FRISCO, Texas (AP) — The Dallas Stars have hired Glen Gulutzan as their head coach 12 years after he was fired from his first stint with them by the general manager who is still there.
GM Jim Nill, who in 2013 had been with the Stars for only two weeks when he decided not to retain Gulutzan, said Tuesday that the coach is returning to the organization. He replaces Pete DeBoer, who was fired after all three of his seasons with Dallas ended in the Western Conference final.
“He's a young man that’s paid his dues and worked his way up. He’s done it the right way,” Nill said. “He’s probably the first one to admit that it was probably too soon here. ... But he was willing to go backward and make himself who he is today, and we think that’s the right coach for the Dallas Stars.”
Gulutzan, who turns 54 in August, has spent the past seven seasons as an assistant with the Edmonton Oilers, including the past two that ended with trips to the Stanley Cup Final. This is Gulutzan’s third job in charge of an NHL team after leading the Stars from 2011-13, and the Calgary Flames from 2016-18.
“My family and I are excited to come back to Texas where I started my NHL coaching journey more than a decade ago,” Gulutzan said in a statement. “Jim and his staff have built a roster that is one of the most talented and deepest in the entire league. The right pieces are in place to compete for the Stanley Cup on a yearly basis.”
Nill said Gulutzan is one of the most respected coaches in the NHL, whose extensive experience as a head coach and assistant make him able to innovate and adapt to the modern game while building relationships with players.
“Glen has worked with some of the best players in the world and continually found ways to maximize their skill sets to contribute to team success," Nill said. "We have full confidence that he is the right person to elevate our team to the next level.”
The Stars announced the hiring of Gulutzan minutes after the league’s annual free agency signing period opened. They will formally reintroduce him Wednesday at their home arena.
In free agency Tuesday, forward Radek Faksa returned to Dallas on a $6 million, three-year contract after one season in St. Louis. The Stars also signed forward Colin Blackwell to a $1.55 million, two-year deal to stay after joining them on a one-year deal as a free agent last summer.
The 31-year-old Faksa was the 13th overall draft pick by the Stars in 2012. He played his first nine NHL seasons with them (708 regular-season games and 86 playoff games) before a four-team trade that sent him to the Blues.
Gulutzan was 64-57-9 in his two seasons that came at the end of the Stars’ franchise-long stretch of five consecutive seasons missing the playoffs. He was 82-68-14 in his two seasons coaching the Flames, who were swept by Anaheim in their only playoff appearance with him in 2017.
This is Nill's sixth head coach in Dallas, where he is going into his 13th season.
Lindy Ruff was the first Dallas coach hired by Nill, who made two playoff appearances in four years before Ken Hitchcock returned for one season with the Stars, the team he led to its only Stanley Cup title in 1999 and was Western Conference champions again the next season.
Hitchcock, the only other head coach with more than one stint with Dallas, was followed by Jim Montgomery, Rick Bowness and DeBoer.
Assistant coach Alain Nasreddine and goaltending coach Jeff Reese are staying on the Stars staff. The club also named Neil Graham as an assistant after 10 seasons as a head coach in their organization, the past six for the Texas in the American Hockey League after four with Idaho in the ECHL.
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FILE - Dallas Stars head coach Glen Gulutzan, center, during the first period of an NHL Hockey game against the St. Louis Blues, April 7, 2012, in Dallas. (AP Photo/Brandon Wade, file)
FILE - Calgary Flames coach Glen Gulutzan watches during the team's NHL hockey game against the Vegas Golden Knights on April 7, 2018, in Calgary, Alberta. (Larry MacDougal/The Canadian Press via AP, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
