Billie Jean King, left, founding PWHL board member, shakes hands with Taylor Heise, Minnesota’s first pick during the inaugural Professional Women’s Hockey League draft on Sept 18.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
It was a monumental day for women’s hockey, decades in the making.
In a wide-open atrium at Toronto’s CBC headquarters, jam-packed with their supporters, 90 of the best women’s hockey players in the world were drafted into the Professional Women’s Hockey League, a new six-team league set to drop the puck on its debut season in January. Its famous board member, tennis icon and equality advocate Billie Jean King, took the microphone first to mark the occasion.
The players – among them Olympic and university stars from Canada, the United States and Europe – entered on a purple carpet with music pumping, dressed to the nines to mark the historic occasion, from pantsuits and miniskirts, to high heels and trendy sneakers. Little girls in hockey jerseys screamed at their arrival and lined the carpet for autographs, while photographers clicked away. Player agents, marketing executives and reporters mingled around the room.
Women’s hockey, which burst into the public eye at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, has seen various professional leagues come and go in the years since. The PWHL pledges to be the one built to last.
King took the stage flanked by Jayna Hefford, the Canadian Olympian and Hockey Hall of Famer, and now the vice-president of hockey operations for the PWHL. She has helped steer this league into existence, from the ashes of the fallen Canadian Women’s Hockey League in 2019.
“Trail-blazing can move slowly, but it’s worth it,” King said to the large crowd at the event that was live-streamed by CBC. “[This is] finally giving women professional hockey players the structure, the support and the platform they deserve. To our fans, our job now is earning the investment of your time and your support, and we have to earn that.”
Brass from each of the six teams sat at round tables – Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul and the New York metropolitan area. They included general managers, coaches and other staff the clubs have had time to hire in these earliest weeks of the league’s existence. They huddled over laptops and spreadsheets, pouring through their research on the 268 players eligible to be drafted.
King announced the first overall pick – Minnesota chose Taylor Heise, from Lake City, Minn., fresh off her final year at the University of Minnesota in which she led the NCAA in goals with 30. She also won gold with Team USA at the Women’s World Hockey Championships in April. King handed her a hockey stick to make it official, because a jersey isn’t yet available since the team names and mascots have yet to be announced.
“It’s just an iconic moment that some people didn’t expect to happen,” Heise said of the league’s big day. “For us, we always had faith, we always knew that we would get what we deserved one day, and I’m glad that today’s that day.”
From left: Toronto GM Gina Kingsbury, Ms. King, Jocelyn Larocque, Toronto’s first round draft pick, and Jayna Hefford during the WHL draft on Sept 18.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Each of the six teams already signed three players in an initial free-agent period – the biggest names included Marie Philip-Poulin (Montreal) and Sarah Nurse (Toronto). All 18 free agents were national team players from either Team Canada or the U.S. The next 90 were chosen on Monday over 15 rounds in an event that lasted some five hours. The teams will now have tryout camps and an opportunity to sign other free agents. Each can take 28 to training camps, which begin in November. Final rosters will have 23 players.
Toronto selected veteran Canadian blueliner Jocelyne Larocque second, and Boston chose Swiss centre Alina Muller third. Muller was the only player not from the U.S. or Canada picked in the first two rounds.
The next three picks were all defenders – New York took Canadian Ella Shelton fourth; Ottawa picked American Savannah Harmon fifth, and Montreal drafted Canadian national team member Erin Ambrose sixth.
For Laroque, a 35-year-old defender and three-time Canadian Olympic medalist, this is her third pro league. She also played in the now-defunct Western Women’s Hockey League and Canadian Women’s Hockey League.
“The WWHL, the CWHL, they had the players, so many skilled players from all across the world, but this feels different,” said Larocque. “Because of the infrastructure behind it.”
“It’s the professional environment we’ve all been craving,” added Toronto draftee Natalie Spooner of the league she enters. “It has all the right bones in place to be successful.”
Women were drafted from the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association and the Premier Hockey Federation, the two groups who were at odds in recent years trying to expand pro female hockey in different directions. As the PWHL promised, players would be considered no matter where they played before.
There were 13 European players chosen, buoying hopes that this league will help improve the women’s game globally.
The PWHL said that six players on each team will be signed to three-year contracts of at least $80,000 a year, while most other players will be on one- or two-year deals. The minimum is $35,000. Each team will play 24 regular-season games.
This was the first women’s hockey draft where players were – with some exceptions – free to be drafted anywhere, and not forced into one market because that’s where they have a second job that pays the bills.
A few players filed for compassionate waivers, asking to be drafted by a certain team in order to make hockey work with their lives. Those had to be approved by the league. Spooner was one of those players – a native of Toronto’s Scarborough area, she has a husband who works in Southwestern Ontario and they have a baby boy. Toronto drafted the Canadian Olympian in the fourth round.
“It would have been really tough to go anywhere else, obviously with my husband and nine-month-old here. … To think of moving away from [baby] Rory, it would have been pretty tough, just knowing how young he is and how much he still needs me.”