Buffalo Beauts forward Brooke Stacey celebrates a goal during a game between the Metropolitan Riveters at Buffalo Beauts on Dec. 29, 2019.Michael Hetzel/NWHL
Over the next two weeks, many players in the National Women’s Hockey League will do their jobs virtually from their hotel rooms in Lake Placid, N.Y., including teachers and investment bankers, accountants, sales and marketing professionals, fitness coaches and entrepreneurs.
By night, these women will play in the most unusual hockey season of their lives, inside one of the sport’s most storied arenas, in a fast-changing league.
Starting Saturday, the NWHL will play its first games since the pandemic brought the sports world to a halt last March. In lieu of the usual six-month-long season, the league will play a single bubbled 14-day tournament that will conclude with the Isobel Cup final on Feb. 5.
But the NWHL isn’t the only home for top female hockey players in North America, which highlights the confusing divide that persists in the women’s game.
There is also the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association (PWHPA), a coalition that formed after the collapse of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League in early 2019. Today it includes some 125 players – including most of the current U.S. and Canadian national team players.
The PWHPA and NWHL share the same goal: a women’s pro league with a sustainable business model that provides livable wages and professional resources. Yet, the two remain divided on how to get there. The NWHL wants to keep building and improving the league it has. The PWHPA’s members are holding out for an entirely new league, preferably one under the National Hockey League’s canopy.
Metropolitan Riveters forward Madison Packer shoots the puck during a game between the Minnesota Whitecaps at Metropolitan Riveters on Jan. 4, 2020.Ashley Intile/NWHL
The NWHL has five American teams plus a debuting Canadian expansion club: the Toronto Six. Founded in 2015, the NWHL was the first league to pay female hockey players, and its top stars made upwards of US$19,000 last season. The league is re-emerging with a new commissioner, and is working to shift franchise ownership from the league to independent groups.
At Lake Placid, with no fans attending, the women will play at Herb Brooks Arena, site of the United States’ famous Miracle on Ice success at the 1980 Olympics. Their games will stream on Twitch with the semis and final also broadcast live by NBC Sports, the first women’s pro hockey games to appear on a major national TV network in the U.S.
Meanwhile, for a second straight winter, the PWHPA plans to play a series of showcase events known as the Dream Gap Tour – this time with $1-million from Secret, the deodorant manufacturer, which has been called the largest corporate commitment ever made for pro women’s hockey on the continent. The PWHPA hopes to partner with NHL teams and use their facilities – which it did for some of the tour last year.
Planning tour stops is difficult during the pandemic, especially as it remains unclear whether the International Ice Hockey Federation’s women’s world championships will take place as scheduled in Nova Scotia this April – an event that would obviously tie up many of the PWHPA stars.
The PWHPA consolidated from eight training hubs to five for this season – Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, New Hampshire and Minnesota – and squads have been limited to 25 players in each hub after tryouts. Each hub is operating more like a team this season instead of shuffling rosters up for different showcases as they did last year, and the PWHPA has added new team sponsors, prize money and its own trophy, the Secret Cup.
“We have ongoing conversations with the NHL about their plans for women’s hockey,” said Jayna Hefford, operations consultant for the PWHPA. “I think if COVID didn’t exist, we might be further down the line. It’s been optimistic, it’s been supportive. But ultimately, the NHL has a lot of decisions to make on their entire business right now.”
Jayna Hefford, the head of the Professional Women's Hockey Players' Association, is worried investment in women's sport will dry up because of the economic impact of COVID-19.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
So with the PWHPA events still on hold, and much of the world sitting at home sitting in front of their screens right now, the NWHL has the spotlight in Lake Placid. This bubble comes at an interesting time for female sports. It comes on the heels of other bubbles staged by the Women’s National Basketball Association and National Women’s Soccer League. Despite having no fans in-house, those female leagues still experienced growth in areas such as TV viewership, streaming, apparel sales and fan engagement, especially on social justice. In fact, the teams competing in Lake Placid will have “End Racism” patches stitched on their jerseys.
“I want people to see that we have a good product and it’s worth tuning into,” said Toronto Six captain Shiann Darkangelo, who won a world championship with Team USA in 2016 and has returned to the NWHL this year after stints in the CWHL and PWHPA. “Everybody wants the sport to grow so that one day you can just play hockey and not have to focus on another job to support yourself. I thought this would be the best place for me to take action and try to move the sport to a better place.”
The NWHL says its COVID-19 protocols in the bubble are strict. They include everything from regular testing in partnership with Yale University; conducting all team meetings virtually; and players saving their post-game showers for hotel rooms instead of at the rink. When not at practices or games, players will mostly be in their hotel rooms.
The NWHL’s teams – the Six, Buffalo Beauts, Boston Pride, Connecticut Whale, Metropolitan Riveters and Minnesota Whitecaps – have done their best to prepare, despite limited opportunities to access ice, training facilities or gather in groups during the pandemic.
Buffalo Beauts head coach Pete Perram talks to the bench during a Buffalo Beauts and Brock exhibition game on Sept. 28, 2019.Michael Hetzel/NWHL
It’s been fast and furious for Toronto’s NWHL expansion team, which just came to life in April – one of two teams now owned independently. Johanna Neilson Boynton, a Harvard hockey grad from Concord, Mass., leads the Six ownership group. A long-time donor to USA Hockey and chief executive officer of her own home-building company, Boynton hopes to emulate the strides Boston made last season when Miles Arnone bought it with a group of investors and quickly improved things for the Pride, like team travel, meals, equipment and facilities.
Digit Murphy came on as Six team president and head coach, an outspoken veteran of the women’s game who coached Brown University’s team and CWHL clubs in Boston and China.
Murphy landed some free agents who played for the PWHPA’s Toronto chapter last year. The Six found their home at Canlan Arena in North York, and got special permission to train as pro athletes while most citizens were locked out of rinks. To follow physical-distancing rules, the players practised in small groups and did their weight training outside. They also put on equipment while physically distanced in the hallway instead of packing into their brand new dressing room.
“I was in one of the first NCAA tournaments, I helped put a women’s team in China, but this season – putting a team together during COVID and then playing in a bubble – this might take the cake,” Murphy said. “What an adventure. I’m so pumped.”
Despite the two-week season, NWHL players are promised their full salaries for the season. Rosters are bigger than usual – 20 players each. Teams who make the Isobel Cup final on Feb. 5 will have played nine games in 14 days.
“It’s really gonna test us … at a certain point it’s going to be about who wants it more and how badly you’re willing to work and fight through it,” said Jillian Dempsey, who has played for Boston’s NWHL team since its first season in 2015, and will teach her fifth-grade class via Zoom throughout the tournament. “When I shared that with my families and my students they were thrilled and nothing but supportive. So I’ll be sending them the links to watch.”
Boston Pride forward Jillian Dempsey during a game in Boston on Oct. 20, 2019.Michelle Jay/NWHL
It will be the first NWHL action since COVID-19 cut short the 2020 season just days before Boston and Minnesota were to play for the Isobel Cup on March 13 (a trophy named for Isobel – the daughter of Stanley Cup namesake Lord Frederick Arthur Stanley – known to be one of Canada’s first female hockey players).
Since then the NWHL had a major shift atop its power structure. Tyler Tumminia left her brief post as a Toronto team chairwoman and became interim commissioner, replacing NWHL founder Dani Rylan Kearney. Tumminia has deep roots in baseball, most recently at Goldklang Group, where she operated five minor-league baseball teams.
Rylan Kearney stepped down as commissioner but became president of the original ownership group looking to land independent owners for the four remaining NWHL teams. Some regard Rylan Kearney as a visionary. Others still think of low moments from the NWHL’s early days, like when she unexpectedly slashed player salaries in 2016 to save the league. Since then the NWHL and its players struck a revenue-sharing deal that gives 50 per cent of all sponsorship and media deals back to players. It resulted in a 30-per-cent increase to their base salaries for last season.
“I used to play for the NWHL, then for the Toronto Furies in the CWHL and the PWHPA, and now I’m with the Toronto Six back in the NWHL now and I feel the league has evolved so much,” said Six defenceman Emma Greco, a Burlington, Ont., native. “I think people carry those old stories with them, but they might not know how things have changed.”
Buffalo Beauts forward Brooke Stacey during a game between Connecticut Whale at Buffalo Beauts, Oct. 19, 2019.Michael Hetzel/NWHL
In the bubble, the NWHL teams will each play five round-robin games, then a playoff round that determines the four semi-final teams, who will battle for the cup from Feb. 4-5.
In place of fans, cardboard cutouts will fill the stands at Herb Brooks Arena. Famous athletes will be among those life-size cutouts as the six NWHL teams landed support from all across pro sports, including the Toronto Blue Jays, New York Rangers, Boston Bruins, all of Minnesota’s pro franchises and various WNBA teams.
“I think it shows that women’s hockey is being supported,” said rookie Riveters defenceman Saroya Tinker, an Oshawa, Ont., native. “We’re being seen and we’re being heard.”