QMJHL’s Cape Breton Eagles name Jon Goyens head coach

A member of the Daily Faceoff family is moving on for an exciting new opportunity. Jon Goyens, who brought more than 28 years of coaching experience to the video analysis he wrote for the DFO brand, has been hired as head coach of the QMJHL’s Cape Breton Eagles, the team announced Thursday. The hiring comes after Chadd Cassidy stepped down as head coach for family reasons earlier this month.

Goyens, 43, had a long and highly successful run coaching the Lac St-Louis Lions in the Quebec M18 league. He took over as head coach of the QMJHL’s Baie-Comeau Drakkar in 2019-20, guiding a rebuilding franchise to a 24-29-0-11 record during a turbulent campaign in which the league suspended the regular season in March 2020 and ended up cancelling the playoffs.

Now Goyens gets a chance to take over an Eagles franchise that has fallen on hard times and is in the earliest stages of a rebuild. During the cancelled 2019-20 season, the Drakkar were a dominant 40-20-3 when play stopped, playing .659 hockey, and were robbed of a chance to battle for a league title and Memorial Cup. They tumbled to a .359 points percentage in 2020-21 and opted out of the playoffs. This past season was the worst in franchise history as the Eagles posted a 14-47-4-3 record and .257 points percentage, finishing dead last in the Maritime Division, a whopping 30 points behind the closest team.

Now the Eagles get a new lease on life with Goyens, a cerebral coach with a background in video analysis and degree in applied sciences from Concordia University. He joins a team that also hired a new GM in Sylvain Couturier after GM Jacques Carriere stepped down following the 2021-22 season.

“This a great day for the organization to have a guy with Jon’s reputation coming in to work with our young players,” Couturier said in a statement from the team Thursday. “Jon brings a wealth of coaching experience and varying perspectives to break down and analyze the game. He has a passion for the sport and the drive to help develop his players to be the best they can be. His commitment to education and player development is one of his biggest strengths as a coach. The energy around the organization and in the community right now is very positive, and I feel that by bringing Jon on board, we are one step closer to our goal of winning a championship.”

The Eagles are still extremely early in their rebuild process but did secure a building block with defenseman Tomas Lavoie, selected earlier this month with the QMJHL Draft’s No. 1 pick.

“I’m grateful and extremely excited that general manager Sylvain Couturier and president Gerard Shaw have selected me to be the next head coach of the Cape Breton Eagles,” Goyens said in the team statement. “I am excited to move to Cape Breton and be part of the amazing community. The organization is ripe with young talent, and based on most recent action at the draft, I am very excited to get on the ice with our guys. I am committed to building a championship culture based on skill development and hard work ethic in everything we do on and off the ice.”