Assistant Ben Gordon
Golden Gopher hockey alumnus Ben Gordon begins year seven as an assistant coach for the Maroon and Gold, a role he took on starting in 2018.
Under Gordon’s guidance, Minnesota made a fourth-consecutive postseason trip and reached the NCAA Sioux Falls Regional Final in 2023-24. The Gophers were well represented on the Big Ten Conference postseason awards list as a league-best 10 different players were honored, including Jimmy Snuggerud, a first team selection.
It was a banner year for Minnesota in 2022-23 as the team won its second-straight Big Ten Conference regular season title and earned a trip to the NCAA Championship game. The Gophers were the highest-scoring offense in the nation, averaging 4.2 goals per game, and had a pair of 50-point freshmen in Logan Cooley and Snuggerud leading the charge. Cooley and Matthew Knies were named Hobey Baker Hat Trick Finalists, while Brock Faber joined the pair as All-American First Team selections, the second time in program history with three first-team honorees.
During the 2021-22 campaign, Gordon and the Gophers won the B1G regular season championship and advanced to the NCAA Frozen Four for the first time since 2014. Minnesota made a late-season surge winning 11 of their final 13 games, including wins over Massachusetts and Western Michigan in the NCAA Northeast Regional.
The Gophers captured the B1G tournament title and returned to the NCAA Tournament in 2020-21, ending a four-year drought, while the program won its first NCAA game since 2014 to earn an appearance in the NCAA West Regional Final.
A native of International Falls, Minn., Gordon returned to Minnesota following the 2017-18 season where he served as the associate head coach for the Chicago Steel in the United States Hockey League (USHL). He previously served on the Gophers staff in 2016-17 as director of hockey operations when the Maroon and Gold claimed the 2017 Big Ten regular-season championship after helping the Tri-City Storm capture the 2016 USHL Clark Cup as an assistant coach. Gordon’s first foray into coaching came during the 2014-15 season as an assistant coach and later as interim head coach at St. Scholastica in Duluth.
Gordon was a four-year letter winner with the Gophers from 2004-2008 and recorded 98 points (39 goals, 59 assists) in 148 career games. The forward helped Minnesota to back-to-back regular season conference titles in 2006 and 2007 while adding a conference playoff title in 2007. Gordon was named the team’s Dr. V. George Nagobads Unsung Hero in 2006. Following his college career, he played in 362 professional games with 380 points over six seasons before transitioning to coaching.