Alyssa Cecere
Head Coach | McGill University Women’s Hockey
Alyssa Cecere was appointed interim head coach of the McGill University women’s hockey team in September for the 2020-21 season. A fluently bilingual 32-year-old native of Brossard, Que., she had served as a full-time associate coach with the Martlets since August 2014.
Cecere replaced Peter Smith, who stepped down on Sept. 2, 2020, after 20 seasons behind the Martlets bench. She received a BFL Canada female coach-of-the-year award in May 2020 as the high-performance nominee from Hockey Quebec. She was an assistant with the Quebec under-18 female team at the 2019 Canadian championship in Manitoba. She is a Hockey Canada Skills Certified coach.
Cecere belongs to a rare group of players to reach the national gold medal game in five consecutive seasons. A member of five RSEQ conference championship-winning teams at McGill, she collected three gold medals at Nationals (2008, 2009, 2011) and a pair of silvers.
A product of Centennial Regional high school and Dawson College, where she captained the Blues, Cecere skated for five seasons with McGill before earning a physical education degree in 2011. A forward who led the Martlets for three years as an alternate captain, she tallied 43 goals and 110 points with 118 penalty minutes in 178 games overall. In 2009, Cecere played for a Canadian university all-star squad that won gold at the FISU Winter Games in Harbin, China. After concluding her collegiate career, she toiled with the Montreal Stars of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League, helping them win a Clarkson Cup national title in 2012.
A long-time instructor at the Martlet Hockey School, Cecere served as an assistant coach at Dawson for three years prior to rejoining the McGill program in 2014.
