FRISCO — When the Stars zeroed in on Glen Gulutzan as their next head coach over the summer, many within the fan base and across the NHL weren’t so sure bringing him back to Dallas was the right decision.
There were even mixed feelings within the Gulutzan household.
His 18-year-old daughter Grace had signed to play softball at Hill College in Hillsboro, 55 miles southwest of Dallas. She was set to move into her dorm in the fall.
She wanted her independence, and having her dad follow her 2,000 miles from their home in Edmonton wasn’t in the plan.
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“When this started to happen with myself, she got really angry,” Gulutzan said. “She didn’t want me or us around. I had to explain to her, ‘I’m not living at the dorm.’”
But Glen said Grace soon realized Hillsboro was a comfortable distance from Dallas but close enough to take advantage of free tickets to games. Laundry and home-cooked meals once a week were nice perks, too.
“I did receive a phone call after saying, ‘Actually, I really am excited about it. I can come for dinner.’”
As Grace warmed to the idea of her father returning to Texas, the Stars and their fan base have, too.
Throughout the month of training camp and preseason, players and staff who knew Gulutzan when he was the team’s head coach from 2011-13 say they’ve seen a more seasoned leader. Fans have opened their minds to a coach encouraging more physicality and freedom within the system for star players.
“He’s come back a better coach, for sure,” said Stars captain Jamie Benn, who played for Gulutzan in the early 2010s. “He’s pretty different, not as a person. Still a great person and the same guy that was here 12 years ago.”
On Thursday evening in Winnipeg, Gulutzan, 54, will begin his quest to prove the biggest barriers to his success a decade ago were timing, circumstances and experience.
He was the only significant change Dallas made this offseason after losing in three consecutive Western Conference finals. But the players and staff believe that after a decade apart, his return could be the spark that leads the Stars to their first Stanley Cup title since 1999.
“It’s one thing to have success, but you’ve got to go through tough times,” Stars general manager Jim Nill said. “It’s those tough times when you find out who you are, and that’s what Glen has done. He’s made himself a better coach because of that and a better person because of it.
“I just see the energy in the room now. It’s a new voice. [He’s] full of life. The players are excited about it.”
News Dallas Stars coach Glen Gulutzan holds his jersey and poses for a photo with his wife Nicole Gulutzan during a news conference at American Airlines Center, Wednesday, July 2, 2025, in Dallas.
Chitose Suzuki / Staff Photographer
From Saskatchewan to Texas
Gulutzan would like to set the record straight: His Wikipedia page is wrong.
Well, it technically isn’t wrong. But it doesn’t accurately capture his upbringing.
Gulutzan was born in The Pas, Manitoba, on Aug. 12, 1971, but from the second day of his life until he was 15, he lived in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. He grew up in Hudson Bay, a town with a population of just 1,500 people and a 20-minute drive from the Manitoba border. The closest hospital was in the neighboring province.
But he’s a Saskatchewanian, through and through.
“Us Saskatchewan guys, it’s like Texans,” Gulutzan said in a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News. “When you grow up there — and there’s not much in Saskatchewan. It’s just farmland and some trees in the north — but people are very proud to be from Saskatchewan.”
Hudson Bay is where he was raised by a hairdresser and a math teacher. It’s where he, like many other young boys in the province, developed his handy nature and appreciation for maintenance projects. It’s where he met the love of his life, Nicole, at a wedding for his cousin and her cousin-in-law, leading to 23 years of marriage.
And it’s where his love for hockey was born on the outdoor rinks in his small hometown.
The hockey culture in Hudson Bay could only serve him until he was 15. He then moved to the big city — Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, with a population of 34,000 — to begin his career in the Western Hockey League.
He dragged out his playing days as long as he could, playing at the collegiate level while studying to be a teacher, in the International Hockey League and in the West Coast Hockey League.
As his playing career wound down, he wanted to chase one of three professions: fireman, policeman or hockey coach. He was pretty close to becoming a police officer, joining the force in Canada, but never saw it through because the door to coaching opened.
Gulutzan started coaching in 2001 as a player assistant for the Fresno Falcons of the WCHL. In 2003, he became head coach and GM for the ECHL’s Las Vegas Wranglers. His four kids — Emma, Brielle, Landen and Grace — were born in those two U.S. cities.
In 2009, he took a job as head coach of the Texas Stars in Austin — a move which would shape the next two decades of his career.
Glen Gulutzan, the new head coach of the Stars, takes questions from the media at American Airlines Center in Dallas on June 20, 2011.
A winding journey
Some men spend a lifetime praying they’ll get the call to become an NHL head coach.
Gulutzan was just praying for an extension.
In 2011, the first-time AHL head coach was entering the final year of a three-year contract he signed with the Texas Stars. As the team’s first head coach in its history, he had seen some great success, reaching the playoffs both years and making a run to the Calder Cup Final in 2009-10.
“I finished year two, and I was at home in Cedar Park, and I was talking to my family and saying, ‘Man, I really hope that [Stars GM] Joe [Nieuwendyk] calls, and I can get an extension in Texas,’” Gulutzan said.
A week later, the call came, but it wasn’t for an extension.
“Joe said, ‘Hey, I want you to come up and interview for the Dallas job,’” Gulutzan said. “It caught me a bit off guard. I spent three or four weeks kind of getting ready for that job, and then I started interviewing. I didn’t know which way it was going to go. I was totally content with being in Austin.”
Gulutzan ended up getting the gig to replace Marc Crawford — his first entry point to the NHL. He had never been a player. He had never been an assistant. His first time in an NHL locker room was at the age of 39 as head coach of one of its 30 franchises.
It went probably as you’d expect. It wasn’t the underdog story they make movies about. The team was bankrupt, switched owners and was controlled by the league. Gulutzan’s Stars missed the playoffs both seasons. He was fired after the second.
Gulutzan has often admitted over the last three months that those first two years in Dallas didn’t go as hoped. But they were his segue to coaching in the NHL.
Two months after being fired by Dallas, John Tortorella offered him an assistant job in Vancouver. He coached under one Stanley Cup-winning head coach then another in Mike Sullivan, who served as interim head coach while Tortorella was suspended in that 2013-14 season.
“You always think you’re ready,” Gulutzan said. “When I look back, I can remember exactly when I knew [I wasn’t]. When I started working with John Tortorella and Mike Sullivan in Vancouver, they had won Cups. John had won a Cup. It was at that time when I was like, ‘You know what? I need to be here in Vancouver as an assistant and work for a veteran guy.’ That’s why I chose to go to Vancouver. That was a big jump for me. It was a big learning curve. I learned a lot under some veteran coaches, and it was important.”
Gulutzan later got another shot to be an NHL head coach in Calgary from 2016-18, and while he made the playoffs in his first year, he was fired again after missing the postseason in his second.
But a month later, he was hired as an assistant coach in Edmonton and ran the team’s power play for seven years. He worked under five head coaches — Todd McLellan, Ken Hitchcock, Dave Tippett, Jay Woodcroft and Kris Knoblauch — before leaving on his own terms to come to Dallas. He turned the Oilers’ power play from the league’s worst to the best under his tenure.
He made two runs to the Stanley Cup Final. He worked with some of the greatest players to ever play the game — Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl. And he gained the experience he lacked in Dallas.
Still, he and his family never thought they’d return to Texas. When Pete DeBoer was fired, they didn’t even bat an eye. They thought he’d have a better chance replacing Rick Tocchet in Vancouver. Nicole said Glen was never sure he’d even get another interview.
“He would say, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to get another chance, but I’m ready, and I know I can do it,’” she said. “He’s ready now. I can tell in him. He is so ready. I think he’s been ready probably for a couple years.”
Those that know him off the ice feel that way. Those that know him on the ice feel the same.
“I feel like Gully’s been ready for five years now, to be honest with you,” Hitchcock said. “He’s long overcooked, and he’s long overdue. I think he has all the knowledge you need to be successful.”
Dallas Stars new head coach Glen Gulutzan instructs the team in a huddle during a training camp, on Thursday, Sept. 18, 2025, in Frisco.
Shafkat Anowar / Staff Photographer
Overcooked and overdue
Only one other head coach in Stars franchise history returned to Dallas for a second stint, and he was the only one to lead the Stars all the way to the top.
Hitchcock, who won the Stanley Cup with the Stars in 1999, came back to Dallas for one year in 2017-18. He retired at the end of that season but came out of retirement eight months later to coach the Edmonton Oilers — with Gulutzan on his staff.
Even the greats like Hitchcock, who was the fourth-winningest coach in NHL history at the time of his Hockey Hall of Fame induction in 2023, know when it’s necessary to lean on others.
Hitchcock did just that with Gulutzan when he arrived in Edmonton over a month into the season.
“The best part for me was he had already built a relationship with our best players,” Hitchcock said. “He had built a relationship because he was running the power play, so there was already a buy-in when I took over. We ran out of gas, but we had a hell of a year until we took on all the injuries on the back end, and Glen was a big part of that.
“I felt like after a year with him, I learned a lot about how to run a power play. You think you know until you see the way Gully runs it.”
Hitchcock took a similar approach in his return to Dallas, leaning on the Stars veterans like Benn, Tyler Seguin and John Klingberg. He said he expects Gulutzan to do the same, relying on the elite talent and leadership in the Stars’ locker room to ease his transition.
It doesn’t hurt that some of Gulutzan’s support system now is the same it was a decade ago with familiar faces both in the Stars organization and outside of it. Glen is rediscovering the team, and the Gulutzans are reconnecting with friends from years ago.
“It’s like going home,” Nicole said. “We don’t live in the same neighborhood, but our neighborhood friends, they came to the second preseason game. No wonder we loved it here. We had the best people surrounding us.”
While some things are familiar, a lot has changed. Gulutzan knows coaching players like Mikko Rantanen, Jason Robertson, Jake Oettinger and Miro Heiskanen is far different from the roster he was handed 14 years ago.
But after consecutive losses in the Stanley Cup Final in Edmonton, he also knows how difficult it is to win, even when the talent is there.
After DeBoer took the Stars to three straight Western Conference finals, some may look at this season as Cup or bust. But Gulutzan knows that’s not fair to him or the players.
“How do I define success? I think I define success as if we can hit the playoffs playing our best version of ourselves,” he said. “If there’s some outlier that comes into play that we can’t control, I’d be OK with that. I wouldn’t be OK with us not being the best version of ourselves.”
The last time Gulutzan arrived in Dallas, he was excited simply to be in the room, knowing his team was still a decade away from being among the best.
But this time, he feels the hope and excitement from the players, his bosses, the fan base and even now from his 18-year-old daughter, who’s looking forward to her free meals once a week.
Gulutzan family poses for photo on Christmas. Left to right: Brielle, Emma, Grace, Nicole, Landen, Glen and dog Jack.
Courtesy of Gulutzan family
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