When the Twin Cities were chosen as host for the 2026 World Junior Hockey Championship, St. Paul and Minneapolis checked every box the organizers needed to put on a top-notch show for fans from around the world. For USA Hockey, one of the boxes checked was an experienced coach on-site who already has a World Juniors gold medal on his resume. On Tuesday at Xcel Energy Center, site of the World Juniors finale in January 2026, Gophers coach Bob Motzko traded in his maroon and gold for familiar shades of red, white and blue as he was announced as the American squad’s head coach. It will be his third turn running the team comprising the nation’s top players under age 20. “I’m so grateful to USA Hockey to have this opportunity,” Motzko said during a news conference in the Xcel Energy Center lobby. “I’ve been able to coach in this tournament before and … it is truly the greatest tournament, outside of the Olympics, in all of hockey.” Motzko offered a memory of the 2017 tournament when the U.S. beat Canada in Montreal for the gold medal. The challenge prior to that was trying to stop a talented Russian teenager named Kirill Kaprizov. In addition to his seven seasons as the Gophers’ head coach, and his 13 seasons running the St. Cloud State program, Motzko was Team USA’s head coach for World Juniors in 2017 and 2018, winning gold and bronze medals, respectively. Retired legendary American goalie John Vanbiesbrouck, general manager of Team USA, joked that he needed to get Motzko in a headlock to convince him to take the job a third time. “We’ve been on a lot of foreign soil for this tournament in the past few years, and we haven’t hosted,” Vanbiesbrouck said. “We needed somebody with his experience, his leadership, and obviously it was a perfect fit.” During his time with the Gophers, Motzko has a 161-82-21 record, winning Big Ten titles in four of the past five seasons, and taking Minnesota to the Frozen Four twice. In addition to being the “home” team for World Juniors, which are being held in the Twin Cities for the first time since 1982, Team USA enters the tournament as the two-time defending gold medalists, with University of Denver coach David Carle leading the Americans to the title in 2024 in Gothenburg, Sweden, and earlier this year in Ottawa, Ontario. Motzko’s staff is expected to include Gophers assistant coach Steve Miller, who has worked with Team USA in eight of the past nine World Juniors, and has amassed a resume that includes a bronze medal, a silver medal and four gold medals. The process of picking the 25 or so players who will represent USA Hockey begins in earnest in late July when the World Junior Summer Showcase will be held over the course of a week at Ridder Arena in Minneapolis. The tournament will include teams from the USA, Canada, Finland and Sweden playing a series of scrimmages. Schedule and ticket information for those games will be available later this month. “Outside of pro hockey, it’s probably the most intense tournament and most highly publicized tournament,” said Minnesota Wild coach John Hynes, who coached Team USA at the 2008 World Juniors. “The opportunity to represent your country, to work with the best junior players, and then going against the best junior players around the world in a best-on-best tournament, it’s an awesome experience.” The 2026 World Juniors will begin in December with a series of pre-tournament games played in Mankato, Bemidji and two other sites yet to be named. The official tournament schedule is not available yet, but ticket packages are on sale at the mnsportsandevents.org website. The tournament’s round robin round begins on Dec. 26. In total, there will be 29 games played at Xcel and at 3M Arena at Mariucci in Minneapolis over the course of 10 days featuring teams from the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Finland, Slovakia, Switzerland, Germany, Czechia, Latvia and Denmark. The gold medal game is scheduled for Jan. 5, 2026, in St. Paul.