The second season might be the charm.
On Nov. 30, the puck will drop for the start of the Professional Women Hockey League’s second season, but with a few changes from last season.
Team names, logos, jersey designs and home arena announcements in the last two months left me wondering why the PWHL was in such a rush to begin last season without confirming any of those details.
The Original Six of the PWHL — the Minnesota Frost, New York Sirens, Boston Fleet, Ottawa Charge, Toronto Sceptres and Montréal Victoire — finally have unique names and logos as of Sept. 9. The branding is a vast improvement from the league’s inaugural season, where each team only had a color scheme and hoped to differentiate from each other beyond their home cities.
In addition, each team announced their home arenas for the upcoming season in their respective areas — except for the Sirens, who will not be playing in New York, and the Fleet, who will continue to play in Lowell, Massachusetts. The Sirens will continue the trend of New York teams playing in New Jersey with the Prudential Center as their home turf.
On Nov. 7, each team debuted its new jersey design.
The season’s schedule is finalized and fans are ready to rep their favorite teams. The PWHL is starting to look more like the hockey league we were promised.
With all these offseason commitments, it doesn’t make sense that the league started without any of them. Why did the PWHL rush to start an inaugural season on New Year’s Day 2024 with no team names, logos or permanent venues?
The PWHL should not have started before it was ready. It should have waited until this year to roll out its inaugural season.
The brash start was not without reason, though. The PWHL formed to fill the hole in professional women’s hockey, following the collapse of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League and the Premier Hockey Federation in 2019 and 2023, respectively.
With a turnaround of about six months from the end of the PHF — the prior attempt at a stable, salaried professional women’s hockey organization — to the beginning of the PWHL, it’s no wonder they missed the mark on a few integral details of the season.
However, why rush to fill the gap of women’s hockey with a half-baked inaugural season rather than taking some time to roll out a new league with everything figured out?
The PWHL was always supposed to be a replacement league for the PHF. The PHF was bought out in 2023 by Mark Walter, owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Billie Jean King’s respective businesses, both of which are on the board of the PWHL. Furthermore, all six teams in the PWHL are owned by the Mark Walter Group.
The motive was stability for both the players and investors.
According to an article from DW, 200 players from the CWHL went on strike in 2019 claiming a lack of health insurance and salaries as low as $2,000 per season. Multiple players from the league called for “a sustainable professional league for women’s hockey.”
The PWHL promised all that and more by creating the PWHL Players’ Association, a union protecting the league’s players. Salaries are set to range between $35,000 and $80,000. This was a far cry from men’s league’s minimum salaries but leaps and bounds ahead of the PHF.
All of this is well and good, but if they were able to figure all of this out in six months, it’s hard to reconcile that branding took this long. Where were the creatives?
The PWHL needed to build a fanbase and credibility as a new sports league with cohesive branding. The fans wanted something to be excited about, and they wanted to support a new league. However, it was hard to do that when some teams alternated home arenas over the course of the season, and they didn’t even have names.
If nothing else, this season will bring some much needed consistency, not only to the players but to the fans. Traveling to games is more accessible over a longer season with the team locations set in stone, so there’s more games to build hype.
Professional women’s hockey has had a lot of ups and downs throughout the past few years, but it looks like the PWHL is here to stay.
Better late than never.
