The inaugural season of the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) wraps up in the coming days, as Minnesota and Boston battle it out in the league’s first finals. No matter which team prevails, professional women’s hockey in North America appears to be headed in the right direction after years of concurrent leagues, folding leagues, pay cuts and labor issues. Expectations are high for the PWHL’s second season, and therefore the stakes are too.
There has arguably never been a better time for women’s sports. A Disney-record 1.02 million viewers tuned in to last year’s NCAA gymnastics championship, and the arrival of Caitlin Clark in the WNBA has drawn even more eyes to women’s basketball — which just announced its impending expansion into Toronto. The PWHL, meanwhile, has already broken numerous attendance records. According to the league, the season garnered over 40 million views and more than 100,000 subscribers on YouTube.
These are stats that suggest a wellspring of support for a sport that for too long has been starved of resources.
Like with basketball and soccer, women’s hockey has a lot to offer men’s hockey fans — a quick, physical and incredibly skilled game — if those fans now where to look.
The PWHL is a young and relatively small league, but it can build off the growth that women’s hockey more generally has seen in recent years. And like with basketball and soccer, women’s hockey has a lot to offer men’s hockey fans — a quick, physical and incredibly skilled game — if those fans know where to look.
The Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL) was founded as an amateur association in 2007 but quickly grew to become the top women’s hockey league in North America. In 2015, the National Women’s Hockey League, which eventually became known as the Premier Hockey Federation (PHF) was founded. The latter league focused primarily on the United States (though two Canadian teams were eventually added), and most importantly, players were paid.
Both the CWHL and PHF expanded over the years, but neither was perfect and a “two league” debate soon formed. The CWHL didn’t pay its players until 2017; the PHF did, but working conditions could reportedly be challenging and the league cut player salaries almost immediately, in 2016.
Still, the leagues continued to co-exist until 2019, when, on a seemingly random Sunday morning, the CWHL announced it was folding. Nearly two months later, the #ForTheGame movement and the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association emerged from the ashes, formed as a temporary refuge for many of the U.S. and Canadian women’s national team players as they pushed for better wages, working conditions and stability in a full-time league outside of the Olympics