Forrest

Forrest

J.D. Forrest promoted after serving four seasons as assistant

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<p>Karmanos</p>

Karmanos

For the second straight summer, Wilkes-Barre/Scranton needed a new coach and a new general manager. And with so much uncertainty about the next season in the AHL, the Penguins have opted to stick with people they know.

Pittsburgh is staying in-house with its picks to lead Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, promoting assistant J.D. Forrest to head coach and having assistant general manager Jason Karmanos oversee the operation.

The Penguins announced the decisions on Friday, nine days after Mike Vellucci made the move up to Pittsburgh as an assistant coach. Vellucci served one season as Wilkes-Barre/Scranton’s head coach and general manager.

Forrest has been around much longer, serving as an assistant coach for the past four seasons under Vellucci and his predecessor, Clark Donatelli. He worked primarily with the Penguins’ defensemen and penalty kill unit.

The 39-year-old New York native previously served as a minor-league head coach in Austria before coming to the Penguins.

“I’m really excited,” Forrest said through the team. “These are difficult jobs to get. I want to thank the Penguins organization for having faith in me and giving me the opportunity to coach down here in Wilkes-Barre. It’s a great deal.

“We get a lot of important prospects, a lot of important players, and there’s a long tradition of that pipeline from Wilkes-Barre to Pittsburgh. My job is to keep that going. So I can’t wait to get started. I know most of the players and we’ve got a fantastic team. Whenever that time comes, I’m ready to get going.”

That acknowledgment of an uncertain timetable to resume playing is important. The AHL has previously announced a tentative start date of Dec. 4 for the 2020-21 season.

But the league, which was forced to postpone play in March and cancel the 2019-20 campaign in May, is dependent on fan-related revenue. And the eventual start of play could depend on the developing public health situation related to the coronavirus pandemic.

In the meantime, the Penguins were eager to fill the AHL vacancies with familiar faces. Karmanos, 46, has been in Pittsburgh’s front office in various roles since 2014 — and before that he spent years working with Pittsburgh general manager Jim Rutherford with the Carolina Hurricanes.

In choosing Forrest to replace Vellucci, the Penguins did not renew the contract of Wilkes-Barre/Scranton’s other assistant, Jarrod Skalde, who had the job for the last two seasons. The team announced it would wait until “closer to the start of the AHL season” to fill out Forrest’s staff.

Speaking through the team, both Rutherford and Karmanos threw their support behind Forrest.

“With the work that he has done over the years as an assistant, he interviewed for a couple of other head coaching jobs in the American Hockey League,” Rutherford said. “So he’s got the experience, and he’s ready.”

“J.D. has done an excellent job in his four seasons as an assistant coach in Wilkes-Barre, consistently demonstrating a strong ability to develop the young defensemen in our system,” Karmanos said. “His familiarity with the organization, our prospects and the style of hockey we want to play, together with his work ethic and team-first approach, gives us confidence that he will excel in his new role as head coach.”

Forrest was a defenseman in his playing days, serving as an alternate captain for his junior and senior seasons at Boston College. He played nine pro seasons, primarily in Europe, before starting his coaching career as an assistant with the U.S. National Team Development Program in 2014-15, the season the U-18 team won a gold medal at the World Junior Championship.

After a year leading Red Bull Salzburg’s U-20 team in Austria, Forrest returned to the U.S. to join Donatelli’s staff.

His work was appreciated enough that he was kept on board when Vellucci took over as head coach a few months after winning the Calder Cup as the boss of the Charlotte Checkers.

Though he worked only one year with Vellucci, Forrest said it made a major impact on his own coaching style.

“He’s fantastic at managing his staff and utilizing his assistants to the fullest,” Forrest said. “I think he realized he had some good people around him. We always seem to have great people in Wilkes-Barre. So I’m going to make sure that I take a page from his book on that and really let people flourish in their roles.”