Brandon Naurato sits at his desk inside Yost Ice Arena. It’s the middle of May, more than a month since his University of Michigan hockey team lost to Boston College in the Frozen Four. The college hockey world has slowed down for the summer. Meanwhile, Naurato is speeding up. He and his staff have pored over video and data this Friday morning. He’s already delayed our interview by half an hour.
There’s nothing off about this offseason. No, this is when the season is shaped the most, when the calm pace of the summer allows for the reflection and revision necessary to make program changes.
Running one of the most historic hockey programs in the country is all new territory to Naurato. He’d never been a head coach before earning the Wolverines’ interim role two years ago. He’s still learning lessons about being a head coach on the fly as he builds the Michigan vision he pitched from day one. And even though he spent his first year as an interim head coach, he’s only really had one full year with the license and ability to truly build his own program.
“Before I actually sat in this seat, you feel that you have an idea of what this role entails. After sitting in it, it’s so much more,” Naurato told The Hockey News. “At times it can be the loneliest seat in the world, and at other times it can be the greatest seat in the world. But no one truly knows what you deal with day to day, and that’s kind of a metaphor for life and walking in other people’s shoes. It’s not just this title. It’s everything — it’s getting to know other people and appreciating their path.”
What Naurato lacked in experience as a head coach, he made up for with experience as a business owner. Most days, head coaching resembles his life when he ran the Detroit office of Total Package Hockey as a player development coach more than it resembles his one year as an assistant coach for the Wolverines. Working at the largest hockey development company in the country, Naurato’s time at TPH gave him experience with the intricacies of managing personnel and assets. This time, at the helm of a 101-year-old hockey program, his job falls more in line with renovation and optimization.
The way Naurato sees it, coaching his alma mater is a chance to step outside of the box. Being in the business world, there was a lot of established framework for him to implement and modify to build the company he wanted to build. He could form his business to occupy a niche, specializing in areas he thought were important.
“When we started the TPH academy, that started with me googling hockey academies,” Naurato explains. “And I’m proud of that. It’s truly from scratch.” The process forced him out of his comfort zone, for instance when he had to meet with educators to bring academics into his development program.
Running a Division I hockey program is a lot like running a business, especially with all the resources that the Block M provides Naurato with. While he has to weave through more red tape with NCAA compliance rules and university standard practice guides, working at Michigan gives Naurato so many resources to maximize. His methodology to do so begins with people.
“What I’ve learned is a business, a hockey team, a family — it’s all about having the right people,” Naurato explains. “Like-minded people with a growth mindset that are trying to be the best versions of themselves. That’s where we put the most pride or value in.”
Making Michigan a national champion doesn’t mean Naurato is willing to sacrifice everything else to get there. In reality, it’s his own vision — the optimization of Michigan hockey like a hockey business — that Naurato feels will help him bring Michigan to the top.
Look at it this way, it isn’t Michigan Hockey anymore. This is Michigan Hockey Inc.
Like any corporation, Michigan needed an overhaul under new management. When Naurato took over, the state of the hockey program was a lot like Yost itself these days. It’s beautiful in its charm, but beneath the paint and marketing, amenities were scarce — practice space, recovery rooms and even the visiting locker room are squeezed into the rink. At the program level, many operations were lacking, too. There was no analytics department. The alumni network was loose and decentralized. Even the specific roles of staff members weren’t the type Naurato wanted to wield; they were too inefficient, too much of a throwback to empower the program in the modern NCAA.
These all had to change, and Naurato did change them. In his first two years in charge, he played CEO and HR director, establishing the departments he wanted to lean on and filling his positions with experts. Entering his third season, the analytics department is up to full speed, with apps and technology in place to maximize what players can do on and off the ice. Naurato has redefined roles for staff members and coaches, finally putting together his first full staff with the hiring of Chrissy Powers as a brand developer for his players. Now, he’s in the process of beefing up the alumni network through a mentorship program that focuses on life beyond hockey.
“That’s where I feel NCAA athletics is going, is that the head coach needs to pivot to more of a CEO role,” Naurato said. “And then through that, you need to identify what’s your identity — what do we want to be great at on and off the ice? And then after you figure out what we want to be great at, then you surround yourself with people that are great at building this identity. You hire or you recruit the right type of people or kids to play inside of this identity.”
From recruiting to player development to staff organization, Naurato’s vision has gone under construction since the start. But with implementation comes adjustment. The vision itself hasn’t changed — Naurato knows that he wants to build a program that plays great hockey through having great people. But there are roadblocks that he’s learned a lot from over the past year. As much as the first year saw Naurato overhaul Michigan’s systems and structures, the second year saw these go into full action. All of that primes Naurato’s Wolverines for his third year.
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People First
It’s the night before the Wolverines play North Dakota in the 2024 Maryland Heights NCAA Regional. Michigan’s game tomorrow could be the last of its season. Rest and preparation are imperative.
So naturally, the Wolverines spend their evening creating an entirely new game.
In the way that a group of 20-some 20-somethings always seem to get into antics, his players combined the hotel tennis court and a soccer ball to invent their own hybrid game. The players loved it, playing it late into the night — time that would otherwise be spent preparing for a do-or-die game. Even if this doesn’t sound like game prep, it really was in Michigan’s unique way. The Wolverines were all together, all united as one unit. Their priority before a high-stress game is letting loose because their ultimate trait is their ability to play as a pack.
“This summarizes what we’re trying to build in regards to the culture of this program,” Naurato said. “The staff’s out there, wives and kids are out there, every single player on the team is out there. We’re spending time together, and we’re happy and smiling. There’s no pressure for the next big game tonight.”
That’s culture, and so is the way the Wolverines manage the rest of their time. Whereas other teams might break down into friend groups of threes and fours, Michigan spends its time together. Some guys are studying, some guys are watching other games, and some guys are even cutting loose by playing a game, but they’re ultimately together. Michigan hockey might run like a business, but its relationships give it its power.
Naurato also wants to be authentic himself. He doesn’t put on a persona to talk to his players, even when conversations about roles and ice time get difficult. There are no off-limits topics. His mantra is to be as clear and honest with players as he can be.
“Whether that’s right or wrong, that allows me to have consistency,” Naurato said. “… I want them to come into the office comfortable to be open with me and let me know what’s going on in their lives on or off the ice in a positive or negative way. Because if they don’t tell me those things, or they’re not comfortable and open with me, we haven’t developed that trust and I can’t help support them.”
Players have relationships with every staff member, created from their interactions with them. From athletic trainer Brian Brewster to academic adviser Ashley Korn to director of hockey ops Evan Hall and beyond, all these mentors prioritize building trust so that they can help players grow. They’re tasked with being leaders — aces in their places, as Naurato says.
These relationships aren’t just created as a representative of the coaching staff, either. Rather they are unique to each staff member. Young men need mentors, most importantly ones they believe in. This makes tough conversations palatable, and praise even more believable.
“We can have the best strength coach or the best assistant coach in the world,” Naurato said. “If they can’t connect with people and get their message across and require buy in, the X’s and O’s don’t matter.”
Everything in Naurato’s program ties back to people. This is a lesson Naurato picked up from TPH, where he was afforded the opportunity to succeed and fail forward in his own way because of great mentors. With the right leaders ahead of him who were open and honest with him — particularly TPH founder Nathan Bowen and business partner Keith Rowe — Naurato knew where he stood and knew where he needed to move to. Now, he’s replicating that environment for his players.
“What everyone wants is the opportunity to fly and succeed. What everyone wants is the opportunity that if they fail, they’re gonna get another chance,” Naurato said. “So failing is OK, it’s a good thing, you’re gonna be able to figure it out from failure. And to do that — again, whether it’s a family, a hockey team or business — you need to be in an environment with the right mentors and the right type of people that allow you to go through that.”
TPH did that for Naurato, with people like Bowen and Rowe guiding him forward. “It was being thrown in the fire, learning, growing and figuring it out from there.” That’s why he wants to build an environment where his players can be united problem solvers, not just obedient followers.
Authenticity, at the end of the day, isn’t what the outside world will ever judge Naurato’s program by. Instead, external evaluations will look at the quantitative data of records and championships. But internally, Naurato evaluates himself on the way his program can impact the lives of his players and help them achieve.
Naurato put these principles into action almost immediately when he became head coach. Months into his tenure, defenseman Steven Holtz nearly died from an adenovirus outbreak that swept through the team. Forget about hockey, Holtz had to relearn how to live a normal life. But because of Michigan hockey, there were dozens of people — coaches, teammates and staff — that helped him get back. A year and a half later, Holtz graduated with his engineering degree and signed a pro contract to play in the ECHL. Personal victories also translate to the ice, where such close bonds and achievement give players the confidence and ability to win.
The family bond is a trope of sports teams, but it’s something Michigan practices. The product of this brotherly closeness surfaces on the ice, but it’s built almost entirely off it. It’s also built through honoring existing bonds, where players’ family members are part of the Michigan hockey family. Take the example of Nicholas Moldenhauer’s brother, Matty, who has a genetic disorder that presents mental, physical and behavioral challenges. Before many home games last season, Matty sat on the bench during warmups and cheered on his brother. Nicholas loved seeing him. Other players got a kick out of it too, especially Rutger McGroarty who often met Matty with a fist bump or two before he headed back to the locker room. Matty and all the other family members are a part of this team too, even if they don’t put on a maize script jersey.
Even though culture is of the utmost importance, maintaining it comes with challenges. Back in September, Naurato cut defenseman Johnny Druskinis from his program after the player spray-painted homophobic graffiti on Ann Arbor’s Jewish Resource Center. Such an offense had no business in Michigan’s program, and Naurato had to cut Druskinis for his infraction.
In moments like these, Naurato’s job is akin to parenting in front of a crowd, where the whole hockey world is watching his decisions with a judging eye. So far, he has made the right ones to make his team an enriching environment for all his players. The phrase “Good Dudes Only” has been a guiding standard since he became head coach, and so far that standard has made infractions rare and quickly addressed.
All this culture talk, at the end of the day, serves the purpose of winning hockey games. It won’t take some innovative system to win because systems are fallible. He and any other elite coach can dismantle them and expose weaknesses and strengths. What’s harder to dismantle is effort, pride and confidence that come from the Wolverines due to what Naurato’s program emphasizes. Developing skills makes players better. Developing intangibles through culture makes teams great.
Patience amid the Process
In the small business world, the Six Month Rule is a concept that a business has to wait six months to see success. It’s an awfully prescient line for Naurato’s program, which six months after he was named interim coach made an appearance at the Frozen Four. After months of straining and striving, going through injuries and victories, Naurato’s ability to be a head coach was vindicated. Just two weeks before that Frozen Four, he earned a five-year contract to lead the program.
Here’s another small business rule: around 20% of small businesses fail in their first year, and nearly half fail within five. The sheer magnitude of a program like Michigan Hockey means that true failure is out of the question, but principles of regression apply. In other words, it’s easy for Naurato to pitch his program’s vision at the start of his tenure — when his team has gone to back-to-back Frozen Fours with him at the helm — but maintaining success in the long run is the goal. A program like Michigan is defined by wins and losses, even if Naurato looks beyond them when evaluating his program. The survival of his vision depends on his team’s ability to produce on the ice.
All the while, Naurato is tasked with adapting to the ever-changing waters of college sports. Just like the business world, the market changes perpetually and instantaneously. To keep his program on the cutting edge he wants to be at, Naurato is forced to constantly adapt.
“For me, for the college landscape, I have no clue what the market’s gonna look like in a year or five years. That’s exciting to me,” Naurato said. “To me, that’s an opportunity to be ahead of creating something great because there’s no old way for me. Yeah, I played college hockey, but I wasn’t a coach. So this is new for a lot of people, but for me, it’s the only way.”
There’s a level of patience that enacting change requires amid turbulence. Not only to trust in the vision and all its allure, but also to hold on long enough until the core pieces are all clicking together. For a to-the-studs overhaul like Naurato has done with Michigan, time is a premium resource. Case in point, this offseason the NCAA settled three court cases that all but ended amateurism and paved the way for athletes to be paid. As much as Naurato has built, he’ll have to pivot his approach in some areas to keep Michigan on top.
That’s nothing new. Naurato has learned a lot of valuable lessons in two years, let alone all the ones he learned running TPH Detroit. Again, it’s all about people, and getting the right people in place to accomplish his objectives.
Finding those people took time. It wasn’t until this offseason that Naurato says he truly finished hiring his staff. This summer, he added Chrissy Powers as director of player personnel, a position visualized to help players develop their own personal branding opportunities. And no, this isn’t just an NIL thing. Naurato knows that his players’ personal brands extend to the workforce, too, where he wants them to own their education and their personal story. It’s one thing to have the experience and education to qualify for a job, and it’s entirely another to be able to tell an interviewer why you’re the best candidate. That’s where Powers, who worked as a brand developer and digital strategist for Lululemon and a number of athletics-adjacent companies, can help them.
With the addition of Powers, Naurato has assembled his “aces in their places” across all the areas he wants his program to excel on and off the ice. Now, we’ve all been around college sports long enough to know that Naurato will have to fill positions at some point when people move on to other opportunities, but for the time being he has stacked his own deck with a winning hand.
Naurato’s aces span many fields other than branding. The most obvious are his coaches. Associate head coach Rob Rassey is his right-hand man, one of the first hires Naurato made once he became interim head coach. He handles everything from recruiting to roster management to skill development and beyond. Assistant coach Matt Deschamps coaches defense, with a pedigree proven in coaching Owen Power and other Chicago Steel elites in the USHL. Kevin Reiter, a former director of player personnel for the National Team Development Program, coaches goaltenders. Each one specializes in an area, but they’re all culture boosters who set examples for how the Wolverines approach each day.
© Junfu Han / USA TODAY NETWORK
Don’t think that all the investment is coming from Naurato, either. The buy-in to Naurato’s system comes from the coaches, too. When Rassey joined an interim-tagged Naurato back in August 2022, he did so on a one-year MOU dependent on Naurato’s position as coach, interim or otherwise. He also turned down a job at Princeton this offseason to keep building with Michigan. For Deschamps, he left a powerhouse Chicago Steel program to coach at a program where every phase of the game is analyzed under a microscope. . For Reiter, he paid up by ending a decade-long stint as the NTDP’s director of player development to coach at Michigan. In other words, everybody has some skin in the game. All these aces anted up.
Naurato’s aces span a variety of areas off the ice, too. There’s Anthony Ciatti running the analytics department that has built an elite scouting system and an individual player development platform. Ashley Korn has built an academics program for each player that saw the team combine for an almost perfect APR score last season, with just three players below a 3.0 GPA. Kristy McNeil, communications director, has built an unmatched media presence that outperforms NHL teams’ own outreach. Strength coach Joe Maher and athletic trainer Brian Brewster team up to get the most out of players’ conditioning, scraping data from practices and games to assess growth and regression in each area of player performance.
[Read More: Redefining an NHL Factory: Kristy McNeil Revolutionizes Social Media for Michigan Hockey]
“There’s a lot of hard working staffs in college hockey,” Naurato acknowledged. “I truly believe our guys are possessed to make this program the best it can be. And at this time of the year, there are no days off. We’re here every single day getting better, but that’s because people want to be here. We’re not just working to work.”
With a foundation of systems and departments now established, plus the knowledge of how and how not to wield them, Naurato is in position to bring his vision to full, roaring life.
“You have a plan when you first start, and the plan is constantly adjusted,” Naurato said. “But after two years of doing this, I know exactly who we are, and I know exactly where we’re going.”
Patience is difficult, and Naurato knows this well. Since the early days of his program, Naurato has had to remind himself that he can only control what he can control, and everything else — time included — isn’t worth getting hung up on. Even when changing areas of his plan or even himself could create faster results, he has to remain patient.
It Takes a Village
In the eternal words of Jerry Garcia, “You who choose to lead must follow. But if you fall you fall alone.” Little did Jerry know that his words would be a perfect description of Naurato’s program in the early going. Coming in without a long resume of head coaching experience, he had to learn a lot. He did so by letting people be experts in their areas — again, those aces in their places.
“Can you imagine running around trying to tell everyone how to do their job? That’s crazy,” Naurato said. “The main message I guess would be empowering the kids, empowering the staff, because that’s what we’re all fighting for is to be empowered to do it. And if we, or I, succeed or fail, I want to be able to do it my way. I don’t want to have to have the resentment of failing because I wasn’t able to do something. So I don’t want to be able to put that on the kids or our staff. And when they have success, I want them to know it’s because of what they did. And when we don’t, we have to go back to the plan and say ‘OK, how can we tweak it.’ ”
Later, Naurato revisits this topic: “Here’s my main thing for every player: I’ll give you everything from a development standpoint — my time, video, on the ice — and then when they score or they play more, it’s because they walk through the door. We gave them everything we could to help get them there but it always goes back to them. … The right environment of people brings average to good, and good to great. And I think that’s what we’re trying to do: We want to help develop our people to become the best versions of themselves in this environment.”
Naurato doesn’t expect perfection. He’d be foolish to. So instead he leans on a saying his mom had called the 5% rule. Basically, it went that everyone’s got 5% of them that you’re not going to like. Instead of fixating on that 5%, she reminded a young Naurato to focus on the 95%. For coaches, for players. Even for himself. When issues occur, he focuses on correcting them rather than being frustrated that they happened.
“When I look at these young men, I try to find the best in them, not the 5%,” Naurato said. “… Who they are as people, at their core, that’s what matters.”
It’s a beautiful mantra in theory, but in practice it takes effort to keep sight on the 95%. Take the Wolverines’ penalty kill this season. Before the resumption of Big Ten play in January, Michigan’s penalty kill was less than 74%. That would’ve been bottom five in all of D-I compared to the end-of-season stats. For first-year assistant coach Matt Deschamps who coached the PK, this was a rough start to his career in Ann Arbor.
But the whole time, Naurato didn’t care so much about the flaws in the penalty kill as he cared about the problem-solving skills he saw from Deschamps. Deschamps was grinding film, meeting with players, showing great enthusiasm to improve. He was trying his hardest to improve it. Most importantly, Deschamps owned the mistake and didn’t make excuses. He was possessed to put his PK players in a position to succeed.
“And he took pride in it,” Naurato emphasized. “He was beating himself up. … It wasn’t (Deschamps), it wasn’t the structure. We just needed to find a way to get through to them.”
With all the hard work he and his players put in, the PK finished the second half of Big Ten play clocking an 85.4% kill rate, which would’ve finished sixth in the country.
Again, it wasn’t about tactical tweaks and adjustments so much as the trust and buy-in Deschamps gained from the players based on relationships he built with them. It’s that 95% enthusiasm that makes 5% mistakes palatable. When combined with expertise, this gives Naurato’s program its wings.
“At some point, Michigan is gonna have a top five PK in the country, and Matt Deschamps is gonna be the one running it,” Naurato said. “If we took this year to learn all these things about the PK or any other area, now we’re going to apply that. We’ll be that much better for it.”
Mandatory Credit: Adam Cairns-The Columbus Dispatch
What Comes Next
College hockey is at most four or five years of a player’s life. The average pro career lasts about five years. Once that’s over, what comes next?
Naurato’s charge as a coach is to manage what happens during the college career of his players, but he’ll never build the program he wants without empowering players well beyond the time they leave Ann Arbor.
“We want to develop young men that are high performing people, and we use hockey as a metaphor for all of that,” Naurato said. “That’s what we want. So how do you do that? When they go through adversity in any area, we’ve got to go through that with them, guide them, mentor them so that they learn from it and they’re strong because not everyone’s gonna have it go perfectly all the time.”
Even star players go through highs and lows. Take the example of Adam Fantilli, who won the Hobey Baker his first and only season of college hockey when Naurato was an interim.
Fantilli scored more than anyone in the 2022-23 season, going third overall at the NHL Draft and inking an NHL contract that summer. But before that could happen, he got checked and whacked by pretty much every opponent he faced. He caught adenovirus and ended up in the ER during the same team-wide outbreak that threatened Holtz’ life and forced Michigan into skating its third-string goalie at left wing. He even caught a one-game suspension for fighting a Michigan State player during a scrum. It was a banner year, but it wasn’t without struggle.
The task for Naurato and his staff is to get players to understand that struggle, to push through it and come out the other side as an even better version of themselves. That’s a lesson that applies to every area of life.
One of the ways Naurato can get players to understand that lesson is to learn it from those who’ve gone through it, i.e. alumni. Naurato’s task for the future is developing a stronger alumni network. Not just the NHL guys, or the coaches or the agents. He wants the doctors and lawyers, third grade teachers and entrepreneurs involved too. People in the exact shoes his players want to occupy. Every player comes in with different plans for their one wild and precious life, but there’s someone who’s done it before that can guide them.
And yeah, don’t doubt for a second that he’s also preparing players for the hockey chapters, too. He wants players to come in and get the most they can out of Michigan. If that ends in a couple years in maize and blue followed by an NHL contract, great. If it ends in four years of service to the program, fantastic. If it ends with a player transferring elsewhere for more opportunity, that’s great too. By investing the most into players and giving them an equal, fair shot for every opportunity — even if it doesn’t end up directly benefiting Michigan — he can be sure he’s gotten everything he could out of his players. There’s no holding back assets or trapping players. What’s good for the bee is invariably good for the hive, even if it forces Naurato to adapt.
Naurato also wants what’s best for his coaches. Take a look at Alabama football under Nick Saban, where his coaching tree is full of NCAA and NFL elites. His program was a university inside a university, a place for the greatest minds in the game to both study Saban’s methodology while also teaching him facets of their own. Even if it’s awkward for a coach at Michigan to say it, Naurato wants his program to function as a coaching factory much the same as Alabama.
“We want to move on people, too,” Naurato put it. He knows that it’s only a matter of time before Rassey is running his own program, and he’s sure that Deschamps will end up a head coach someday. Reiter’s niche in the scouting and goaltending space will see him earn a promotion, too. Those are just the coaches, let alone the comms interns and analytics assistants that his program regularly produces. Good programs develop talent, but great programs aren’t afraid to lose it.
All of this serves an end goal of championship hockey, year in and year out. Every year requires adjustment, but by establishing baselines of culture, communication and development, Naurato believes that his team can finally get over the hump.
“I’m not going to do just what it takes to win,” Naurato said, his voice rising in assurance. “It will always come back to (how) we’re going to do what’s best for these players, to develop and play the game the right way that allows us to win. It’s not trickery in structure to influence a game. I’m not going to go into the Frozen Four and run a trap. Nope. I won’t do it. I don’t believe in it. I want to do it our way. Then when you win, it’s ‘Look at all this stuff Michigan’s doing.’
“We just gotta win.”
Again, Naurato knows that his program will be judged by outsiders based on records and championships. But for those on the inside, the path to winning runs through excellence in all the other areas. By cultivating excellence, investing in people on and off the ice, Michigan can win. Through people, patience and personal development, the Wolverines can reach the top again.
It’s a vision of the future that hasn’t changed since Naurato was hired, and that isn’t an exaggeration. Let’s go back to August 8, 2022, a day after Naurato was hired. I had covered the coaching transition for The Michigan Daily. Just a day after he was named interim head coach, Naurato DMed me at 4:28 a.m. for a phone call. I responded at 6:17, and he called me not a minute later.
Seemingly out of breath at times, Naurato described to me how he wanted to build the Alabama football of college hockey. He shared a vision for the future that was idealistic and rosy — exactly what you’d expect of a first-year coach — doing it “the right way.” But despite all the learning of two seasons, and despite all the times he’s learned and grown and failed forward, Naurato’s vision has remained the same.
Only this time, it’s not about being Alabama. Because even ‘Bama just lost, anyway.
For Naurato, it’s about being Michigan Hockey Inc. Heading into his third season, business is booming.
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