GAME WITHIN THE GAME
The CWHL all-star game at the home of the Maple Leafs highlighted the strides made by the women’s game — and the one big thing that still needs to happen.
Natalie Spooner dreams of a day when women’s professional hockey players won’t have to rush home from work to make it to practice.
Hilary Knight hopes the narrative of the sport’s gender inequality eventually fades so she’s only asked questions about wins and loses, successes and failures. Spooner and Knight were among the 34 players on the ice for the Canadian Women’s Hockey League all-star game Sunday afternoon at Scotiabank Arena, but the bigger issues facing the sport — especially at club level — weren’t far from their minds.
“When I was little, I was going to play in the NHL,” Spooner, who topped the podium with Canada at the 2014 Olympics, said before Team Gold beat Team Purple 8-4 at the home of the Toronto Maple Leafs. “Now the girls are like, ‘I’m going to play in the CWHL.’ That is a huge step already.
“I hope these little girls that are dreaming in the CWHL, when they’re older they can have hockey as a career and not have to worry about going to work all day and coming to practice at night.”
“Unfortunately the way to get a story now for women’s hockey is essentially talking about the inequity of the sport,” Knight, a gold medallist with the United States at the 2018 Olympics, added. “I hope we get to a place where we do have equality in the sport ... and hopefully that storyline won’t be there anymore.”
According to the players, one way to push the game further ahead and achieve those goals is an oft-talked about merger between the CWHL and North America’s other women’s pro hockey league — the NWHL.
The CWHL has four franchises in Canada, one in the U.S. and another in China. The fiveteam NWHL is based exclusively south of the border. Both interim CWHL commissioner Jayna Hefford and NWHL commissioner Dani Rylan have indicated in the past a merger makes sense. The CWHL all-stars agree. “It would be awesome,” said Canadian national team forward and three-time Olympic medallist Marie-Philip Poulin, who plays for les Canadiennes de Montreal and leads the league with 35 points in 19 games this season. “You want to play with the best.”