Dalhousie men’s hockey coach steps down with no championship wins in 15 years
The team finished in last place for a fourth consecutive season
Dalhousie University’s men’s ice hockey team will have a new leader behind the bench when they take the ice next season.
The university will immediately begin looking for a replacement for Chris Donnelly, who stepped down on Feb. 25 after 15 seasons.
Cindy Tye, Dalhousie’s director of athletics and recreation, declined to comment on the staffing change.
The Dalhousie Tigers ended the 2025-26 season with a staggering 2-28 record, finishing in last place in the Atlantic University Sport conference for a fourth consecutive season.
This isn’t just a number that showcases a single rough year of play; it is a culmination of a program that hasn’t posted a season with more wins than losses in over two decades.
During Donnelly’s tenure as head coach, the men’s hockey team has posted a 95-308 record and finished last in the AUS eight times, six of which have come in the past eight seasons.
There are six playoff spots in the AUS championships, with just seven teams in the league since St. Thomas University’s men’s hockey program shut down following the 2015-16 season.
In the last 15 seasons, the Tigers made the playoffs twice: in 2017-18 and 2021-22, when Donnelly won the AUS and U Sports Coach of the Year awards.
The Tigers finished the 2025-26 season with an average attendance of 124 people per game, the lowest in the AUS. The team’s home arena, the Halifax Forum, has a seating capacity of 4,610 fans, meaning the Tigers have a capacity percentage of 2.7 per cent.
“The question for Dalhousie is: are people coming to games? Is the team something people are interested in, or are they an embarrassment to the school?” says Joseph Baker, a sports science professor at the University of Toronto.
The Tigers were expecting to move their home games to the Oulton-Stanish Centre, a new arena located on Dalhousie’s Studley Campus, sometime this past season. With the season finished and the new rink scheduled to open on March 12, the Tigers will instead play their first game on the new ice this fall.
Related: Oulton-Stanish Centre opens its doors
The Dalhousie Gazette spoke with six sports experts in academia across the country about the Tigers’ on-ice performance over the past 15 seasons. They all said the team has been underperforming on the ice.
“I’m not sure why an athletic director would not either step up or be pressured to step up and make a change [earlier],” says Mark Lowes, a communications professor and sport researcher at the University of Ottawa.
“If that individual is not performing in any tiny measurable way, then [retaining the coach for that long] is a puzzling one,” he says.
All six experts also brought up the complexity of measuring success within U Sports. Many listed academic success, student engagement and community involvement as different ways a university’s athletics department may define the success of its program.
“The performance on the team is good when it happens, but it’s not really the reason for having the team,” says Baker. “A lot of teams in Canadian university sport focus on it being an opportunity for [the athletes] to have a more positive university experience.”
Tye agrees that there’s more to university athletics than wins and losses.
“Of course, success is measured by wins and losses, but it’s definitely not the only way that we measure success,” says Tye. “If it’s just about sports, then I’m in the wrong spot.”
She says the university’s athletics department considers its athletes’ community involvement and academic achievement as additional measures of success.
Jehad Assaff is the founder of Atlantic Puck, a sports media outlet that promotes and showcases high-level hockey within Atlantic Canada. In his time covering the AUS, he’s always viewed the Tigers team as disappointing, given the university’s size and reputation.
“It has been an unsuccessful program in terms of what sports are measured by, and that’s winning,” says Assaff. “It has the potential to be run much more professionally.
The men’s hockey team has only won the AUS championship once — the 1978-79 season.
“If you’re known as being in the basement all the time and you’re not really good, nobody’s going to waste their time, let alone their money, to go watch the game.”
Just 8.8 per cent of the Tigers’ 2025-26 roster consisted of alumni from the three major junior leagues in the Canadian Hockey League. The next lowest in the AUS is Saint Mary’s University, at 29.6 per cent.
The University of New Brunswick, which has finished at the top of the standings in the AUS in every season since 2007-08 and won the past seven AUS championships, leads the way with 71.4 per cent of its men’s ice hockey roster also playing in the CHL.
Assaff says that players coming into U Sports from the CHL tend to gravitate towards teams with a winning history.
“Hopefully, the new [head coach] that [Dalhousie] brings in has some deep connections in the CHL, because you do need that to be able to recruit heavily.”
