Toronto Tempo President Teresa Resch at The Combine in Toronto in April, 2025.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Teresa Resch, president of the Toronto Tempo, has already seen a fan with a tattoo of the team’s logo. This, despite the fact that the WNBA franchise, the league’s first in Canada, doesn’t have any players yet.
Season’s tickets sold out months ago. And when the team released its Tempo 26 “Explorer” jersey in February, stock was bought up within minutes.
Women’s professional sports are booming in Canada – but no one needed to see a tattoo or jersey sales to know that.
Last month, the Professional Women’s Hockey League enjoyed record home venue ticket sales since expanding to eight teams for the 2025–26 season. The Northern Super League, Canada’s first for professional women’s soccer, capped its inaugural season last year with a final viewed by more than 1.1 million people. And now come the Tempo, riding a wave of WNBA excitement.
What the president of the WNBA’s Toronto Tempo has learned about the business of sports
Gender equity in sport has long been a goal in Canada. How does – and how can – this growing interest in professional women’s teams support that aim in terms of funding, facilities, development and training? While popularity helps, it will take a lot more than that to get there, sports leaders say.
“It’s undeniable that we are in a time of generational change to the sport landscape,” said Allison Sandmeyer-Graves, chief executive officer of Canadian Women & Sport, national non-profit organization dedicated to creating an equitable and inclusive Canadian sport system.
“Women’s professional teams and leagues playing consistently in the Canadian market month after month just drives unprecedented investment, fandom, visibility. And that’s driving a cultural shift.”
But to serve the girls and young women who are inspired to lace up skates or show up to tryouts at their local pitch, sports at the grassroots level must be overhauled and redesigned with them in mind, experts say. If not, that surge may return to the baseline.
To paraphrase a piece of baseball mysticism, if they see it, they will come. But if you want them to stay, you have to build it.
Think about all of the girls who decided to swing a bat at their local baseball diamond and live out their Blue Jays dreams during last year’s World Series. Researchers call this “the demonstration effect.”
How many of those girls are still playing baseball? How many young women inspired by the Olympics will be perfecting their slapshots next winter?
“You get this spike. People are really excited, and then it slowly wanes. The reason for that is because the system isn’t necessarily well set up for that spike to happen,” said Laura Misener, a professor in the School of Kinesiology at Western University whose research focuses on how sport and events can be used as instruments of social change.
Obstacles can include things as seemingly innocuous as how change rooms are designed.
“They’re not set up for women. They’re especially not set up for teenage women going through various changes in their bodies,” Prof. Misener said.
“And suddenly we want them to stay in sport? Again, a noble goal and a great idea, but unless we provide them the safe environment where they feel comfortable and confident to continue participating, we’re going to continue to lose them at that level.”
Research shows that participation rates for girls in sports fall off a cliff during adolescence. One in three will quit by their late teens, compared with just one in 10 boys, according to a report from Canadian Women & Sport released in 2020.
As a result, only 8 per cent of girls ages 12 to 17 are meeting the national physical activity guidelines of at least one hour of moderate to vigorous physical activity a day, compared with 33 per cent of boys, according to Statistics Canada.
Sports organizations have been sounding the alarm for years, and professional leagues and teams have recently created several initiatives to encourage participation.
Last month, the PWHL launched a web series featuring “Professor Puck” that explains the league and the sport to those unfamiliar but curious. It also runs a program called “Ready, Set, Skate” for girls ages five to 12 that provides them with a full set of equipment and professional coaching over eight weeks.
“It’s a sense of community that I think people are finding they love being a part of,” said Jayna Hefford, PWHL executive vice-president of hockey operations.
Girls are also more likely to experience mental health issues such as anxiety and depression than their male peers. Sports can be one avenue to help address these challenges.
Leagues are looking at that angle, too. This week, the Tempo launched Tempo Impact, an initiative that will work with organizations in the women’s health sector to advance physical, mental and social health outcomes across Canada.
Overall, female participation in sport is rising in Canada, with 63 per cent of girls ages six to 18 playing sports weekly, compared with 68 per cent of boys, according to a report from Canadian Women in Sport released in late 2024.
The demonstration effect appears to working, particularly when it comes to hockey.
“The idea is that when we are watching sport on TV, especially when teams are winning and doing well, that it inspires us or other individuals to get participating and be active,” Prof. Misener said.
The PWHL premiered in January, 2024. More than 115,000 girls registered to play hockey in the 2024-2025 season, an annual participation rate record, according to Hockey Canada data.
Yet despite these gains, women and girls make up less than 20 per cent of hockey players in the country.
Notably, men are also far more likely to be in coaching and officiating roles. While the number is increasing, only 6.6 per cent of hockey coaches are women, according to Hockey Canada.
More female coaches are key to keeping more girls in sports, said Lorraine Lafrenière, chief executive officer of the Coaching Association of Canada.
“Let’s talk about a 12-year-old girl who starts menstruating. She’s in sailing. She gets put on a boat for eight hours for training and the coach is a man, so they don’t understand that, right?” she said.
“If it’s a woman who is a coach, that aspect right there, there would be an awareness and a sensitivity that would change one aspect of the dynamic among many.”
There is also a need for more sports infrastructure, experts say, with shortages of hockey rinks, soccer pitches, swimming pools and other facilities in many parts of the country.
That holds true at the professional level as well.
“We’re still for the most part second or third tenants in every facility that we’re in, and so we don’t get the best times,” said Christina Litz, president of the Northern Super League. “And we’re playing in facilities that aren’t made for our sport and aren’t made for women.”
(Soccer may be closer to gender parity, but even there, only one in three players are girls, according to Canada Soccer.)
Being the main tenant in an arena, or having purpose-built facilities, increases a team’s commercial potential, and therefore its growth, said the Toronto Tempo’s Ms. Resch.
“That’s how you’re able to pay players more. That’s how you’re able to build more facilities. That’s how you’re able to invest in the product,” she said.
Ms. Resch looks at what three decades of the Toronto Raptors have done for basketball culture in Canada and the number of Canadian men who now play in the NBA – including the reigning MVP, Hamilton’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander – and says the Tempo can do the same thing for women.
“I absolutely believe that it will,” she said. “I can’t wait to see in 30 years all the women that are in this league because of the impact of this team. It’s going to be incredible.”