Former Wild Goaltender Jensen Helping NAIT Women Achieve Goals of Their Own
EDMONTON, Alberta – As a junior hockey player, Brendan Jensen’s task was to stop goals from being achieved. 16 years later, his focus has changed to helping goals of a different kind come true.
Jensen grew up in El Granada, California, on the Pacific coast between San Francisco and San Jose – he first skated shortly after his sixth birthday, but his start in hockey came earlier than perhaps any other player who has put on a Wild uniform. His first exposure to the sport came as a newborn, attending a San Jose Sharks game at the Cow Palace in nearby Daly City, a building that last hosted a National Hockey League game in 1993.
His parents instilled plenty of competitive spirit, Midwestern grit, and his love for hockey – his dad, Lars, served as the head wrestling coach at San Francisco State University for 33 years, leading the program to the school’s only NCAA Division II team championship in 1997. His mom, Chanda, took care of the hockey and the Midwestern roots, growing up on a farm and attending games in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Kalamazoo, Michigan.
“My mom was the driving influence there,” said Jensen. “She went to Western Michigan, and obviously went to a few hockey games there. When the Sharks came around, my dad was involved in a pretty physical contact sport – they went a few times, and that kind of spurred it when I was a little guy. I went to my first wrestling meet when I was a month old, and I guess I went to my first Sharks game when I was two weeks old. Being a Sharks fan and growing up in that environment of California hockey – and that Gretzky era, too – definitely helped.”
After climbing through the Bay Area ranks, the Western Hockey League’s Vancouver Giants spotted the young goaltender and selected him with their sixth-round pick in the league’s 2008 Bantam Draft. After spending one more year at the AAA level with the Los Angeles Selects, he moved full-time into juniors, splitting his first season between the Giants and Wenatchee. Jensen won his first three starts and shut out the Prince George Cougars for the last of those wins, but those three wins were followed by three losses, and a reassignment to Wenatchee. At just 16 years old, he could not be placed with a Canadian team, and the move to the Wild allowed him to play for an American team close enough for his WHL club to keep tabs on him.
The move was a good one for all involved – for Wenatchee, bringing in Jensen represented a natural swap after eventual NHL draft pick Mac Carruth moved on to join the WHL’s Portland Winterhawks the previous offseason. Jensen joined the North American Hockey League club during a trip to Alaska just before Thanksgiving, and promptly earned an overtime win in his first start. Two weeks later, he stopped 22 shots in shutting out the St. Louis Bandits, who had edged the Wild for a national championship the previous season.
He would win six of his first seven starts in Wenatchee, and nabbed wins in three of four appearances in the Robertson Cup playoffs, to go with a sterling 1.63 goals-against average and .942 save percentage. The team would win the NAHL’s regular-season championship before winning the West Division playoff title, earning its way into the Robertson Cup championship tournament despite earning an automatic bid by hosting the tournament.
“That division was pretty interesting,” said Jensen. “I remember an extended road trip where we played the three teams in Alaska, and then went down to Texas and played in the same month. Being a 16-year-old in school, that was interesting to navigate. I have fond memories of going to school there, and with the community and fan base, almost every night it felt like it was a sellout. It was a neat environment to play in as a 16-year-old.”
Vancouver happily brought Jensen back the following season, where he added eight more wins to his total. He tacked on his final two WHL wins early in 2011-12 with the Giants before winning 16 games for the Alberta Junior Hockey League’s Spruce Grove Saints and helping them reach the semifinals that spring. The 2012-13 season was even better, winning 23 games for the United States Hockey League’s Fargo Force. That group proved nearly impossible to put away in the Clark Cup playoffs, winning a pair of five-game victories against the Waterloo Black Hawks and Sioux Falls Stampede before being dispatched in three straight by a Dubuque Fighting Saints team that featured three future NHL players.
“That was another special group,” said Jensen. “We won a Game 5 against Waterloo, a really talented team with a couple of future NHLers like us in Fargo. We played in Sioux Falls before the new arena, which was like playing in a barn – it was pretty tight. It felt like if they shot it from the other blue line, it would be a pretty good scoring chance.”
After winning six games with Fargo to round out his junior career, Jensen battled simply to get ice time the following two seasons, stuck behind talented goaltenders at both the University of Manitoba and Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. After playing just three games for NAIT during the program’s perfect run to the 2016 Alberta Collegiate Athletic Conference crown, he nearly won them another title the following year, winning 18 games on the way to an ACAC Player of the Year honor and a return to the conference final.
Jensen took a one-year sabbatical from college hockey, earning a cup of coffee in the pros with the Southern Professional Hockey League’s Evansville Thunderbolts. It was a brief one, playing only in a pair of early-season games, but he says his exposure to pro hockey set him up well for the second half of his collegiate career.
“I think that’s everybody’s dream, to play professional hockey,” said Jensen. “I didn’t play nearly well enough there, but I think it’s a cool experience if anybody can try to play pro. It’s another good learning experience. I enjoyed my time – I was there in a couple of different stints, being there in training camp and getting cut, and then coming back and playing right away, and then soaking in the experience before getting cut again. It made me realize that I needed to get my degree, so that’s one of the reasons I came back to NAIT to get my final two years, but I definitely got some growth from it too.”
While he worked on getting his degree, he also set to work on frustrating the ACAC’s best players – his 2.08 goals-against average and .931 save percentage in 2018-19 both ranked second in the ACAC, as did his 1.90 goals-against average and .933 save percentage the following year.
Before wrapping up his playing career, Jensen caught the coaching bug as well, helping the St. Albert Flyers win Alberta’s minor midget provincial title in 2019. His varied coaching experiences – an assistant at West Fargo High School in North Dakota, state and district evaluation camps for USA Hockey, Pure Goaltending camps and assisting the NAIT women during their COVID season, just to name a few – helped him to see the game in a lot of different ways and prepared him for his next opportunity with the Ooks.
“To be able to understand [the game] at the youth level, and to be able to teach small skills that especially at this level, I might take for granted as a head coach is huge,” said Jensen. “We still run a pretty big hockey school here, started by Perry Pearn back in the day. We usually have 250 to 275 young kids right before we get camp started. Over the course of three weeks. Those developmental tools are on full display there, and then getting involved at West Fargo High School and working all the way up there has really helped. Then again, in St. Albert before I got the assistant’s job here, getting my feet wet as a coach and learning those ropes at the U16 AAA level that they used to have up here in Alberta, has helped me.”
His next opportunity with the Ooks is also his current opportunity, as he gets set to begin his sixth season as NAIT’s head women’s coach. He takes a 76-34 record out of his first five years with the program, finishing in the conference’s top three in all five seasons, and credits a strong support structure and good mentors at NAIT for helping him ease into his role as the program’s head coach.
The Ooks’ goaltenders in particular have benefited from Jensen’s experience at their position – second-year netminder Jorja Imrie finished second in the ACAC with a .935 save percentage this past year, splitting time with third-year goaltender Ella Howard, who represented Great Britain in the country’s bid to qualify for the 2026 Olympics in Italy.
The women’s game itself is enjoying a surge in popularity following the Milan Olympics and the Professional Women’s Hockey League’s third season – more than 7.7 million Americans watched the United States defeat Canada in overtime for the Olympic gold medal, while the PWHL expanded from eight teams to 12 for the upcoming season amid record-breaking attendance figures leaguewide. Jensen and his fellow coaches are especially excited for the ongoing growth of the women’s game, knowing that growth also means more opportunities for the women they’ve coached to showcase their skills.
“It’s awesome to see the investment, and to see women’s hockey really take off,” said Jensen. “I’ve been to a couple of those (PWHL) Takeover Tour games here in Edmonton, and seeing a sold-out Rogers Place is unbelievable. The city’s been really dying for a team to come up here, and to see it grow and expand as rapidly as it has is definitely much-needed. To see it grow and expand as rapidly as it has, it’s definitely much-needed. It leads to further opportunities for the student-athletes that I coach every day, and for my coaching staff. Those expanded opportunities are huge, and it’s been a long time coming.”
