Remove the Interim Tag

Through his acumen as a recruiter, program builder, and teacher, Brandon Naurato has made it clear that he will be a star. Now it’s up to Warde Manuel to keep that star in Ann Arbor

Through eighteen games under interim head coach Brandon Naurato, the University of Michigan men’s ice hockey team has a record of 11-6-1.  Excuse me, allow me to contextualize.  After sending nine players to professional hockey last spring and breaking in twelve new freshmen this fall, Michigan’s men’s hockey team has a record of 11-6-1 after eighteen games under interim head coach Brandon Naurato.  

Despite a messy process that preceded his appointment, despite having to assemble a staff well past the standard cycle, despite all that departing talent and all the new faces who needed to be broken in not just to college hockey but to featured roles, Brandon Naurato’s team sits at number six in the nation in the most recent USCHO poll.  If it weren’t for a widespread team illness forcing the Wolverines to take on Minnesota short seven players (one more hurdle, this one unforeseeable and essential context to the two games), that 11-6-1 mark would perhaps look even prettier.  Now, each week, it seems news breaks of another five-star commitment to help the cause down the road.

With all that as context, a question begs: why exactly are we still bothering with that interim tag?  

It’s the season of giving, and the University of Michigan could get itself a present that would pay off for years by removing the interim label from its head hockey coach’s title.

Of course, in making the case for Naurato to become the full-time coach at what could easily be argued is the best job in college hockey, it would be short-sighted to look only at the results of eighteen games.  To evaluate the first-time head coach’s fitness for assuming the reins full time, you have to look beyond a shiny record in a small sample size.  

Whether or not he can win with an inherited roster over half a season does not say all that much about Naurato’s long-term fitness for the role.  However, taking into account a fuller picture only makes the conclusion clearer: there is no need for the interim tag any longer, if there ever was one.

Since assuming the office in August, Brandon Naurato has already shown that he can excel in the three essential functions of a successful collegiate coach: as a recruiter, as a program builder, and as a teacher.  Based on his ability to thrive in these discrete roles—all while operating under the shadow of the interim label, Naurato will be a star in the world of hockey before long.  The choice for athletic director Warde Manuel is whether that will happen in Ann Arbor or elsewhere.

No team succeeds at the highest echelon of collegiate athletics without excellent recruiting.  To be sure, player development (the two words most often associated with Naurato) is essential to any well-run program and can help a disadvantaged program compete with teams backed by greater resources or easier access to talent, but national championships are only available to teams with elite players.

In the realm of collegiate football, Bud Elliot puts a finer point on this sentiment through his concept of “blue chip ratio.”  Elliot contends that “to win the national championship, college football teams need to sign more four- and five-star recruits (AKA “Blue Chips”) than two- and three-star players over the previous four recruiting classes.”  

Elliot clarifies that meeting that ratio “does not guarantee a national championship, but a team not meeting it is almost certainly guaranteed not to win it all” (emphasis mine).  He adds “that is not to say that development does not matter. It certainly does. But nobody wins a national title by player development in lieu of elite recruiting.”  To reinforce this point, Elliot notes that the lowest “BCR” for a national title winner in football since 2011 was Clemson in 2016, who still registereded a 52% BCR for the 2013-2016 recruiting classes.

Even accounting for the structural differences between collegiate football and hockey, the notion that elite talent is a prerequisite for top-level success, regardless of coaching, hardly seems controversial.

On this front, University of Michigan hockey has several key advantages regardless of its coach.  The school is located in one of the nation’s most talent-rich hockey states; it is a twenty-minute drive from USA Hockey’s hand-selected top annual array of junior-aged talent in the form of the NTDP.  The program’s longstanding tradition of success and rabid fan base, along with a robust budget and exemplary facilities, make Ann Arbor an easy sell for the country’s top amateur hockey players.

However, as the Wolverines’ in-state rivals can attest, even the sport’s most vaunted brands can atrophy under mismanagement, and once that cycle starts, it is not so easy to reverse.

As Michigan fans remember from the saga of Jim Harbaugh’s contract renewal around the ill-fated 2020 “COVID” season, recruiting becomes a near impossibility when you are trying to do it without long-term contract certainty.  For rival coaching staffs, it is easy to scare off recruits and their families with whispers that the regime in question will soon be elsewhere.

As an interim, Naurato has to cope with an even sharper uncertainty, yet his results suggest that the interim head coach won’t just match the lofty bar for recruiting at Michigan but exceed it.  In ‘06 five-stars Aidan Park and Kristian Epperson, along with ‘05 four-star Mikey Burchill, Naurato has secured the services of three exceptional young American talents.  Meanwhile, through ‘06 five-star Michael Hage and ‘04 four-and-a-half-star Nick Moldenhauder, Naurato has continued the trend of would-be CHL talent eschewing Canadian major junior hockey for the NCAA.

If this is the recruiting standard Naurato sets as an interim, his potential heights in a full-time capacity will send chills down the backs of the rest of the Big Ten.

Of course, even if recruiting is essential to competing for national championships, as Elliot points out, it alone is insufficient.  Sustaining success requires building a program with an identity and sense of purpose that transcends any one recruiting class.  

In the modern world of collegiate athletics, a head coach can no longer get by just on expertise within their sport.  Much though some may yearn for the halcyon days of amateurism, which may or may not have ever existed, successful programs bear a sharper resemblance to corporations than ever.  NCAA hockey might not have corporatized at the rate of college football (and may well be better off for it), but the days of a few kids chasing a puck across the Huron River are no more.

A head coach cannot just be an X’s and O’s tsar, nor can they rely entirely on recruiting; instead, a successful college coach in 2022 is a program builder, a CEO.

To turn again to college football as an exemplar, Steven Godfrey explained on a recent episode of the podcast Split Zone Duo the importance of hiring a CEO-style coach in relation to a recent vacancy at the University of Alabama-Birmingham:

“You have to find someone who has an almost impossible skillset…Imagine all the things you need to know as a hard-nosed head coach, imagine all the things you need as a branding executive in the marketing world, imagine all the things you need to know as a K-12 educator—in psychology, early childhood development, and then adolescent development.  All of those things have to be, if not in one person, that one person has to make a decision through all those lenses and then find a matrix of people around him” to fill in whatever gaps remain.

In the nascent days of the Naurato era, that CEO-inspired work of program building seems to come even more naturally than recruiting.

One key component of this process for Naurato is the hiring of Topher Scott as director of hockey operations.  Scott arrived in Ann Arbor having spent the previous four years running his own company, the Hockey Think Tank, which sought to improve coaching and development philosophies throughout the world of youth hockey.

“I think Toph adds tremendous value in the team building piece of it,” first-year assistant coach Rob Rassey explains.  “What you’re trying to do is build a close team, you want to build a team that communicates, a team that trusts each other and that knows what it has to do to be successful and is willing to pay the price to do it, so all the things that Toph’s been able to do—the little exercises and stuff that he does—I think adds tremendous value to our staff.”

For his part, Naurato explains that, while this process might take time, ensuring Michigan returns to and remains at the pinnacle of the sport requires a mindset of intentionality behind all aspects of the program, even those that seem trivial: “I feel like there’s a better way to do everything, so you see what’s been done well or where we can be ahead of the curve from what we’ve done in the past year or ten years.  Something as simple as when we eat on the road, it matters.”  

That the Wolverines have not captured a national title since 1998 reflects the need to reinforce some of the program’s proud foundation.  Naurato recognizes that all of Michigan’s success on the ice in recent years should not be mistaken for perfect operation at every turn, saying “You acquire this business, which is Michigan hockey, and it’s got this great brand, but there’s so many holes underneath going back twenty years, so how do we plug those holes and do it the right way?”

Having spent seven years as the owner and director of Total Package Hockey prior to his time with the Detroit Red Wings and then his return to Ann Arbor, Naurato is no stranger to what it takes to set up a business for sustainable success:

“You’re trying to sell the brand of Michigan, and there’s a lot of ways to do that.  One would be coming to the game—our style of play, winning, how we treat our players goes into recruiting because all these kids play with and against each other and talk, but then just the business in general.  To me, well everything’s a budget.  Say you spend a million bucks.  Okay, so you want something new, you have to cut something.  Well can we drive revenue?  What college programs actually drive revenue outside of ticket sales?  We will.”

In defenseman Seamus Casey, Naurato has a clear testimonial that this approach resonates with his team and young players.  In early October, before even playing in a regular season game, the Floridian freshman said of the environment Naurato has created “I feel like I’ve been here for years, and it’s only been a month.  I haven’t barely been on a team like this ever.  It’s going to help us a lot down the stretch, how tight we are.  We’re all learning together—that’s something [Naurato] talks about.  You would never know this is his first job coaching.  It’s been amazing; it’s been a great experience for me.  I think every guy would say that.  All the systems we’ve been working on, I think they’re great, and I love playing with this team.”

As Naurato explains it,“[in building out sub-departments within the program] like the analytics, the player development, all we’re trying to do is find more time in our day to spend with the kids.”

To that end, we’ve now arrived at the last of our three essential functions of the modern collegiate coach: the teacher.  Since his hire was announced, Naurato has been lauded for his work in player development, for guiding young players toward maximizing their potential.  Even if we previously contended there is no level of development that can replace elite recruiting, development and recruiting cannot be divorced from one another.

Unlike in football, gifted prospects have legitimate options as to where to prepare for the top professional league in the world.  There is the Canadian major junior route.  There is NCAA hockey.  You could even follow in Auston Matthews’ footsteps and spend a season playing pro hockey in Europe.  If prospects don’t feel they are receiving the best possible preparation for a career in hockey, they don’t just have alternatives in different collegiate programs but also entirely different leagues.

One obvious example of this phenomenon comes in the form of freshman phenom Adam Fantilli.  A native of Nobleton, Ontario and prospective top-two NHL draft choice this June, Fantilli likely would have defaulted to the OHL as recently as a decade ago.  Instead, the Ontarian chose Michigan, sensing a more fruitful long-term outcome for his career in Ann Arbor than in Sudbury, Guelph, or Kitchener.

“We don’t come here every day strictly looking at the outcome of winning every hockey game we play,” Fantilli observes.  “We come in here and we focus on developing as a team and getting better throughout the season.  We focus on developing as individuals, making strides in all of our personal games to help the team and to help put ourselves on a trajectory upward instead of plateauing at some point in the season.”

As for Naurato’s specific role in cultivating that environment?  “He’s such a great hockey mind to be around.  He’s such a great dude to be around.  Whenever I have time, whenever he has time, we sit down and watch video.  His door is always open.  He’s obviously in an interim spot, this is my first year, we’re both going through pretty new experiences, and he’s been awesome to bounce ideas off.”

As Naurato himself pointed out, the world of high-level hockey is small, and reputations—of coaches, of players—travel quickly for better and worse.  If Fantilli’s review of Naurato is any indicator, there will be plenty of top prospects eager to follow his path.

The one-on-one video sessions Fantilli alluded to are perhaps the clearest manifestation of his head coach’s commitment to teaching and player development.  As Naurato explains them, these meetings help players uncover subtleties to the game that might help jumpstart their productivity by demystifying the nature of offensive creation:

“We have individual meetings all week, and [we say] here’s where you’re at, so if I tell you for just five-on-five, here’s how many chances you’re on the ice for, changes against, then here’s how many chances against you’re involved in, what’s the common trend?  Then, if you are always on the ice for X amount of rush chances against, why?  Are you not backchecking?  Are you diving down as F3?  Are you turning the puck over at the blue line?

“Well, if I identify that, I’ll jump back again: the top scorers in the league are also the top guys in front shot attempts and slot shot attempts.  It goes hand-in-hand; you don’t score from the perimeter.  So if you can increase your volume—if I have one goal on every ten shot attempts from the slot, imagine if I had twenty.  So by the end of the year, I have a hundred and I have ten goals, but what if you had two hundred?  You have twenty goals.  So how do you get more? And then you just rewind the tape fifteen seconds, and how do you get there more?”

Of course, Nauarto’s commitment to close work with the young athletes under his command doesn’t only manifest in the film room.  In the last week, Naurato showed his total commitment to working closely with his players after a sudden need to replace goaltending coach Jeff Salajko emerged.  

There was nothing scandalous behind Salajko’s departure; it was instead bureaucratic—his capacity with the Red Wings as a goalie scout limited his ability to do necessary recruiting work to avoid rules violations.  Hiring a new goalie coach mid-season proved untenable, because any volunteer coach would then not be able to work with high-school aged goaltenders and thus lose out on a vital piece of their income from private lessons.  How did Naurato solve this problem?  By taking on the extra duties himself.

“The whole plan is to let [goaltenders Erik Portillo, Noah West, and Tyler Shea] lead it,” Naurato explains.  He notes that he “worked goalie camps for like ten years growing up—that’s why I had a good shot and couldn’t skate,” then adds with a bit more seriousness that allowing his netminder to explain the challenges they’ve encountered (recently, point shots with netfront traffic) sets him up to create practice plans that will test those skills.

Even if functioning as a de facto goalie coach is a short-term solution, it illustrates Naurato’s natural qualities as a teacher and team-builder.  The first-time head coach wants to delegate to set up his staff and players to do their best work but is ready to jump into whatever aspect of his program demands his attention, especially when it is his players who need that attention.  

Meanwhile, the approach of allowing the goalies significant input into their practice and development plans reflect the way Naurato’s style provides his young team with agency rather than didacticism in service of maximizing their growth.

Here again, it’s worth noting that an interim label is working against Naurato.  The prove-it nature of the designation would seem to invite short-term thinking, incentivizing strong immediate results over long-term growth.  However, Naurato and his staff can’t help but adopt an approach that centers individual progress over a prolonged period.

As Rassey puts it, “One thing that our staff shares is our mindset and development.  It’s why we coach; it’s what we really enjoy doing, so that’s what we’re going to do either way.  It’s a core belief for us.”

In the end, perhaps most important about the first steps of the Naurato era, though, is the way he has restored faith that the program is in the right hands after a tumultuous offseason that raised genuine concerns about program culture.

Friend of the newsletter Drew VanDrese, who served first as a student manager then as a full-time equipment manager for the Wolverines between 2012 and 2017, summarized what it has meant to see Naurato take over the team amidst trying circumstances and what it might mean for that to continue into the future:

“To say that Nar has been a breath of fresh air for Michigan hockey would be a massive understatement. There’s a confident ease about his ability to sell the program, institution, and overall viability of college hockey in a manner that comes across as genuine and exciting to recruits because he deeply cares for all three. 

“I’ve been really impressed by his overarching tendency to teach & willingness to dive in headfirst with the guys. His energy is infectious and the staff puts an emphasis on making it fun so that kids want to keep coming to the rink to work and develop their game with him. The future is incredibly bright.”

It’s possible that Brandon Naurato might not have been tapped to coach this team if the vacancy had arisen out of more customary circumstances (i.e. a retirement or a firing made after underwhelming on-ice results) along a more traditional timeline.  Perhaps a more normal coaching search would have led to a more conservative hire—one with more experience as an assistant and more than likely who had been a head coach elsewhere.

However, in just his fifth month on the job, Naurato has rewarded his alma mater for taking a chance on a thirty-seven-year-old with no head coaching experience.  From his recruiting to his program building to his skills as a teacher and developer of talent, Naurato has left no doubt that he will be a star in the world of hockey.  All that’s left is for Warde Manuel to assure that such a star orbits around Ann Arbor for years to come.

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