BOULDER – Trace Jablin is the head coach of the men’s Division I ACHA hockey team at the University of Colorado. At just 30 years old, he leads one of the university’s largest club sports teams.
His journey until now has been quite unusual, which is quite usual for a hockey player.
“I played my first year of juniors in St. Louis, Missouri, [then I] found my way down to Texas, played juniors there for a season and a half,” Jablin said. “Then I was over in Massachusetts, so [I was] a little bit of a ‘suitcase’ traveling around.”
After bouncing around the juniors circus, he found himself at NCAA Division III Endicott College where he played for one season. But after losing his love for hockey, he wanted a full reset in a big college town.
“I had never been to the state of Colorado before, didn't even know what Boulder was,” Jablin said. “[I] looked up some pictures, looked up some videos and I was like, I want to go there.”
He took the summer off from hockey and actually felt he may not make the team during tryouts as he underestimated the talent level of ACHA DI. Despite the worry, Coach Ballard put him on the roster and Jablin was a new man.
“I really found my love for the game again,” he said. “And just being part of the team, not too caught up in my performance and just trying to win hockey games.”
Jablin’s reset had worked. In his first season with the Buffaloes, he put up 22 points in 36 games and was a +16. It was his best season of hockey since his second season with the St. Louis Jr. Blues in the NA3HL four years prior.
In his follow-up season, he improved even more. After scoring 30 points in 28 games with 18 goals, the Buffs made the ACHA playoffs with a 22-8 regular season record. They even won their first playoff game that year before being eliminated in the second round.
After making the USA University Hockey Team during his senior year, he hung up the skates and entered graduate school at CU.
“I studied sleep and circadian rhythms,” he said. “Specifically how light impacts the internal clock of preschool-age children.”
His studies brought him to many high-end projects both in and out of labs, such as setting up “cave days” with families where he and a team would black out all the windows of the family’s home for an entire day and monitor the children’s melatonin levels.
It was during these studies that he gained a mentor who would change him for life.
“My mentor, Dr. Monique LeBourgeois, I would have never known it at the time, but a lot of my coaching philosophy was inspired by her,” Jablin said.
LeBourgeois passed away in November 2023, and it was then that Jablin had fully realized her effect.
“It hit me really hard,” he said. “It was really sad and until then I still hadn’t realized how much she influences me and my beliefs about leadership and all that.”
LeBourgeois had seemingly set him up for a career on the scientific study path, getting Jablin a position at Colorado State University to work on a study about the sleep health of people experiencing difficult times.
After that, he became an educator on skates at a roller rink in Denver called Skate City, where he taught roller hockey to people of all ages.
“It was really good coaching experience for me,” he said. “It goes to show that it's all about having fun and it doesn't matter if you're 4 [years old], 70, [a] beginner, [or] college-level.”
Jablin had still been involved with the team as he knew a lot of the players and was always around, and that’s when the team decided to bring him on as an assistant. He took a year away from an official role with the team, but halfway through that season, it became apparent that he was a serious candidate for the head coach position.
“We kind of knew once our old coach – we mutually went our separate ways, we all had the same thought process of going to get Trace because we had already had him before, and knew what he was like,” said team captain and team president Marc Borghi.
Since Jablin had only graduated a few years prior, he related more closely to his players and was there in ways that older coaches may not have been able to.
“He knows what we’re going through as well,” said Borghi. “I feel like he’s definitely our coach, but he’s also there as a friend and a mentor as well.”
Going into year one as a head coach, Jablin spent the summer endlessly preparing. He admits he was not a talker, speech-giver, or anything of that nature in his playing days. So transitioning into that role was a tall task for him. But what he took to heart the most was the teachings of his aforementioned mentor, Dr. LeBourgeois.
“When you go into scientific research you have all these expectations and ideas about what it is and how it's supposed to be done,” Jablin said. “A lot of us were really nervous and you don't want to make a mistake because there's millions of dollars going into this research and you don't want to mess it up. And she had a really cool way of building confidence by putting pressure on you to do a good job, but at the same time allowing you to screw up and learn from it.”
This mindset of rather than avoiding adversity, but using it as a learning tool was the key point for Jablin’s first year as a coach. While not wanting to create their own problems, Jablin often told the team to invite challenges and face them head-on as opportunities to grow.
Adversity was a common theme of the Buffs’ 2023-2024 season. While regularly showing great displays of talent during their push for the playoffs, the Buffs disappointed in big ways at times.
With one series remaining before the ACHA playoff bids were announced, the Buffaloes had to face off against in-state rivals. The black and gold traveled to Fort Collins to take on the Colorado State Rams and dominated them by a score of 6-2. All they had to do from this point was win again on home ice and a bid to the ACHA playoffs was to be expected, given the way outside matches had fallen that weekend.
The Buffs had quickly pulled away, going up 4-0 in the first period. But before that period ended, the Rams had scored two quick goals to bring themselves back into the game. This eventually became a heart-wrenching 7-5 comeback victory for CSU to upset the Buffs and end all hopes of making the playoffs.
When prompted on what he felt was the worst moment of the season, Jablin took no time to answer.
“When the final ranking came out and we were No. 22,” he sighed. “This year it worked out with the auto-bid teams that you had to be top 21 to get in.”
To cope with troubles like this, Jablin’s recollection of how Dr. LeBourgeois instilled a family-like culture in the lab emanated beyond the players.
“Working with Trace is so much fun,” said team manager Abby Ettel. “He was a part of this program and knows what it’s like to be on the team but does a great job at coaching. He is super passionate and supportive of the sport and players and fosters such a good environment.”
Jablin is currently preparing for a second season as head coach, and all eyes are focused on next year.
“We're so hungry for next year,” Jablin said. “We started doing interviews with a lot of the players and [we ask], ‘What are you excited for next year?’ It's nationals. That's it. We want to go, just get us in, and we can beat anyone.”
The Colorado hockey squad just wrapped up their spring prospect camp and now looks ahead to tryouts in August. With the expected loss of multiple starters such as Matt Server, Adam Trunko, and Marc Borghi, the underclassman unit at CU will need to make a big and immediate impact if the team is to achieve its goal of making the playoffs.
“With the experience that’s coming back, both for [Jablin] and a lot of the guys that are coming back to play, I think that’s going to be super important,” said Borghi.
All of the action of Jablin’s sophomore coaching season will be broadcast on the Sko Buffs Sports YouTube channel.
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