Color of Hockey: Iginla to coach sons on youth teams in native Canada

William Douglas has been writing The Color of Hockey blog for the past nine years. Douglas joined NHL.com in March 2019 and writes about people of color in the game. Today, he profiles Jarome Iginla, who was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame on June 24, 2020, and is returning to Canada to coach an Under-15 academy hockey team.

Hockey is keeping Jarome Iginla on the move, even though it's been nearly three years since he retired as a player.
Iginla, who will be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in November and is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, is preparing to pack up his family and move this summer from Boston to Kelowna, British Columbia, where he'll coach the Under-15 team of the RINK Hockey Academy Kelowna.
After playing 16 seasons for the Calgary Flames, Iginla moved around quite a bit in his final five NHL seasons, playing for the Pittsburgh Penguins, Boston Bruins, Colorado Avalanche and Los Angeles Kings in pursuit of the Stanley Cup, a chase the forward never completed.
Now the 43-year-old Edmonton native is moving back to Western Canada for his kids. He'll coach his son Joe on the academy's Under-15 team and help former Flames teammate Byron Ritchie coach the Under-18 team that Iginla's older son, Tij, hopes to play for.
Iginla's daughter, Jade, is a junior forward at Shattuck-St. Mary's School in Minnesota and aspires to play NCAA Division I hockey.

"We had always planned on going home when our daughter finished high school," said Iginla, who has a summer home near the academy. "Now that she moved away, we figured it was a good time to go back and the boys really wanted to go to a hockey academy. They're good students, school is important, but they also want to give themselves every chance to be the best hockey players they can be because they really like it."
Iginla enjoyed coaching his sons on two Boston teams over the past four years. Tij's Boston Jr. Eagles AAA team was the top-ranked team in the United States last season.
"Coaching for me (at RINK Academy) is a continuation of minor hockey coaching," he said. "There's a learning curve there and I'm still learning, the attitudes of the kids becoming teenagers, seeing the progressions from a 13-year-old to 15 years old, trying to nurture them as athletes and people."
Could the move to Kelowna be a prelude to landing an NHL coaching job someday? Iginla said he's got the youth hockey coaching bug, but not the fever for coaching professionally. At least not yet.
"I definitely like being part of hockey, watching games, watching a lot of them," Iginla said. "I also know how much work goes into it as far as a professional coach. I remember the amount of time at the rink; we as players felt like we were busy and focusing on hockey, and the coaches were there so much more than we were.
"There are the ups and downs, and you can see how stressful it can be as a coach. But saying that, I'm not saying I wouldn't do it. I'm not there yet as far as wanting to be a professional coach. But I can see how it can be a lot of fun, but also I know there's a lot of stress and some grind that goes with it."
Iginla said having the coach's whistle has allowed him to see the game from a different point of view.
"I've had a lot of coaches, and now that I'm coaching minor hockey, I see a lot of points that they were making," he said, "and I can see where on some days I could have been frustrating for them to coach."
His statistics and accomplishments say otherwise. Iginla scored 1,300 points (625 goals, 675 assists) in 1,554 NHL games between 1996-2017. He's the first Black player in NHL history to score 400, 500 and 600 goals and to surpass 1,000 points; the first to win the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL scoring leader (2002) and the Lester B. Pearson (now the Ted Lindsay Award) the same year, as the most outstanding player voted by his peers.

Iginla became the first Black player to win the Rocket Richard Trophy as the NHL leading scorer in 2001-02, when he scored an NHL career-high 52 goals for the Flames, and 2003-04 (41, also with Calgary). He's the Flames' all-time leading scorer with 1,095 points (525 goals, 570 assists) in 1,219 games. He was the NHL's second Black team captain and the first Black male athlete to win a Winter Olympics gold medal when he played for Canada in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.
Glen Naka, director of hockey operations at RINK Academy Kelowna, said Iginla's resume brings an "invaluable experience to our organization from both a coaching perspective … and a player perspective from the NHL, which is almost every student-athlete's end goal."
So what should the academy's young players expect from Coach Iginla?
"Competing is very important to me," he said. "I love skill and I love working on that. But at the same time, I love second and third effort. You look at guys like (Chicago Blackhawks forward) Patrick Kane, the career he's had, and how hard he works and his competitiveness. (Pittsburgh Penguins center

, (Colorado Avalanche center

, (Edmonton Oilers center

, as talented as they are, they're literally some of the hardest workers, if not the hardest workers, in the way they prepare."