The Seattle Kraken opened their fourth straight season with a familiar development camp setup and one notable new voice behind the bench: Seattle Torrent head coach Christine Bumstead.
Bumstead’s presence gave the young prospects a different kind of instruction, and Kraken director of player development Cory Murphy said that was exactly the point.
"As coaches, we're always looking to grow and learn, too,” Kraken director of player development Cory Murphy said to NHL.com. “When you bring new voices in with that kind of experience to add to the camp and provide their feedback and their voice, I think it makes us all better.”
Bumstead’s ties to the Kraken go back to June, when she was named head coach of the Torrent. Before that, she served as the team’s assistant bench coach during its first season, when the club went 8-1-5-16.
According to NHL.com, Kraken assistant general manager Alex Mandrycky invited Bumstead to join the development camp staff.
For Bumstead, the value of the experience comes from what the PWHL can teach and how that translates to player growth.
“The PWHL game is different than the NHL game,” Bumstead said to NHL.com. “That's also something that we can share and provide - the different little nuances within our game or the little nuances within our athletes and how we develop them.
You have to work with those players …they're very successful and elite where they're playing, but you want to craft them and develop them to be elite and successful here as a Seattle Kraken or as a Coachella Firebird, right? So that's something that's important, and we are able to have those conversations between the dev staff and me.”
Murphy said Bumstead’s energy showed up immediately once she got on the ice.
“Just getting a different perspective, you can see the passion comes out right away,” Murphy said. “We had (Bumstead) running the bench, and you could see her getting prepared and the competitive fire.
It was great to have her on the ice. I’ll be following the Torrent for sure.”
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