Former University of North Dakota head coach Brad Berry is set to be named head coach of the USHL’s Youngstown Phantoms, reports Brad Elliott Schlossman of the Grand Forks Herald. The Phantoms’ previous head coach, Ryan Ward, is expected to join Harvard University as an assistant coach, creating a vacancy for the junior club. The team is set to fill that vacancy with someone who was recently one of the top coaches in college hockey.
Berry, 61, coached North Dakota from 2015-16 through 2024-25. During that tenure, he was named his conference’s coach of the year four times, the NCAA’s coach of the year once. He won one NCAA national championship, four conference regular season titles, and one conference playoff title. While Berry has no previous coaching experience in junior hockey, he was previously an assistant coach at both the AHL and NHL levels.
Other notes from around the hockey world:
- Peter Cehlarik, a former Boston Bruins depth forward, has signed a two-year contract with the Växjö Lakers of the SHL. The 30-year-old got into 40 NHL games from 2016 to 2020, and has since spent the last six years in Europe playing in the KHL, Swiss National League, and SHL. The Olympic Bronze Medalist is coming off of a nearly four-year run with Sweden’s Leksands IF, and scored 24 points in 45 SHL games last season as Leksands suffered relegation to the country’s second-tier league, HockeyAllsvenskan.
- Former Los Angeles Kings forward Austin Wagner has signed a one-year contract with the Frankfurt Lions of Germany’s DEL, according to a team announcement. The 29-year-old has played in 178 career NHL games, but has none since 2022-23. Wagner, who scored a career-high 12 goals for the Kings during the 2018-19 season, has spent the last three seasons playing for three different pro clubs. He spent 2023-24 in the SHL with IK Oskarshamn, where he scored 13 points in 34 games and was the SHL’s most penalized player. He spent 2024-25 back in the AHL with the Chicago Wolves, and he played for the KHL’s Shanghai Dragons in 2025-26. Now, he’ll test his luck playing in Germany’s top pro league for the first time.