Mind Set | written by: Darien MagazineCT
Photo courtesy the Darien Athletic Foundation
WINNING. WHO DOESN’T LIKE THAT? But it can carry an unintended weight, especially for our youth.
So how do you lighten that load, and still inspire players to come together with grit, resilience and focus to do their best, especially when the heat is on? In this Q&A with legendary girls hockey coach Jamie Tropsa, we collect some insight into the philosophy behind his success over 14 years as head coach of Darien High School (DHS) Girls Hockey, where he won eight FCIAC and seven state championships before turning over leadership of the team to Coach Gray Weicker following an undefeated 2025 season. Note: Jamie continues to coach a U10 girls team for Ice Cats Connecticut and run his business, Blue Line Sports.
Q: How did you build winning teams?
Coach: They needed to buy into a program and work hard for each other for a common goal. That’s the biggest thing. Because if they don’t do that, the team never really comes together as a unit and it’s very hard to win.
Q: How did you get your teams to come together?
Coach: Usually by making sure every time they were together, they had some kind of fun rather than just beating the heck out of them all the time, because that doesn’t work.
Q: How did you maintain an all-for-one spirit with players of different abilities? Not everyone is the superstar scoring machine.
Coach: We never talked about stats and we made sure everyone had ice time. We also always tried to make sure they all knew that they were part of the program. There are tons of ways to contribute. It doesn’t just have to be the person scoring the goals. We had a lot of kids that would be our biggest cheerleaders on the bench. And, we’d tell them, ‘Look, we’re going to get you in there. You’re going to get your time, but you’ve got to keep working hard at practice.’ If they weren’t the strongest players, we’d tell them, ‘You’ve got to keep pushing everybody because that’s the only way we are going to get better. You’re going to get better, (your teammate) is going to get better.’ And then we got them in games. You’re not going to win with one player. You need a group to do that.
Q: What makes a good team?
Coach: You need kids who want to become a team, kids that want to work hard, kids that want to get along with each other. You don’t have to love the person you’re sitting next to in the locker room. But you have to like that person enough to want to work hard for her, and she’s got to want to work hard for you for that common goal. It’s not just a selfishness that ‘I’m better than you.’ That’s not what it should be about. You need that culture that gets them believing right from the beginning that this isn’t about me anymore, this is about us. Even when we’d get scored on, I always said, ‘Hey, there were six of us out there. They didn’t score on one of us, they scored on six of us.’ So, when we scored a goal, the same thing was true too. Six of us scored a goal, not just one.
Q: Hockey is intense, obviously. Still, how important is it to relax?
Coach: If you’re not relaxed, you’re not going to perform at your best level.
Q: How did you get your players to relax?
Coach: In hockey, you have to just play. When you feel it, you have to go for it. There are other people that are going to cover for you. You can’t sit there second-guessing yourself because then it’s too late. We teach them, go for it and we’ll live with the consequences. We will live with the consequences. Not just you, we will. When you put too much pressure on yourself to execute, sometimes you lose that natural instinct of just doing.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about the importance of resilience?
Coach: In ice hockey, so many things go wrong when you’re on the ice. You’re not playing for those things that go wrong. You’re trying to fight through all those things for the thing that goes right. So many times, you’re going to make a bad pass. You’re going to shoot wide or you’re going to go in on a breakaway that could win the game and you’re not going to make it. You have to manage it. You can’t just throw in the towel. You’re going to learn to deal with stuff like that and make yourself stronger. We talked to the players about this all the time. That’s why you should play athletics. They teach you to deal with stuff life’s going to throw your way.
Q: How did you get the kids back on track after a loss?
Coach: After a bad loss, you have to forget it. You have to move on, and you have to push yourself a little harder. You can’t sit there and dwell on it. You’re just going to drive yourself nuts. That’s something I preach constantly. It’s like if you have a bad shift, that’s it. It’s over. Forget about it. You can’t sit there and just let it keep beating you up. You have to move on. Your next shift is going to be your best one.
Q: What did you hope the girls would get from playing for you?
Coach: I would hope they realize that if they want to work hard, they can succeed. And realize, too, that if they’re going to be lazy, they’re going to pay the price for that.
Q: Okay, final question: How do you define success?
Coach: Everybody wants to win every game but that is not how I would define it. I don’t think that’s what it should be about. It’s that you’ve got 25 kids that had a great time, felt like they got better, felt like they all contributed, and had a lot of fun. At the end of the day, if you’re not having fun with it, you’re never going to be as good as you probably could be. When you have fun, you win.
