PWHL Barnstorms Arenas After Strong Inaugural Season

FACEOFF: The PWHL debuted with six teams identified only by their city as to allow time to develop. Montreal’s squad is shown here playing New York on opening night, Jan. 10 at UBS Arena. (Getty Images)

PWHL’s second season begins Nov. 30

In a new era of remarkable and unprecedented success for women’s sports, the biggest surprise may be on the ice with the formation of the Professional Women’s Hockey League, whose principals believe is the strongest effort to date to bring the sport at its highest level to arenas across North America. Going from announcement to regular season in less than half a year was a major risk with the league’s success being uncertain at best.  

The puck drops for the PWHL’s second season on Nov. 30. 

 “The reception for the first year for the PWHL overall and specifically in Minnesota was better than we certainly anticipated, and it was much better than the PWHL anticipated,” said Kelly McGrath, general manager and executive director of Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “We had great turnout from fans and great support of people who wanted to say they were part of that team and that organization. It benefited from the groundswell of what is hopefully more than a moment that women’s sports is having.” 

 For professional women’s ice hockey, at best, it’s an elusive moment and a tumultuous history in the U.S. and Canada, with earlier efforts — the National Women’s Hockey League, Canadian Women’s Hockey League, the second National Women’s Hockey League and the Premier Hockey Federation — plagued by lack of financial and fan support and low (and, sometimes, no) player salaries. The fragmented structure, with leagues on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, resulted in struggling competitors both vying for the same audience and sponsorship dollars. 

 In 2019, disaffected players formed the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association and vowed to boycott any league that wasn’t unified and financially sustainable. 

It 2022, the players found some deep-pocketed partners with access to resources and vast connections: Guggenheim Partners CEO and Los Angeles Dodgers part owner Mark Walter and tennis legend Billie Jean King, who also owns a piece of the Dodgers. 

The PWHL was announced in August 2023.  It intended to start play just five months later, an almost unheard-of short runway for what was intended to be a top-flight sports league, launching New Year’s Day 2024. 

 Hockey-mad Canada was home to three of the inaugural teams: Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. The league opted for the obvious Eastern choices of megamarket New York City with Boston joining its long-time rival city to lock up New England.  

 For the sixth, and most western, team, the PWHL eschewed the country’s third-biggest media market in Chicago and instead landed in Minnesota, where women’s and girls’ hockey at the youth, high school and college level is ingrained in the culture; nearly one-sixth of the U.S.’s registered women’s and girls’ hockey players are Minnesotans, according to USA Hockey. 

 The decision worked: the inaugural game Jan. 6, 2024, for the Minnesota team sold out St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center with 13,316 fans crossing the turnstiles, setting the attendance record for women’s pro hockey. 

 For the first year, Minnesota — the team ultimately won the league title — was the only team that played in an NHL arena; New York, which played most of its home games in its inaugural season at Bridgeport, Connecticut’s Total Mortgage Arena (capacity: 8,412) with four games at UBS Arena (18,500) in Elmont, New York, will play in Newark, New Jersey’s Prudential Center (17,500), home of the New Jersey Devils, in the league’s second season.  

In year two, the main arenas for the other franchises range from those with primarily minor league hockey tenants — Toronto’s Coca-Cola Coliseum (8,100) and Place Bell in the Montreal suburb of Laval (10,062); both franchises move up from smaller buildings with Toronto having played at Mattamy Athletic Centre (3,850) and Montreal at Verdun Auditorium (3,795) — and Canadian junior hockey teams. Ottawa played in the home of the Ontario Hockey League’s 67’s, the 8,585-capacity TD Place Arena. Boston primarily played on the campus of UMass-Lowell at the 6,003-capacity Tsongas Center. 

 “We’re looking for a venue that is the right size, run by the right group, in the right area of town where people will travel and that provide professional-level facilities that our fans deserve and our players deserve,” says PWHL Executive Vice President of Business Operations Amy Scheer, a 30-year industry vet who’s previously worked in the WNBA, MLS and Major League Rugby. “The facilities drive a lot of our decision making, whether it’s a practice facility, arenas where we play or our barnstorming neutral-site games.”  

 In the inaugural season, Ottawa topped the league’s attendance ladder, averaging 7,496, followed by Minnesota at 7,138. For the regular season, the league averaged 5,448, jumping to 7,021 for the playoffs.   For comparison, the much more established WNBA, which features a more popular sport in general, averaged 9,807 in its watershed 2024 season 27 years after the women’s pro hoops league began play. 

 “We didn’t really know what to expect,” Scheer said at this year’s VenuesNow Conference in Phoenix. “We were launching a new league. I started two months before our first game. We didn’t have venues, we didn’t have broadcast agreements, we didn’t have sponsors, we didn’t have anything, and in two months, we shot out of the gate with an unbelievable team.” 

 Something else they didn’t have: team names. The league played its first season with its teams playing under geographic names only with differentiation limited to jersey colors. Even the fonts on the jersey were the same across the league. 

 Scheer said there was “a lot of criticism” around that decision, but with the short turnaround from announcement to launch, it was better to take the time to develop branding and names than to rush something second-rate. 

“If team names around cities are good enough for soccer, it’s certainly good enough for us, and that’s the line that we used. It certainly does not hurt Barcelona or Manchester City,” she said. 

The teams will have unique branding for Year Two: the Boston Fleet, Minnesota Frost, Montreal Victoire, New York Sirens, Ottawa Charge and Toronto Sceptres. Logos and names were introduced in early September. Partnering with Bauer, uniforms debuted Nov. 7. 

 The generic introductory team names notwithstanding, the league was not afraid to innovate. Women’s hockey has historically prohibited body checking; the PWHL relaxed the rule to allow some contact insofar as the players involved are seeking possession. A shorthanded goal releases the penalized player from the penalty box — the league calls it the “jailbreak rule.” To push back against teams tanking for draft picks, the PWHL uses what’s called the “gold plan,” where draft order is determined by standings points acquired after a team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, incentivizing winning even in a heretofore unsuccessful season. 

 “We weren’t afraid to take over the game,” Scheer said. 

 Because the league is centrally owned, rather than following the typical franchise model, the league controls all sponsorship, marketing and branding. 

“We basically own every piece of inventory, from a league down to every team,” Scheer said. “It allows us to have single conversations (with potential partners) versus team assets, media assets. We, overall, get to have that conversation at once.” 

 While the league had national broadcasting in Canada — 44 in the inaugural season were broadcast on cable’s TSN or Sportsnet, 16 on French-language cable sports station RDS and some shown on tape-delay on the CBC after “Hockey Night in Canada” — in the U.S., games were available only on regional sports networks. All games were streamed for free and without geo-restriction on YouTube and in the U.S. on Women’s Sports Network, a streamer that also deals with the LPGA, the National Women’s Soccer League and the World Surf League. 

 “There will be a few changes in year two on both sides of the border,” Scheer said. “Hopefully, that will be announced in the next couple of weeks.” 

 With the new team identities comes a stronger merchandise push for the second season, as fans look to gobble up jerseys, T-shirts and hats. Even in Year One, the league showed a willingness to engineer interesting marketing and merchandising partnerships, teaming up with Mattel Canada, beginning with a Barbie-themed marketing and series of “storytelling” packages and later expanding into an apparel and accessory collaboration. It was the first such partnership for the iconic doll line. 

Other sponsorship deals were inked with Discover, Air Canada and Bauer for jersey and helmet advertising.  

 Scheer says the league’s unique single-owner structure allows for this nimble decision making. 

“We’ll be a single entity for quite a while as we look to build a lead that allows us some luxuries,” she said. “It’s nice when I have to make some decisions, and I don’t have to call six or seven owners.” 

 Still, there’s partnership with the venue in the boots-on-the-ground sense. 

“They drive all their marketing, all their ticketing, all their promotions,” Xcel Center’s McGrath said. “But our team heavily supports them on the marketing side. Our arena team will amplify their messages, so we’ll push out social media posts and pushes around game day or ticket offerings that help amplify their message. We sent regular emails to our database to help support their initiatives. The Minnesota Wild marketing team, which obviously has a lot of eyeballs in the hockey world, has been great.” 

 In addition to the standard home arenas, the league presents showcase games at other sites, another advantage borne of central ownership since individual teams don’t have to rely on the gate at home sites for their own revenue. In Year One, for example, Montreal and Toronto played one another at both the Bell Centre (home of the NHL Canadiens) and Scotiabank Arena (home of the Maple Leafs), drawing 21,105 and 19,285, respectively. The league wasn’t afraid to leave their home cities, either.  

 Out-of-market games in Pittsburgh and Detroit, both played at NHL arenas, drew 8,850 and 13,736, respectively. There will be nine such “barnstorming” games in Year Two: six in the U.S.— Buffalo, Denver, Detroit, Raleigh, St. Louis and Seattle—  and three in Canada. Vancouver and Quebec City have already been announced, with a Toronto and Ottawa’s Feb. 16 game in a location to be announced.  Those new markets could well portend expansion, which Scheer said may come in the wake of the increased attention of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy, where the U.S. and Canada are once again expected to be favorites. 

“The goal is to continue to grow,” Scheer said. “We need to move past our six markets. We need to grow across both countries, to just get off the East Coast. So that’s the next trip for us. The goal is to go to 16, to eight, to 10, but it’s very important that we do it at a pace in which the talented hockey players can keep up with us. What we don’t want to do at any point is hurt the product on the ice, because the hockey is so good.” 

It’s good for business to get beyond the standard hockey strongholds. Girls hockey is among the fastest growing youth sports in the U.S. with a 65% increase in participation since 2009, according to USA Hockey. Travel leagues have sprung up in increasingly less frosty locales, including California, Nevada, Texas and the Deep South. Team USA defenseman Cayla Barnes, selected fifth in this year’s league draft, played youth hockey in Anaheim, California.  

Exposure to pro-level women players was important in established markets like Minnesota, McGrath says, where the seats at the Xcel Energy Center were often filled with youth players to watch the PWHL. 

 “You can see kids wearing their jerseys, and they can see themselves on the ice maybe some day,” she said. “People wanted to show their children that you can do this if you want to and there’s a path now. In the past, you could play in college and might make the Olympic team, but that was it; to make a living at it was not going to be possible,” she said. Scheer says the professional model in women’s sports creates consumers different from what might show up to a venue for major men’s sports. 

 “When you bring a women’s team into a building, you bring a new audience, you bring a new sense of entertainment. You’re exposing your building to new people,” she said. “Yes, you have Disney On Ice. Yes, you have other shows that bring families in, but it’s not quite the same as a team that brings inspiration, brings dreams and brings other things that other shows do not.” 

 That’s important, sure, but Scheer points out that more than 50 years after Title IX sought to level the athletic playing field between men and women, there’s generations of people that don’t know a world without women’s sports. 

 “Now you’re going to see there’s just as many young boys as there are young girls, because they don’t know any different,” she said. “They’ve always grown up with women’s sports there, so to see a women’s hockey player doesn’t faze them. You’re bringing new entertainment, intergenerational families, to your venue. There’s a big value to venues for having women’s sports.”