Syracuse, N.Y. -- Fresh off the best season in program history, Syracuse University has hired Clarkson assistant Britni Smith to become its second women’s hockey head coach.
Smith will replace Paul Flanagan, who coached Syracuse for the first 14 years of the team’s existence and retired after winning the College Hockey America regular-season and postseason championships last year. The Orange advanced to the NCAA championships for the second time in program history.
Long-time Syracuse associate coach Brendon Knight, an assistant with the program for nearly a decade, had been leading the program on an interim basis since Flanagan’s retirement.
Smith has been an assistant at Clarkson since the 2014-15 season, helping the Golden Knights to two national titles and four Frozen Fours during that time. She played collegiately at St. Lawrence from 2006 to 2010, including two years under Flanagan before his arrival at SU.
She is is a native of Port Perry, Ontario, a province where the Orange has done a heavy amount of recruiting in recent seasons. Fourteen members of last year’s team were from Ontario.
Smith played four years in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League from 2010 to 2014, serving as a captain of the 2014 CWHL champions, and has experience in Canada’s national program as both a player and coach.
“Britni is a highly regarded coach who is a proven recruiter and has experience as an assistant coach for two national championship teams and as a coach with Hockey Canada,” Syracuse athletic director John Wildhack said in a statement from the school. “She is incredibly detailed and prepared and has excellent communication skills. Britni is a rising star in the coaching profession. We are excited to have her lead our program.”
Wildhack’s hiring of Smith continued a trend of hiring in women’s programs that have improved the school’s gender representation among its head coaches.
Just four years ago the school had just one female head coach in its entire athletic department, ranking ahead of just two Division I schools in the country. The poor representation earned the school an “F” in an annual scorecard put together by Nicole LaVoi, a professor at the University of Minnesota and the Director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport.
She began publishing the gender representation scorecard to shine light on the challenges that female coaches face getting jobs leading women’s program and the nearly complete exclusion they face trying to get jobs leading men’s programs in college athletics.
Since the scorecard was published and written about by Syracuse.com, the school has increased the number of women’s head coaches in its athletic department to six for 10 programs, a list that includes field hockey coach Ange Bradley and women’s lacrosse coach Kayla Treanor, whose programs were two of the school’s most successful over the past year.
The school still has a vacancy for head coach of its women’s volleyball program.
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