When PWHL Vancouver announced they hired Brian Idalski as their first head coach on Monday, I was sad for St. Cloud State and women's college hockey, but thrilled for Vancouver. This is, in my opinion, a spectacular hire and has me more jazzed for the new season than any other thing that has happened this offseason so far.

Idalski is renowned for getting the best out of his players. He made a massive impact immediately at St. Cloud State and in his three years there, he led the team to three of their highest win totals in program history.

Usually programs experience growing pains after a coaching change, particularly as a coach waits to get "their" recruits in. The turnaround in Idalski's first year at St. Cloud State was immense - they went from 9-23-3 overall and 4-20-3 in the WCHA to 18-18-1 overall and 11-16-1 in the WCHA. They finished the season ranked 12th overall, their highest national ranking in 14 years. They earned at least a point from every other team in the conference – something they’d not done since 2010. They tied the program high in wins that hadn’t been touched since 2008 and had the second-most conference wins in a season.

Little had changed with the team or program, but as we'd come to learn from the players, the biggest thing Idalski brought to St. Cloud was belief. That changed the way the players viewed themselves and their team. He taught them how to be confident and believe in themselves, each other and the team as a whole and with that came the knowledge that they belonged playing against the best teams in the country.

One of Idalski's best qualities, I think, is his ability to think outside the box, be creative and find new solutions to old problems.

When he took over the program at North Dakota in 2007, they were coming off a winless conference season - they'd won just three games overall the previous year. The team made the NCAA tournament (when only eight teams qualified) in his fifth season at the helm.

They did thanks in part to Idalski recruiting players from Europe and be more involved in pulling players from Canada. It was something few teams were doing at the time. Fellow WCHA coach Shannon Miller at Minnesota Duluth won her fourth national championship with a roster

"When I had the opportunity at North Dakota to turn that program around, I was faced with the daunting task of trying to break into what at the time was the big three in Duluth, Wisconsin, Minnesota," said Idalski in a 2022 phone interview we did for an article on international recruiting that never came together.

"How are we going to move up? How are we going to compete with the big three? The easiest thing to do was basically to compete for international players."

The program produced 10 Olympians, including one of the biggest names in the upcoming entry draft, Michelle Karvinen.

Idalski was so successful with what he did at North Dakota that coaches from other collegiate programs would spend time in Grand Forks shadowing him, learning from him and picking his brain on how he carved out a spot for his program among those with more money, bigger athletic departments, national championships and prestige. He couldn't organically compete for the top recruits with his WCHA foes, so he found different recruits that would make his program competitive.

Vancouver's roster may be stacked with talent, but what I think folks need to take away from Idalski's two different stints in DI women's hockey is how he was able to maximize results from the resources available to him.

And he does it in a way that leaves his players singing his praises, thanking him for his impact and - as I think we'll see particularly from this draft class with players like Emma Gentry, Sanni Ahola and Dayle Ross - excelling at the next level.

After a heartbreaking OT loss at Wisconsin in 2024, I spoke to Idalski postgame and it was one of the most memorable postgame conversations I've ever had. I talk about it in The PodKaz episode 12, starting at the 11 minute mark. This part of the conversation lasts about 10 minutes, but if you're interested in knowing more about Idalski and who he is as a coach, I highly suggest taking the time to listen.

That game, in a nutshell, is what I think makes Idalski such a good coach. It showcased how he prepared his team to give the No.2 team in the country absolutely everything they could handle. He found a place he felt they could exploit against Wisconsin and even though it hadn't been a strong suit of the Huskies all year long, he brought the best out in his team and they executed their game plan perfectly. And in the loss, he was passionate and empathetic and emotional for his players.

When I spoke to Idalski in June 2022 and we delved into his connection to international recruiting, he spoke of striking up a conversation with Peter Elander after a presentation Elander gave at a coach's convention. Elander coached the Sweden women's national team for nine years, including to the bronze medal at the 2006 Olympics and is one of the most respected names in Swedish hockey. While there's obviously quite a bit more to the story, Idalski said that conversation led to Idalski assisting at Elander's girls camps in Sweden, helped open the door to Idalski recruiting more in Europe, put Elander on the North Dakota bench as Idalski's associate head coach for seven years and put Idalski on the path that led him to the KRS Vanke Rays and coaching the Chinese national team in the 2022 Olympics.

"I tell people all the time how soft touches, conversations, can pivot the trajectory of your life. You don't know when it's gonna happen, or why necessarily it happens. But it turned out that a small conversation had a big impact on the trajectory of my life, our program, a lot of things that I've been able to experience over the years," he said.

There's a contrast between the intimidating, stern way Idalski can come across while coaching and the way he thinks and talks about the game - and life. And his players respond to it.

When we named Idalski the 2023 Coach of the Year at USCHO, I ended the piece by saying "Women’s college hockey is better for Brian Idalski being in it." We can amend that remove the "college" qualifier and the point still stands.

There's no way to know how successful Idalski will be in Vancouver or if this roster will react or resonate with his process the way the players in St. Cloud did. But this feels like more of a portent for this team's ability to win it all early on than even their already stacked roster does.

(Photo: PWHL Vancouver)