TCS Live is heading back to Canada from August 6-8, 2026, landing in Edmonton, Alberta, alongside the Hlinka Gretzky Cup. If you look at this year’s speaker list, three names jump out for a shared reason: they all came up through the Western Hockey League before their careers took them to the NHL, AHL, and beyond.
Jamie Kompon, Brennan Sonne, and Glen Gulutzan all spent time in the WHL long before TCS Live in Edmonton. For Gulutzan in particular, this summer he returns to a rink where he spent years running a power play with one of the best WHLers to ever do it – Leon Draisaitl.
Here’s a look at what each of them is bringing to the conference.
That lens now shapes how he coaches.
Jamie Kompon: from Portland to 4 Stanley Cups
Before he had four Stanley Cup rings, Jamie Kompon was running a bench in Portland. He was GM and Head Coach of the Winterhawks from 2014 to 2016 and took the team to a Western Conference Final. From there his career kept climbing: assistant coaching jobs with the LA Kings, Chicago Blackhawks, and Winnipeg Jets, and now with the Florida Panthers, where he’s been part of back-to-back championships in 2024 and 2025. Four cups with three different franchises (LA 2011-12 & Chicago 2012-13) is a club almost nobody gets into.
At TCS Live, Kompon is on the main stage on August 7th with “Building the Right Breakout for Your Team,” a session for coaches who want to sharpen how their team moves the puck out of trouble.
Brennan Sonne: a WHL title, now coaching in the AHL
Brennan Sonne’s time in Saskatoon speaks for itself. He took over as the Blades’ Head Coach in 2021, was named WHL Coach of the Year for the East Division in 2022-23, and won the Scotty Munro Memorial Trophy as league champions the year after that. In 2024 he moved on to the Coachella Valley Firebirds, the Seattle Kraken’s AHL club, as an Assistant Coach. It’s the kind of move that shows how much pro organizations value what WHL coaches learn on the job.
His TCS Live session, “Defining Compete: The Scorecard Behind a Competitive Culture,” is set for August 8th. It’s less about talking compete level and more about how he actually measures and builds it with a group.
Glen Gulutzan: a WHL alum now leading an NHL bench
Talk about a tour of duty in the dub! Gulutzan’s WHL story goes back further, as a player with Moose Jaw, Brandon, and Saskatoon in the late 1980s and early 90s, well before coaching became a reality. But since then he’s been a Head Coach in Dallas (twice), with fourteen years between the two stints, plus a head coaching run in Calgary and assistant jobs in Vancouver and Edmonton. That stretch with the Oilers included back-to-back Stanley Cup Final appearances in 2024 and 2025. He’s back in Dallas now, hired as Head Coach in the summer of 2025.
Instead of a breakout session during TCS Live, Gulutzan is sitting down with TCS founder Aaron Wilbur for a live recording of the Glass and Out Podcast on August 8th. Expect a very relaxed, conversational hour of in-depth hockey talk.
What it says about the league
Three coaches, three very different paths, three different levels of the game right now. But they all started in the same place. For TCS Live, a conference built around helping coaches improve, it’s a good reminder of how much NHL and AHL coaching talent gets its start in WHL rinks first.
