MUSKEGON – Considering his bloodline, it’s no surprise that James Ryan went into coaching.

But he’s not coaching the sport you might expect him to coach, and he entered the profession at an unusually young age, following a scary bout with cancer during his high school years.

Ryan, a second-year assistant coach with the Muskegon Lumberjacks, is the grandson of Buddy Ryan, who gained great fame as the innovative defensive coordinator of the 1986 Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears, led by legendary head coach Mike Ditka.

He’s also the nephew of former New York Jets and Buffalo Bills head coach Rex Ryan, current Baltimore Ravens assistant coach Rob Ryan, and the cousin of current Detroit Lions assistant wide receivers coach Seth Ryan.

Given those kind of family roots, how in the world did he end up in hockey?

Ryan’s father was Buddy Ryan’s oldest son, and he was the only one of the children who listened to Buddy’s warnings about not becoming a football coach. Ryan’s dad went on to play a little hockey at the University of Minnesota, and later spent some time broadcasting Golden Gopher games.

So Ryan picked up his dad’s interest in hockey, and left football to the rest of the family.

As a young teen Ryan was a promising young player on a high-level traveling youth hockey team, before a rare form of adolescent cancer sidetracked his life.

After several long years of chemotherapy and radiation treatments, Ryan returned to hockey, playing for a high school team in his hometown of St. Louis, then decided to follow the family tradition and go into coaching.

He gained admission to Miami University in Ohio, which has a great NCAA hockey program, and became an undergraduate assistant with the team for four years.

After that experience, he was able to secure a coaching job at the elite Academy of Hockey in Buffalo, New York, which operates the Buffalo Junior Sabres program.

That great opportunity finally ended due to COVID cutbacks, and he found himself without a job in the hockey world, until he came into contact with the Lumberjacks and was hired by head coach Mike Hamilton.

“I did a few phone interviews with Coach Hamilton, they went well, and I got lucky and got the job,” said Ryan, 28.

Buddy Ryan – a quiet old guy?

Buddy Ryan was the mastermind of the super-stingy Chicago Bears “46” defense that dominated the league and led the Windy City squad to the NFL championship in Super Bowl XX, played in January of 1986.

Before that, he was an assistant defensive coach for the Joe Namath-led New York Jets team that stunned the old Baltimore Colts and won Super Bowl III in 1969. Later he was the defensive line coach for the Minnesota Vikings, and developed the team’s famous “Purple People Eaters” line that helped the team reach the Super Bowl in 1977.

After his stint with the Bears, Buddy Ryan went on to serve as head coach with the Philadelphia Eagles and Arizona Cardinals, and as defensive coordinator for the old Houston Oilers. He passed away in 2016.

While he was certainly successful, Buddy Ryan was also noted for being abrasive and confrontational. Among other things, he publicly feuded with Ditka when they worked together with the Bears, and once had a sideline altercation with the offensive coordinator when he was with the Oilers.

But the grandpa that James Ryan knew as a youngster was nothing like that.

“The Buddy Ryan I knew was the quiet old guy who owned a farm in Kentucky and let me play with the dogs and the horses,” Ryan said.

Ryan is actually the namesake of his grandfather. Buddy Ryan’s birth name was James David Ryan, and he named his oldest son James David Ryan, Jr.. Ryan, in turn, inherited that name from his dad, who was commonly referred to as Jim.

“I am the only James in the family who went by the name of James,” Ryan said.

Ryan’s father was the sports rebel of the family. While his twin younger brothers Rex and Rob levitated toward football like their dad, he decided to pursue hockey.

“He was an idiot – he decided to be the one who studied and got good grades in school,” Ryan said jokingly about his father. “He listened to Buddy when he told his sons not to go into coaching. There was not a lot of money in it at the time, and Buddy knew what a grind it was.”

Ryan’s father went to the University of Minnesota, where he was a walk-on goalie with the Golden Gophers hockey team. He was cut about six weeks into that experience by the head coach at the time, Herb Brooks – the same Herb Brooks who coached the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” U.S. Olympic team.

“He did some broadcasting after that, and was calling a Gophers game when he was walking across a catwalk (in the arena) and fell through it about 40 feet into the stands, and landed a few rows behind the coaches,” Ryan said. “I think he broke every damned bone in his body.”

Ryan’s dad earned his undergraduate degree from Minnesota and an MBA from Notre Dame, then ended up working for the National Hockey League marketing office in New York. That’s where he met Ryan’s mother, and they married and eventually moved to St. Louis, where Jim Ryan eventually became a sports agent and finally an attorney.

Ryan traces his own interest in hockey back to his very early years, when he attended a St. Louis Blues game with his father.

“I was three or four when we went to that Blues game, and apparently I told my dad I wanted to be Chris Pronger,” Ryan said. “A couple of days later I was skating. Hockey has been my first love as long as I can remember.”

Ryan was a promising young player on a youth traveling team when he was 12 or 13, and his coach at the time was Rob Hutson, a former pro who played for the old Muskegon Fury. Hutson’s son is Quinn Hutson, who is currently in his second year with the Lumberjacks.

“I’ve known Quinn since he was two or three,” Ryan said. “Coach Hutson had this RV that we would travel to games in on the weekends, so it would be me and two or three teammates in the back playing PlayStation 2, and we had three-year-old Quinn back there with us and we taught him how to say cuss words.”

A  battle with cancer, then on to coaching

Ryan’s life was changed forever when he was diagnosed with alveolar rhabdomyosarconoma just a few weeks into his freshman year of high school.

It’s a very rare form of cancer that develops in the skull and typically afflicts adolescents.

“It felt like something was pushing on my eye, and we went to seven different eye doctors,” Ryan said. “Luckily they caught in in Stage 1. I ended up doing 48 straight weeks of chemotherapy and a month and a half of radiation every day.

“I could barely skate after that for a while. Chemotherapy is really just poison. It kills all the bad stuff, but it also kills all the good stuff, so all the muscle and muscle memory and quick-twitch reflexes and endurance I had built up over years, through hours and hours of practice and off-ice workouts, were drained from my body.”

It was nearly two years before Ryan returned to organized hockey. He played on a lower level sub-varsity team at his high school,  but said it was one of the most enjoyable seasons of his life.

“I ended up leading the team in goals,” he said. “I didn’t have the strength or speed to skate very hard, but one thing I did a lot when I couldn’t play was stick-handle. I would take a golf ball and stick-handle around the basement in my parents’ house for hours, with our golden lab or black retriever chasing me. So when I played again I had the best hands and best shot, and was one of the smartest players on the team.”

As a younger kid, Ryan had dreamed of someday playing hockey in the NHL, and it was hard for him to let that go. Yet he realized that his bout with cancer had taken a permanent toll on his body,  and playing high-level hockey was not in his future.

But as everyone knows, the Ryans make good coaches, and that’s the alternate route he chose.

He had more than his share of early exposure to the coaching world. He was a training camp ball boy for the New York Jets in 2009 and 2010, while his uncle Rex Ryan was the head coach. Those were fun years to be around the Jets, when Mark Sanchez was their quarterback and they made it to the AFC title game two years in a row.

“I didn’t have to do the unfun parts of being a ball boy, like doing the laundry,” he said. “All I had to do was run around the field and help out.”

Ryan said his Uncle Rex created a special kind of fun and scary drill, just for the ball boys.

Rex was the quarterback, the ball boys were the running backs and wide receivers, and they would line up against the Jets’ first-team defense. Rex would throw them the ball and they had to try to catch it while being covered by NFL defensive backs.

“Rex would throw the passes deep while we just tried not to get murdered by NFL players – it was awesome!” Ryan said.

One of the other ball boys was his cousin Seth Ryan, Rex’s son, who was 13 or 14 at the time. One day Seth was being covered by Darrelle Revis, one of the greatest cornerbacks to ever play the game, and actually managed to catch a pass.

“He was running a slant against Revis, who was very competitive,” Ryan said. “He didn’t care if it was a walk-through drill against the ball boys or if you were Randy Moss, he wasn’t going to let you catch the ball. But their feet got tangled, my cousin fell to the ground, Revis fell as well, the ball went up in the air and came down right on my cousin’s chest, and he hung on and caught it! It was the greatest catch anybody ever made against Darrelle Revis!”

Ryan was also exposed to other high-level coaches after his bout with cancer, when the Make A Wish Foundation arranged to have him meet with the St. Louis Blues coaching staff.

“They were giving me advice and telling me things, and the one thing that stuck out was when one of them said, ‘The next best thing to playing is coaching.’ That’s all I needed to hear.”

A great experience in Buffalo, ruined by COVID

After graduating from high school, Ryan searched for a college with a credible hockey program, where he hoped to get in with the team and start learning coaching skills. He found what he was looking for at Miami of Ohio.

“It was an unbelievable school – it had 16,000 students, a beautiful campus, very good academics, and the No. 1 ranked hockey team in the nation,” Ryan said.

Ryan managed to land a job as an undergraduate assistant with the team, shooting video and taking stats for four years.

“It wasn’t the sexiest job in the world, but I enjoyed it,” he said.

After earning his degree, Ryan was lucky enough to land a job with the Academy of Hockey in Buffalo, New York, which directed the Buffalo Junior Sabres program and worked with young players of all ages as they developed their skills.

He admits that he used family connections to become an assistant coach in the elite junior program.

“The Buffalo Bills ended up hiring my uncle to be head coach, and the owner of the Bills also owned the Buffalo Sabres and the Academy of Hockey,” he said. “My Uncle Rex heard about the academy, knew I was looking for a job, and told them ‘I’ve got someone for you.’

“Long story short, they took a chance on me, even though I didn’t have much real coaching experience, and I did everything.”

Over the next five years Ryan worked with players ranging in age from 8 to 18 and, and learned a ton about coaching the game and younger athletes. Along the way he met and worked with Owen Mehlenbacher, who played for the Junior Sabres and is now a second-year forward with the Lumberjacks.

“I was coaching every single day and learning high-end details from a lot of people who were really good at what they do,” he said.

Unfortunately Ryan’s world took a hit in the spring of 2020, about the time that the COVID pandemic descended on the nation and the world.

His father died in March of that year, and about a month later he was laid off from the Hockey Academy, which took a big financial hit from the pandemic, just like most other businesses.

“I reached out to an agent that a family member knew, and he listened to my story,” Ryan said. “It was about a month after my dad passed, and I was in a pretty tough spot mentally. He reached out to some teams for me, and landed on Muskegon.”

Ryan predicts a Lumberjacks bounce-back

Ryan said he’s very fond of Muskegon and the Lumberjacks organization, working with Coach Hamilton, associate head coach Cody Chupp and fellow assistant coach CJ Kusch.

One of the best parts of the job is getting to work with the most coachable age group in junior hockey – elite 16-20 year-olds who are highly motivated and eager to learn and advance in the hockey world.

“I love it,” he said. “They are a combination of young but high end, and extremely hungry. I don’t think I’ve met a kid at this level who I felt like I had to pull my teeth out to get them to work on something. They are very motivated and want to get better. It’s awesome. These are the kind of players I want to work with.”

So what is the trick to coaching very talented hockey players who also happen to be very young?

“Just being clear and concise with your message,” he said. “You have to be positive and energetic, but if there is one detail you want to make sure they get, you have to hammer that home and make sure they clearly understand, or the work you do with them is irrelevant.

“You try to teach them to take what they learn and apply it to game situations – now how would you utilize this? You have to make sure you’re not going through drills with them just to do drills.”

Ryan’s first season with the Lumberjacks was 2020-21, which was a strange but successful year for the team.

Very few fans were allowed into the games for most of the season, due to strict COVID restrictions, so Mercy Health Arena was eerily quiet when the Lumberjacks competed.

But the team was very good, finishing second behind Chicago in the USHL’s Eastern Conference and advancing to the Eastern Conference finals in the playoffs.

This season has started out as more of a challenge for the coaching staff. The team has a lot of new and younger players and is off to a rough start with a 2-7-3 record.

But Ryan knows young talent when he sees it, and he’s convinced the Jacks will be playing much better in the near future.

“I think you’re going to see a lot more consistent play coming,” he said. “We had three or four games that we lost, and if you played those same games 100 times, we would have won them 99 times. Every little mistake we made we paid for, particularly in the first five or six games.

“It was never just one thing – it wasn’t just our goaltending, it wasn’t just our defense or forwards, it was a little bit of everything each game. We just had some unfortunate bounces. The law of averages is a real thing, and we’re going to start winning a lot of hockey games.

“I don’t think anybody in the organization thinks we don’t have enough talent. We just have to get everyone pulling in the right direction and fix a couple of things. It’s a great group of kids, and they deserve better results than what they’ve gotten so far.”