Maine Hands Its Women's Hockey Program to a Familiar Face

Alex Gettens is heading back to Orono as the eighth head coach in UMaine women's hockey history, and the timing lines up with a Hockey East coaching carousel that keeps spinning toward the desert.

A New Bench Boss for the Black Bears

Maine's athletic department made it official on Monday, naming Alex Gettens the eighth head coach in the history of the school's women's ice hockey program. It's a homecoming of sorts. Gettens spent the 2017-18 season in Orono as an assistant working primarily with goaltenders before building a coaching résumé that ran through Vermont and, most recently, Colgate.

Athletic director Jude Killy pointed to that Maine history plus Gettens' feel for the Hockey East footprint as reasons the fit made sense, praising what she called his enthusiasm and plan for building the program going forward. For a league where familiarity with rosters, rinks and recruiting territory matters as much as anything, hiring someone who already knows the building is a low-risk way to try to keep momentum from stalling.

The Résumé That Got Him the Job

Gettens is a Concord, New Hampshire native who picked up his first coaching job in 2011 with St. Paul's School, guiding the girls' program to a New England prep title in 2015 before stepping into the college ranks. His path since then has been almost entirely Hockey East and ECAC adjacent: six seasons at Vermont, working up from assistant to associate head coach for the 2023-24 campaign, followed by two seasons as an assistant at Colgate.

That kind of ladder, prep school success into a decade of Division I assistant work at programs that compete directly with Maine, is the sort of track record athletic departments point to when they want a coach who can walk in and start recruiting immediately rather than spend a year learning the league from scratch.

Why the Job Opened Up in the First Place

The vacancy exists because Molly Engstrom, Maine's seventh head coach and a two-time U.S. Olympian, left in June to take an assistant coaching job with PWHL Detroit, one of two expansion franchises dropping the puck this fall. Engstrom had been in Orono since 2022 and was a runner-up for Hockey East Coach of the Year in her very first season, so her exit to the pro ranks is as much a credit to what she built as it is a loss for the Black Bears.

It's also part of a bigger pattern. Women's hockey keeps adding professional jobs faster than colleges can replace the coaches who leave for them, and Detroit's addition alongside PWHL Las Vegas this fall is exactly the kind of growth pushing that carousel. Every time a college staff loses someone to the pros, it's a small reminder of how much bigger the sport has gotten in just a couple of years.

What It Means for the Desert

None of this happens in Maine's rink alone. The same expansion wave that pulled Engstrom to Detroit is what stood up PWHL Las Vegas at T-Mobile Arena, and the players and coaches moving between college programs and the pro ranks are increasingly part of a pipeline that runs straight through Southern Nevada. A coaching change in Orono today can shape which programs are sending talent to the desert two or three years from now.

For fans on the Strip, the connective tissue is the sport itself. College hockey nights here keep pulling in bigger crowds precisely because storylines like this one, coaching moves, transfers, expansion drafts, don't stay contained to one campus or one league. Grab tickets to a game this season and you're watching the same sport that just reshuffled a Hockey East bench three time zones away.

Alex Gettens' Coaching Path, Stop by Stop

The new Maine coach didn't arrive overnight. Here's the route that led back to Orono.

1. St. Paul's School (2011-2015): Started his coaching career with the girls' program and helped it to a New England Prep School Championship in 2015.
2. University of Vermont, first stint: Earned his Bachelor of Science in community entrepreneurship there in 2017 before returning as a coach.
3. University of Maine assistant (2017-18): Worked primarily with goaltenders during a single season in Orono.
4. Vermont assistant coach (2018-2023): Spent five seasons on staff before a promotion.
5. Vermont associate head coach (2023-24): Stepped up to the second-highest role on the Catamounts' bench.
6. Colgate assistant coach (2024-2026): Spent two seasons on the Raiders' staff, his most recent stop before this hire.
7. Maine head coach (2026-present): Named the eighth head coach in program history on July 20, 2026.

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