Why Notre Dame hockey coach Jeff Jackson will step down after 2024-25 season
Notre Dame head hockey coach Jeff Jackson doesn’t view Monday evening’s news as his retirement.
Jackson, who is entering his 20th year leading the Irish and will step down after the 2024-25 season, doesn’t want to give up coaching. He could see himself stepping into a different role at Notre Dame, but he wants to remain in hockey in some capacity.
Jackson spoke with former Irish head men’s basketball coach Mike Bray, who made the same decision after the 2022-23 season and is now an assistant coach with the Atlanta Hawks. He would like to consider doing something similar in the NHL.
Much like Bray, though, the 69-year-old Jackson realized his time at Notre Dame had run its course.
“I just feel like I’ve been boxed in a little bit recruiting-wise over the last couple of the years, and I have to take responsibility for that,” Jackson said in a Zoom press conference Tuesday morning. “It’s caused the program to drop a little bit over the last few years.
“We’ve had great kids, but we haven’t had the same talent level over the previous years. And we need to get back to that.”
The Irish have not made the NCAA Tournament since 2022, won the Big Ten Tournament since 2019 or made the Frozen Four since 2018.
Jackson credited Andy Slaggert, Notre Dame’s recruiting coordinator and associate head coach, with targeting the right players and doing everything he could on the recruiting trail. But ultimately, he believed he couldn’t change enough to land them.
“We’ve tried a lot of different things to offset all the commentary out there about how we play and how we develop players and, you know, certain agencies talking about Notre Dame and developing players like that,” Jackson said. “It’s something we couldn’t combat.”
Name, image and likeness becoming more and more entrenched in college hockey played a role in Jackson’s decision as well. He supports players earning money as a principle, but he called the idea that the term “student-athlete” shouldn’t be used anymore “embarrassing.”
The zero-sum nature of recruiting and the transfer portal discouraged Jackson, too.
As recently as a decade ago, Jackson explained, major college programs had a “gentleman’s agreement” regarding each other’s players and recruits. Unlike most other college sports, hockey is unique in that it has to compete with major junior hockey in both the U.S. and Canada.
That agreement, to Jackson’s dismay, is no longer honored.
“It’s become more like football and basketball, where everything is cutthroat” Jackson said. “Stealing everybody’s players and recruits. It’s just not what it used to be, and it’s disappointing, but more importantly, I worry about the future of college hockey in that regard.”
Jackson viewed his decision to announce his impending departure now (as opposed to stepping away after next season with no warning) as a way to give his replacement, current associate head coach Brock Sheahan, an advantage in the 2025 recruiting cycle.
He remains the head coach for one more season, though, and he doesn’t want it to be a farewell tour. Jackson is as unhappy as anyone that the Irish failed to make the NCAA Tournament in either of the past two seasons, and he wants to remedy that in his final go-round.
“I want to get our guys back in the right frame of mind and understand that, ‘Hey, business as usual,'” Jackson said. “If anything, I’d like to see a little redemption for the last couple years and see our guys motivated to get back to where we were.”
