Hockey Sense Exclusive: Coach Nate Leaman on World Juniors cancellation, Team USA experience
U.S. National Junior Team coach explains life inside WJC 'protected environment'
In an ideal world, Nate Leaman would have spent his Monday afternoon preparing for a World Junior Championship semifinal, one step away from being able to defend a gold medal and give the United States a chance to win its first ever back-to-back World Junior titles. Instead, he was back in Providence, Rhode Island, still reeling from the shock and disappointment of the abrupt cancellation of the World Juniors last week.
Leaman and the rest of Team USA have since gone their separate ways, all on different flights out of Canada to return to their college or junior teams with the empty feeling of unfinished business and the continued uncertainty of what COVID-19 has in store for us all next.
On Monday afternoon, Leaman took some time to chat with me about the experience of the 2022 World Juniors, what things were like as the tournament’s feasibility began to deteriorate, the emotions of having to tell his team their tournament dream was over, and if he’ll return should the IIHF manages to find a way to reschedule the tournament as they apparently hope to.
Before we get to how it ended, I asked Leaman how he and his staff understood the protocols when they entered Canada. Team USA’s coach said that it was their understanding that they would test twice after they arrived in Canada over a 48-hour quarantine period that all teams were mandated to execute upon entry into Canada. Assuming they tested negative, they’d be released from quarantine and be able to start preparations from the tournament. It was also their understanding that they would not be tested again until they were due to leave Canada, as is required for re-entry into the United States. Things changed, almost immediately, however.
“When we first got in there, they held everyone in another day in quarantine and said we needed to test again,” Leaman said in a phone interview with Hockey Sense. “We were like, ‘Wait a second, we all tested negative, we’re all vaccinated and we tested negative twice before we got here.’ That’s when things started to get changed. Things just kept ramping up and ramping up.”
Leaman said he knew it was more “bad luck” than anything else with the timing of the omicron variant, which kept things changing rapidly.
Most of the decisions made on tournament logistics were made months in advance when vaccination rates were high and infection rates were lower and lower. The rules changed as the facts about the virus changed.
Meanwhile, the tournament’s protocols continued to evolve and put coaching staffs and team administrators in a constant battle against moving targets that caused tensions to rise and concerns to grow about the feasibility of the tournament, especially when they learned of what would happen if their team dealt with positive tests.
“One morning at breakfast, [Team USA GM] John [Vanbiesbrouck] said that if one person [tests positive], we all have to quarantine. We were all kind of like ‘wow, that wasn’t even what took place the year before,’” Leaman said.
The U.S. then got some first-hand experience on that new protocol when two players tested positive ahead of their scheduled game last Tuesday against Switzerland. The game was cancelled and, U.S. team had to forfeit and wonder if they’d have a chance to play Sweden the next night.
After overcoming the initial shock and disappointment of how things had just turned in their tournament, Leaman began to understand what the positive cases meant not just for his team, but for the tournament as a whole.
“Our guys tested negative for 11 days straight. You don’t test negative and then pop if you carried it in,” Leaman said.
“I knew if we got it, we were not going to be the only team that had positives. Our guys had done absolutely nothing wrong. They wore masks everywhere, they followed every protocol. If we were going to get it, all of the other teams were in the same protocol, the same situations. I just knew if we were going to get it, we weren’t going to be the only ones.”
Leaman and the coaching staff had to push through, though. They were optimistic that they’d have enough players clear testing protocol the following day in order to play Sweden. That meant they had a game to get ready for while all being isolated in their hotel rooms.
“We met as a staff in the morning, we went through video work we were going to show the guys. The night before we went through all the schedules. Everything was set to go. We were ready to go,” Leaman said.
However, there were more concerns about the testing process. The U.S. had all of its players retested Tuesday and then again Wednesday morning. They had expected results from the Tuesday testing the night before the Sweden game as they still needed two negative tests to play. Those results, however did not arrive until the morning of the Sweden game. The team learned the two players that tested positive were still positive on the re-test, but were still the only ones to test positive. The rest of the team still had to get that second negative to play.
“We were only supposed to test those first two days. Then all of the sudden, they said you’ve got to test every day. That kind of testing wasn’t really set up. The results weren’t coming back for 24 hours,” said Leaman, noting the logistical hurdles that existed for even being able to have results cleared in time for the game.
A team source told me the day of that game that the team’s second round of testing was completed in the morning and someone physically drove the samples to Edmonton for expedited results. It’s unclear if they would have gotten the results in time because as that was happening, Leaman’s concern that other teams were going to test positive proved prescient.
Wednesday morning, it was announced that Czechia’s game with Finland was canceled and the Czechs had to forfeit. That put COVID in the other side of the tournament as the Czechs were based in Edmonton. A little later that same morning, it became known that Russia had a positive test that would lead to another cancellation.
Word quickly spread that there was an emergency meeting coming involving the leaders of each country. After that meeting, Leaman said he received a call that the tournament was cancelled. Leaman and his staff acted quickly to get all of the players, still sitting in isolation a notification to get on a video conference.
“I wanted to get a Zoom with our players immediately so they could find out from us and not social media,” Leaman said. He believed they just beat the news as it began to spread on social media, but that made the conversation no less difficult.
“We were pretty emotional as coaches,” he said. “Each coach had a chance to speak to the team.
“I was devastated for [the players], I was devastated. [Before] we had talked a lot about what it meant to play for our country and how some of us may never get that opportunity again. We’re going to be committed and we were going to give everything we had.
“You were devastated for them because they did nothing wrong. You could point the finger if some kid broke protocol and did something dumb and they shut us down. The kids did everything right. That’s what I think is really, really hard.
“It’s hard putting all the work into it, too. It’s six months of work and for those kids too, going through the process, trying out, working and getting to that point and then calling the tournament. It’s still tough to process."
As the U.S. coach took a step back and understood how much his team was hurting, he soon realized just how badly the rest of the teams in the tournament felt as well.
“The more I get away from it, I’m equally devastated for the other countries,” he said. “You get so lost in your own team and you know their dreams, you know how hard they worked, you know what it means to them. Then later it starts to come out, I read what the Finnish coach said, the Slovakian goaltender. Some of these other countries, they’re hurting just as much as you are, so you start hurting for them.”
IIHF president Luc Tardif said in his post-cancellation media conference that the IIHF hopes to hold the tournament at a later date, possibly in the summer. It would be a herculean undertaking with so many moving parts that it’s difficult to know for sure how feasible such a thing is, especially as COVID-19 continues to evolve. Leaman knows, however, if it happens, he will very likely be there.
“Any time you get the offer to rep your country, you want to do it,” he said. “I will finish something that I started.”
But even in the best of circumstances, it’s not going to be as simple next time around.
“I think it’s a difficult ask [to replay the tournament later]. It would have to be extremely well coordinated, detailed and planned for it to take place. It’s not like your group is all going to be in the same place, either. I think that will be the hardest thing,” he said.
For now, the coach will go back to Providence College to attempt to lead the Friars back to the postseason. He’ll be joined there by sophomore forward Brett Berard, who was seeking his own second consecutive gold medal after winning with his coach last season. Aside from that, Leaman may just see the rest of his American players in passing, or on the opposite end of the ice as opponents. Losing the opportunity to coach this team is one that still stings, especially knowing where things were headed as the group began to gel.
“I love this group,” Leaman said. “You have to learn a lot early in the tournament to get to your identity. Two years ago, the Russia game did that to us. I thought we dominated a good portion of the [pre-tournament] game against Finland. I don’t think we got to our identity completely against Slovakia, but we grinded it out.
“[The next day] we had a great film session, the guys had an unbelievable practice. They were dialed. You could feel it as a coach. They knew who they are, they knew how they were going to execute and we were ready to roll. I was excited, we were all excited as coaches. We were feeling it with them a little bit. We were pretty excited about the group.
“You go into the tournament with questions, every team has question marks. I felt like we were in a good place, we were dialed in and I didn’t have any questions about the team anymore.”
Sadly, for the coaches, the players and all of us who were expecting to be watching some World Junior semifinals tonight, those questions won’t have a chance to be answered on the ice.
I’ll have just one more World Junior aftermath story coming in this week’s Hockey Sense Roundup, but that piece will also switch gears and begin focusing on the 2022 Winter Olympics. I have a list of college players I most expect to be invited to play for Team USA and Team Canada. Expect to see a number of high-end NHL prospects participating in that tournament now that NHL players will not be going. Stay tuned and subscribe today.