J.F. Houle left quite an impression on the Montreal Junior last season.

Houle, the coach of the Lewiston Maineiacs last season, helped engineer a second-round upset of the No. 2-seeded Junior in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League’s President’s Cup playoffs.

Since then, the Maineiacs have folded, the Junior have moved a half hour up the road and become the Blainville-Boisbriand Armada, and Armada general manager and head coach Pascal Vincent left to take an assistant coaching position with the Winnipeg Jets.

Houle followed the falling dominoes. Monday, the Armada named him their new head coach, his second top job in the QMJHL in three seasons after leaving Clarkson University of the NCAA, where he played for four years and coached for a half dozen more.

“I’m very excited to come back to Montreal,” said Houle, a native of Quebec’s largest city. “For me, this is a great opportunity with a new team.”

Maineiacs owner Mark Just hired Houle as a mid-season replacement amid one of the team’s more disastrous runs in 2009-10. Together with assistant coach Darren Rumble and general manager Roger Shannon, Houle helped orchestrate one of the more stunning turnarounds in the league, guiding the Maineiacs to a 40-24-1-3 campaign and into the semifinals with one of the four youngest squads, top to bottom, in the league. Now, he’ll have to help another team rebuild. Montreal was loaded last season with 19-year-old talent, and will be very young this season.

“It’s a new city for them, a new rink and it’s beautiful, their facility,” Houle said. “Their off-ice facilities and the arena are great.”

As a player at Clarkson, Houle scored 49 goals and added 81 assists for the Golden Knights. He then played five seasons of professional hockey in both the ECHL and American Hockey League. In 288 games, Houle recorded 84 goals, 148 assists and 500 penalty minutes during regular-season play. In 17 playoff games, he added two goals, eight assists and 28 penalty minutes.

Houle is no stranger to Montreal and its surrounding communities, either, having grown up in the shadow of one of the greatest franchises in all of sport. His father, Rejean, was a star for the Montreal Canadiens and Quebec Nordiques in the 1970s. In 635 NHL games, Rejean Houle amassed 408 points and was a part of four Stanley Cup-winning teams. He also had a three-year stint with the Nordiques in the World Hockey Association, putting up 257 points in 214 games.

When Just first announced he had hired Houle with the Maineiacs, he likened the rising coaching star to another former Maineiacs coach: Clem Jodoin.

“I’ve known Clem for 17 years, back when Clem was closer to this guy’s age, and this guy is him, his personality, his understanding of the problems these kids face both on and off the ice,” Just told the Sun Journal.

Houle originally applied to be the team’s assistant under Vincent, but resubmitted his application for the top job when Vincent got the call from the NHL.

“That just shows how quickly this business moves,” Houle said. “I had applied in some other places, in the AHL, but nothing moved there, then this popped up at the last minute.”

Houle will begin his duties with the team immediately, with the Armada’s training camp set to open in less than three weeks.

“We have about 16 days,” Houle said. “The people here have mostly got everything figured out, the schedules and everything, so I can come right in and work on the hockey.”

The Maineiacs’ players were dispersed throughout the league after the QMJHL purchased the franchise and then folded it. Two of those players — Kirill Kabanov and Jess Tanguy — are on the Armada’s roster, so Houle will have at least a pair of familiar faces on the ice with him.

Meanwhile, the whereabouts of the rest of the team’s coaching and support staff were far from guaranteed after the sale, either.

Assistant coach Darren Rumble remained in junior hockey, as well, assuming an assistant coaching position with the Seattle Thunderbirds. General Manager Roger Shannon is an assistant GM with Shawinigan, and assistant GM Tim Schurman is now an assistant coach with the Summerside (PEI) Western Capitals in the Maritime Junior Hockey League.

Jodoin, who has coached the Rimouski Oceanic since leaving the Maineiacs after the 2006-07 season, is now the head coach of the Hamilton Bulldogs of the American Hockey League, the top affiliate of the NHL’s Montreal Canadiens.