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<\/p>\nCOLUMBUS, Ohio \u2014 In the summer of 2001, the Columbus Blue Jackets hired Barry Brennan to be the strength and conditioning coach for their American Hockey League team in Syracuse, N.Y. Part of the gig was to help with the NHL club\u2019s development camp in early July.<\/p>\n
\u201cI drove all night \u2014 12 hours \u2014 from Ottawa to Columbus to get there early in the morning, because I couldn\u2019t freaking wait to get started,\u201d Brennan said. \u201cI got to the rink (Nationwide Arena), was walking around trying to find the dressing room, and just pinching myself that I was working in an NHL rink.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I finally found the dressing room, a guy was sitting on a chair right next to the door. The guy. I knew exactly who it was, and I honestly almost fainted.\u201d<\/p>\n
There aren\u2019t many Blue Jackets coaches or staff who have been with the organization long enough to have had a personal interaction with franchise founder John H. McConnell, who died in 2009. But Brennan is one of the lucky few.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s a big reason Brennan was so excited \u2014 almost to the point of tears, he said \u2014 to return to the Blue Jackets on Thursday, when GM Don Waddell announced his hiring as the club\u2019s new strength and conditioning coach. He last held the job in 2010.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis whole time, through the interview process and in the last day or so since I found out I was coming back, I\u2019ve been thinking about that (interaction) with Mr. Mac,\u201d Brennan said. \u201cHe reached out his hand, shook mine and said, \u2018You must be Barry. Happy you\u2019re here.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was so genuine. What owner does that? I was a minor-league guy, a peon. It was so meaningful to me, and I walked away saying to myself, \u2018This is where I belong, and I\u2019m going to do everything I can for that man and his hockey team.\u2019 I will never forget it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis place just means so much to me. I mean \u2026 I\u2019m getting emotional, but it does. This city, this organization \u2026 these fans. To get this opportunity \u2026 I\u2019m just so freakin\u2019 thrilled about what we\u2019re going to get done here, and I can\u2019t wait to get started.\u201d<\/p>\n
Waddell said he was sent \u201cso, so many\u201d applications for the job, which came open shortly after the season ended in April when previous strength and conditioning coach Kevin Collins was among a wave of support staff whose contracts were not renewed.<\/p>\n
He spent months cutting the list down to four or five candidates, then went into hyperdrive talking to mutual contacts around the league.<\/p>\n
NHL legend Sergei Fedorov, who played for the Blue Jackets when Brennan was working in Columbus, crafted a handwritten letter to persuade Waddel. Fedorov admired Brennan\u2019s work so much that he took him along to Russia as strength and conditioning coach when Fedorov was general manager, and later coach, of CSKA Moscow.<\/p>\n
It also meant a phone call from Waddell\u2019s longtime compatriot Rick Dudley, along with other Blue Jackets luminaries \u2014 director of player personnel Rick Nash, assistant coach Jared Boll, team services director Aarron Johnson, broadcaster Jody Shelley \u2014 who were all players when Brennan ran the Blue Jackets\u2019 weight room.<\/p>\n
\u201cUsually when you talk to as many people as I talked to, you\u2019re going to find somebody who has some kind of a complaint or an issue with somebody,\u201d Waddell said. \u201cI talked to a lot of people. Not just people in this building, but all around the league, around hockey. Nobody had anything negative to say. It was all glowing.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis track record is impressive. You don\u2019t put that together without knowing what you\u2019re doing. And his work ethic is tremendous. But his passion for the job \u2026 and his passion specifically for Columbus, really stood out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brennan spent four seasons working for the Blue Jackets\u2019 AHL club before he took over in Columbus, spending five seasons with the Blue Jackets (2005-06 to 2009-10), including the franchise\u2019s first Stanley Cup playoff berth in 2009.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Brennan talks with Nikita Zaitsev during his time with CSKA Moscow. (Courtesy of Barry Brennan)<\/p>\n
After Columbus, he spent one season with the Atlanta Thrashers, but didn\u2019t make the move when the franchise relocated to Winnipeg in 2011. Waddell was the Thrashers\u2019 club president during Brennan\u2019s one season in Atlanta.<\/p>\n
Over the last 15 years, Brennan has worked in Russia\u2019s KHL and operated a gym in Ottawa, working with NHL players and prospects, professional boxers, etc.<\/p>\n
When Brennan and Fedorov arrived in Moscow, CSKA was the fifth-worst team in the 23-team KHL. In the years since, they\u2019ve had the best record in the league six times, won three Gagarin Cups as the league champion and finished as runner-up three times.<\/p>\n
Fedorov invited Brennan as one of his guests when he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2015.<\/p>\n
Waddell said Brennan\u2019s expertise and experience, along with his passion for the job, were the reasons he was picked. But his experience with CSKA should come in handy with Russians Yegor Chinakhov, Kirill Marchenko, Ivan Provorov and Dmitry Voronkov on the roster.<\/p>\n
The Blue Jackets also have a plethora of Russian prospects: goaltenders Pyotr Andreyanov and Sergei Ivanov, forward Kirill Dolzhenkov, and defenseman Nikolai Makarov, who may come to North America over the next several seasons.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to be able to get 22 or 23 guys in the room to believe what you\u2019re saying,\u201d Waddell said. \u201cWe feel like he\u2019s the guy who can do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brennan takes over a Blue Jackets roster that is not only blessed with some of the NHL\u2019s best young talent but was also one of the league\u2019s biggest surprises last season by finishing just two points out of a playoff spot. It\u2019s also a club that has been overwhelmed by injuries in recent seasons.<\/p>\n
The Jackets had 309 man-games lost to injury last season, fourth-most in the NHL. That marked the fifth time in six seasons they exceeded 300 man-games lost in a season, including a franchise-record 563 in 2022-23.<\/p>\n
Ryan Gadbois, an assistant under Collins the last four seasons, will remain in that capacity under Brennan, although Waddell said he was impressed with how Gadbois handled summer workout instruction with players over the summer, during development camp, etc.<\/p>\n
Ben Eaves will enter his sixth season as the AHL Cleveland strength and conditioning coach.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told (Gadbois) and (Eaves) that we\u2019re all going to work together, all pulling the rope in the right direction,\u201d said Brennan, 62. \u201cThey\u2019re going to be the guys who take over for me, so I want to help show them the path and let them run. It\u2019s a group effort.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even as the years ticked by, Brennan said, he always had a strange sense that his time in Columbus wasn\u2019t finished. When he returned to Columbus for a Bruce Springsteen concert in the spring of 2024, Johnson showed Brennan the refurbished dressing room at Nationwide Arena, and the fire burned even hotter.<\/p>\n
The last couple of days, Brennan said, have been emotional.<\/p>\n
\u201cI watched every Blue Jackets game I could, even when I was over in Russia,\u201d Brennan said. \u201cI poured everything into Columbus. That place means everything to me. Everything. To come back there \u2026 man, I can\u2019t even begin to describe it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m coming back to finish the job we started. From the day I left, I wanted to come back here and help this team get to the playoffs. I feel like this team is right on the edge. There\u2019s some work to do, absolutely, but this can be special. I want a Stanley Cup for Columbus. To be part of that would be the dream of a lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Top photo of Barry Brennan with Alexander Radulov: Courtesy of Barry Brennan)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"COLUMBUS, Ohio \u2014 In the summer of 2001, the Columbus Blue Jackets hired Barry Brennan to be the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54603,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[392,385,99],"class_list":["post-54602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-columbus-blue-jackets","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}