The Professional Women’s Hockey League will expand to Vancouver and begin play next season, the league announced on Wednesday.
The decision to expand to Vancouver had been rumoured for weeks, and was finally confirmed at a press conference in downtown Vancouver on Wednesday morning. The official announcement was made by a local under-11 girls’ hockey team. The girls crowded around a podium, waving signs to show how badly they wanted Vancouver to get a PWHL team, before announcing the news.
Vancouver was chosen as the seventh PWHL franchise after an eight-month process that saw expansion bids from groups in more than 20 cities.
And it may not be the only team joining the league for next season. The PWHL is in negotiations to potentially add a second expansion team, which would bring the number of teams to eight.
Amy Scheer, the league’s executive vice president of business operations, said Vancouver is step one in a multi-year plan to continue to grow the league.
“There are multiple other cities in contention that we’re still working through, so we’re hopeful that we will have an announcement in the future about a second expansion team for next year,” Scheer told CBC Sports in an interview.
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The Vancouver team will play out of Pacific Coliseum, an arena on the site of the Pacific National Exhibition grounds. It can seat more than 16,000 fans and the PWHL team will be the anchor tenant.
When evaluating the expansion bids, a group within the league looked at several criteria, ranging from geography and economic opportunity to youth hockey and infrastructure.
Vancouver checked off a number of boxes.
A January PWHL game between the Montreal Victoire and Toronto Sceptres drew more than 19,000 fans to a sold-out Rogers Arena, home to the Vancouver Canucks. That made it the best attended of the nine games on the PWHL Takeover Tour, which visited cities across North America this season.
But the biggest selling point may have been the opportunity to be the sole tenant of an arena. Vancouver will be the first PWHL team to have its own building. Players will also have their own practice facility with dedicated dressing rooms at the Agridome next door to Pacific Coliseum. The locker rooms and training facilities will undergo what the league described as “comprehensive upgrades” before the team takes the ice next season.
“We’ll be able to brand and build a space that’s designed really well for them and for women, which doesn’t happen in all of our markets,” Jayna Hefford, the league’s executive vice president of hockey operations, said.
The PWHL launched in 2023 with six teams, primarily in the east: Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, the New York area, Boston and Minnesota. Like the first six teams, the Vancouver franchise will also be owned and operated by Mark and Kimbra Walter and the Walter Group.
Staff have already been modelling how to navigate the extra travel, especially when teams fly commercially. The Takeover Tour will be back next year, and the league may plan other games in the west.
“I think between the fans telling us it’s time and ownership wanting to invest and grow this league, and everything that we’ve seen, it’s time [for expansion],” Scheer said. “It’s time to get past just being a regional league.”
The second expansion franchise could also be in the west, which could allow teams from the east to visit two cities in one road trip.
Seattle, which drew more than 12,000 fans to a PWHL Takeover Tour game this year, would be a natural neighbour to a Vancouver team, and has successful teams competing in the NWSL and WNBA.
The new team will be known temporarily as PWHL Vancouver while the league develops team branding, including a logo and name. The team’s colours, Pacific blue and cream, were also unveiled on Wednesday.
It marks the return of elite women’s hockey to Vancouver, the city where the Canadian women’s national team, including Hefford, captured a gold medal at the 2010 Olympics.
The last time the province was home to a professional women’s hockey team was when the B.C. Breakers played out of Langley. That team played in the Western Women’s Hockey League (WWHL), which folded in 2009.
Before that, stars like Cammi Granato and Nancy Drolet played on the Vancouver Griffins, a team that competed in the Canadian-based National Women’s Hockey League until 2003.
A lot has changed in the women’s hockey scene in British Columbia since those teams left town.
“We see now a number of young players, both on the women’s and men’s side of the game that are coming out of that area,” Hefford said.
“It really speaks to the strength and the depth of the grassroots and the minor hockey development in that area, which is really important to us. We want to be in those emerging markets where you’ve got lots of people playing the game.”
Seven players from B.C. competed on the Canadian women’s development team this year, while three made the senior national team that just earned silver at the world championship in the Czech Republic. A fourth player from British Columbia, Hannah Miller, was named to the initial roster but ruled ineligible to compete for Canada after previously playing for China.
The biggest name might be Chloe Primerano, the defender who captained Canada to gold at the under-18 women’s world championship earlier this year, and who has a chance to make Canada’s Olympic team next year.
Primerano is Canada’s defender of the future, a smooth-skating threat with a strong hockey IQ. She played against boys at the Burnaby Winter Club before going on to play elite girls hockey RINK Hockey Academy in Kelowna. Primerano graduated high school a year early and now plays at the University of Minnesota.
And now, there is a world where she could make her PWHL debut in front of a hometown crowd in Vancouver.
The next step is to start hiring staff, including the general manager who will be tasked with building a roster from scratch.
The league will hold an expansion draft to help fill out PWHL Vancouver’s roster, along with a likely second expansion team.
“We’ve been working for some time now on what that could look like, understanding the priority for us is going to be parity across the league and competitiveness,” Hefford said. “The expectation is that any new teams that enter the league would be competitive in year one. That’s the priority as we look at how we would disperse players.”
The draft will be held before the league’s entry draft, which is scheduled to be held on June 24 in Ottawa, but the date and details on how an expansion draft will work are still to come — details players have been eagerly awaiting.
The expansion announcement could also entice more players to declare for this year’s entry draft, with as many as 46 additional roster spots available in the league. Both teams would also have a clean salary-cap slate.
“There’s just so much depth around the world,” Hefford said. “To be able to open more spots to those players I think is something that’s really great for the game.”
