Thibodeau: Miami a ‘sleeping giant’

When Troy Thibodeau was offered an assistant coaching job under Anthony Noreen at Tri-City in 2018, he answered ‘yes’ without even asking about the salary.

But six years later when Noreen was hired by Miami and the opportunity arose to rejoin his staff this spring, Thibodeau needed a little more time to make a decision.

Now 33, Thibodeau had invested three years into a Dartmouth program that was finally reaping some success after a prolonged drought, and he was also now married with a year-old baby.

But after the feedback he received from others about Miami, the town and the facilities in Oxford, Thibodeau decided to join the RedHawks’ coaching staff.

“It was a difficult decision for me, not that I didn’t want to take it, I felt maybe it was a year to soon to leave Dartmouth, based on having recruits that are finally coming in that I’ve recruited for a couple of years,” Thibodeau said. “But the more I thought it, and the more I talked to family, and people in the hockey world, people just kept talking to me about Miami, and the history of the program, and a lot of people mentioned that it was a sleeping giant. And so as time went on it got easier for me, and I finally made the call to Anthony and said that I’m all in and would love to be a part of it.”

He had never visited Oxford prior to being hired, but Thibodeau immediately fell in love with every aspect of the community upon his first arrival.

“I was completely blown away by the campus, the facilities and the surrounding town, and it kind of validated my decision,” Thibodeau said.

Thibodeau was hired as Miami’s associate head coach this spring. He was an assistant under Noreen at USHL Tri-City in 2018-21 and served in the same role for a rejuvenated Dartmouth program the past three seasons.

Thibodeau grew up in Danvers, Mass., a suburb a half hour north of Boston.

Though the New Englander played numerous sports as a youth and excelled at hockey, baseball and golf (he earned a second-place finish in the Massachusetts high school state tournament), the self-admitted late bloomer didn’t even consider college hockey a possibility until around his junior year of high school.

“I was pretty naïve to the whole hockey process and junior hockey, and I wasn’t that talented either, so I knew playing Division I was probably going to be a stretch,” Thibodeau said. “I really wanted to play (baseball and hockey) in college and knew D-3 was the only way.”

So Thibodeau committed to the Division III Southern Maine hockey program for the 2010-11 season, and he walked onto the baseball team that spring.

On the ice, he was an assistant captain his final season and scored 12 goals that year, and his nationally-ranked baseball team advanced to the Division III national championship game that spring. The infielder led the Huskies with a .368 average in the College World Series and was named to the all-tournament team.

Thibodeau also earned scholar-athlete honors each year he spent at Southern Maine.

Following graduation in 2014 with a degree in exercise science, Thibodeau interned as a strength and conditioning coach for the Denver hockey program, led by now-Boston Bruins coach Jim Montgomery and then-Pioneers assistant (and now head coach) David Carle.

Having an all-access pass to that duo made him realize that coaching the sport might be his calling.

“I just kind of got the itch, being around those guys, and realized that strength and conditioning wasn’t necessarily my passion…hockey was,” Thibodeau said. “I kind of started from rock-bottom: I didn’t know anyone in the sport, I didn’t play at a high level, so I just started volunteering and seeing if it was something that I really wanted to do. And then I fell in love with it.”

Through a mutual connection, he landed a volunteer video coordinator position at Merrimack, 20 minutes northwest of Danvers, close enough to his parents’ Massachusetts home that he could commute from there and work other jobs to survive.

“(Merrimack) just kind of told me I could be there as much as I wanted and do the video, so I just ran with that,” Thibodeau said.

During that season, UMass Lowell coach Norm Bazin held a coaching symposium, through which Thibodeau discovered the hockey operations position at Bazin’s UML program was open.

Though he had no experience in logistics, planning team meals or any of the other key duties tied to that position – not to mention it was a step removed from direct hands-on coaching – Thibodeau joined the Minutemen staff for the 2016-17 and 2017-18 seasons.

He embraced the opportunity to surround himself with a successful Division I staff, and his UML team advanced to the NCAA regional finals before losing to Notre Dame in overtime his first season.

“I took a chance to go there and go as a hockey ops guy, but it was probably the best two years that I could’ve had,” Thibodeau said.

And the reputation he built in that role resulted in Bazin contacting Noreen, which led to Thibodeau getting the USHL assistant coaching job in Tri-City.

“I was told early on in my career to follow really good people, not necessarily the money, not necessarily the level, the league,” Thibodeau said. “Just follow really good people because ultimately they’re going to be the ones making phone calls for you when that next job becomes available.”

That next job was over 1,500 miles away, in rural Nebraska, a world away from New England, where he had lived almost all of his life and was in a serious relationship with his now-wife, Bridget.

“I’m so lucky to have a wife that’s extremely supportive,” Thibodeau said. “I think it’s really hard to have a family in this business if they’re not totally onboard and ultra-supportive because it can turn on a dime of living somewhere and then having to move. I think as a young coach, you have to just take the next-best opportunity.”

That made accepting the job offer an easy call for Thibodeau, and the couple headed 23 hours west to east central Nebraska.

“That was a no-brainer,” Thibodeau said. “I really didn’t even know where Kearney, Neb., was on a map, I didn’t know what the salary was. Anthony called, I took the job on the spot, and I was lucky enough to have three amazing years in Tri-City working for Anthony.”

Noreen recalled the conversation he had with Thibodeau when the position became available.

“I’ll never forget: He told me — yeah I just told Bridget I took the job,” Noreen said. “And I was like, ‘Troy, do you even know what the salary is’? And he said, ‘no, I don’t care, we’re just going’. That’s what I love in a coach. That’s the kind of guys that I’ve had success with. Guys that are in it for the right reason. Guys that are in because, this is their life, this is what they want to do, this is what they care about, and they just want to work with elite-level hockey players and help them get better, and I think that’s Troy, 100 percent through and through. He only knows one way, and that’s through work.

“I talked to him on the phone for maybe 30 minutes, and I said, yeah, this is just very clearly the guy. We didn’t really get into hockey specifics, it was more just the work ethic, the mental make-up, the passion, the care. How invested he was in coaching and wanting this to be his career.”

Thibodeau was confident in his coaching ability as he moved out to Kearney, Neb., where Tri-City plays, but he said joining the Storm was a master class for him.

“Coaching high-level players – players that are going to be drafted in the NHL – and committed to big-time Division I schools, it was an unbelievable development opportunity for me as a coach to figure out how I wanted to coach, what my coaching place would be,” Thibodeau said. “And Anthony, he gave me so much responsibility right off the bat and never really looked over my shoulder too much, and allowed me to learn and grow and struggle and also come out on the other end, so I was really appreciative of that.”

His second season in Kearney, Tri-City won the Anderson Cup, the USHL’s award for the top regular season team.

“If you look at some of the players that we had over the course of those three years – Troy ran our forwards and ran our power play,” Noreen said. “We’ve got a lot of guys playing a lot of NHL games that weren’t necessarily high-profile guys when we got them that have gone onto great careers, and I think Troy was huge part of developing those guys.”

After three seasons as a juniors assistant with Tri-City, Thibodeau was offered a Division I assistant position at Dartmouth in the fall of 2021 under coach Reid Cashman, and the answer again was an easy ‘yes’.

But rebooting that program wouldn’t be easy, as the Ivy League had canceled its entire 2020-21 season because of COVID, resulting in many players latching onto other programs.

In 2021-22, Dartmouth won just seven games. The next season was worse, as the Big Green finished 5-24-1.

But last season, Dartmouth caught fire late, winning six straight and advancing to the ECAC semifinal before losing to Cornell, ending the campaign with a respectable 13-10-9 (.547) record.

“We were rebuilding that (Dartmouth) program, and we finally had some success there, so I really didn’t plan on going anywhere for another year or two,” Thibodeau said.

In April, Miami hired Noreen, and Thibodeau congratulated him over the phone.

Toward the end of the call, Noreen asked if Thibodeau would have interest in joining the RedHawks’ staff as an assistant.

“And I obviously said ‘yes, I would’,” Thibodeau said.

Then, decision time.

Another big selling point for Thibodeau was that David Nies is also joining the team as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator. The two were hockey teammates for three years at Southern Maine.

Living two dorms apart on campus in South Portland, the pair was so close that Nies ultimately officiated Troy and Bridget’s wedding three years ago.

Nies acquired a one-day officiant license in Maine and married the two.

“We were thinking about who we wanted to do that, and who better than Nies-y, because my wife – I started dating her when I was in college – so she knew Nies-y extremely well, for over 10 years at the time, and so it just made a lot of sense,” Thibodeau said.

The Thibodeaus’ first child, son Boden, is now 16 months old.

“When my son was born…you have to think a little bit more about the steps that you’re taking,” Thibodeau said. “When I was just getting into coaching, I didn’t really have that five-year plan, I just wanted to be around the best coaches that I could and develop and work hard.”

Having previously thrived in rebuild situations, Miami’s obvious need for hockey’s version of a makeover intrigued Thibodeau, who envisions a far-different RedHawks on-ice product in the coming years.

“I think in a year or two when you see the way that Miami hockey is going to play, I hope people leave the rink every night saying that that team was extremely tough to play against and ultra-competitive and (wasn’t) easy to beat,” Thibodeau said. “I think that comes back to: We all have a chip on our shoulder, we’ve had to do it the hard way. But it’s definitely rewarding to be in the position that we’re all in now, at a Division I school in the NCHC with the chance to turn a program around is extremely gratifying.”

And Noreen is convinced Thibodeau will thrive in his role, which will likely involve his running of the power play and the forwards.

“He’s a guy we’re going to be able to draw on from his experiences, he’s going to be a dedicated worker, recruiter, he’s going to be able to connect with these guys and I have no doubt he’s going to be develop players to make them better,” Noreen said.