WOMEN'S HOCKEY WAITING ON TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE
Sport still a house divided as Beijing Games draw closer and there's no saviour in sight
In March of 2019, Calgary beat Montreal to win the Clarkson Cup, the championship of the Canadian Women's Hockey League.
It was a game that included starring roles for a number of players, Canadian and American, who had been on the ice in the epic gold-medal final at the Pyeongchang Olympics a year earlier.
Few of them have played in a professional game since.
Much has happened in women's hockey, but most of the best female players in the world remain in something of a standoff. Now, with three months until the Beijing Olympics, traditionally the rare time in the sporting calendar when major attention is given to the women's game, will the players agitating for change see it realized in time to benefit from the boost?
Not long after that Clarkson Cup, the CWHL shut down. It killed itself, to be more precise. A league that had survived on sponsor donations, played in near-empty community centres and offered “salaries” that were more like honorariums, hoped that with its demise something approximating a true professional league could be born.
“Could” remains the operative word in that sentence. Most of the elite women's players in Canada and the United States — those who routinely battle at the Olympics and world championships — formed the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association in 2019 rather than join the U.s.-based National Women's Hockey League, which had many of the same resource problems as the CWHL. The PWHPA attracted considerable corporate interest with its equality message; Budweiser put together a slick video spot and Secret sponsored a series of exhibition games on both sides of the border between PWHPA players. NHL players offered words of support and wore PWHPA hoodies, NHL clubs hosted the barnstorming games at their arenas, but the new league has not arrived.
The NHL has refused to back a new venture while the other league exists. The NWHL kept on and has been rebranded for this season as the Premier Hockey Federation while, perhaps more significantly than a change in name, it broke ties with its founder, Dani Rylan, who led the organization from the start but could not get it on sound financial footing. New leadership secured a broadcast deal with ESPN+ for the six-team league — five in the United States and one in Toronto — and a promise to double the salary cap per team.
But the PWHPA is still not interested. Its high-profile members are with their national teams in this Olympic season, and this week it unveiled a statue across the street from the Hockey Hall of Fame in downtown Toronto. Depicting a woman cheering on a team from behind a board, the monument, again sponsored by Budweiser, is meant to highlight the gender disparity in the sport. This weekend, the PWHPA members who are not on Olympic rosters will play another round of exhibitions in Truro, N.S., while next month there will be more games in Toronto. The PWHPA will also play against a Team Canada squad in an Olympic tune-up and travel to Japan to play that national team before Beijing 2022.
What it won't do is join the PHF. Despite the rebranding and the broadcast deal and the extra funding, the members of the PWHPA are either focused on their national teams or the exhibition series. Given that a long time has passed since they played professionally, the opportunity to join a bolstered league must have been enticing. And yet, the standoff remains.
Jayna Hefford, the Hockey Hall of Famer who is a consultant to the PWHPA and has been its main spokesperson since its inception, says the players simply don't see enough in the rebranded NWHL to meet the standards of a real league for elite women's players. Even with the doubling of the salary cap to $300,000 per team, that would be an average of $12,000 for a team of 25 players.
Hefford notes that back in her CWHL days, many players worked second jobs, and practices were at night or early morning to allow for that employment, and they paid for their own equipment and lacked health benefits. “It really hasn't changed much in 20 years,” she says. This is why the PWHPA has, to use Hefford's word, been “uncompromising”: they are hoping not for a semi-pro place to play, but something transformative.
But can they get there? If the NHL is unwilling to follow the model of the NBA and financially support a women's league, then the funding would have to come from wealthy backers or a series of them. In England, women's soccer was changed almost overnight by a $16-million sponsorship from banking giant Barclays in a deal that included television coverage from major broadcasters. If corporate Canada took just a tiny fraction of the money invested in hockey, from the NHL to the Olympics to the world juniors, and used it to backstop a women's league, it might have a chance to grow into a viable professional enterprise.
The PWHPA has several bigname sponsors, but so far none making the game-changing investment. The NHL is also still out there, as are Canada's two sports networks, each owned by a telecommunications giant. “We need these great partners that we have, but we also need a significant investment to get it off the ground,” Hefford says. “Understanding that, you know, the short term is not going to potentially drive a ton of revenue, but over the course of a sustained investment, we do believe it can be profitable.”
And while the PHF has called for PWHPA members to join it to capitalize on the visibility bump of Beijing 2022, Hefford says what they want is lasting change, one where the Olympics and world championships are not the only high-profile events on the women's hockey schedule.