PWHL is rising, post-Olympics increase could take girls’s hockey to new degree

The 2026 Milan Winter Olympics, which culminated in a U.S.-Canada gold medal recreation that set viewership data throughout the U.S., thrust girls’s hockey into the highlight prefer it hasn’t been earlier than. The Skilled Ladies’s Hockey League has spent a lot of the final three years positioning itself to capitalize on the momentum to construct a sustainable girls’s hockey league.

“Each Olympic 12 months, there can be some increase in pleasure and curiosity across the girls’s recreation,” mentioned Jayna Hefford, government vp of hockey operations for the PWHL, who received 5 Olympic medals taking part in for Workforce Canada. “After I take into consideration the place we are actually, it is form of exponential from that.”

Regardless of the current success of girls’s sports activities and leagues just like the WNBA and NWSL, girls’s hockey leagues have struggled to discover a comparable footing, and that’s even with the Olympic success of the U.S. and Canadian groups. Since girls’s ice hockey was launched as an Olympic sport in 1998, Canada has received 5 of the eight gold medals, with the U.S. successful the opposite three, together with a 2-1 time beyond regulation win on the 2026 Video games.

A number of earlier makes an attempt to launch girls’s hockey leagues in North America have failed, usually as a result of monetary difficulties. Whereas the WNBA is partially owned and backed by the NBA, the NHL has not traditionally supplied monetary help for a girls’s league, and plenty of of these organizations have struggled to pay gamers sustainable wages. In 2019, most of the high girls’s gamers boycotted the prevailing skilled leagues in a combat for higher assets.

However that panorama shifted in 2023 with the launch of the PWHL. The league is privately funded by Mark Walter, the billionaire Guggenheim Companions co-founder and CEO, who over the previous few years has turn into one of many largest sports activities buyers with controlling stakes in MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers, the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers, the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks, and motorsports group Andretti International. Walter, who acquired the rights of one other girls’s hockey league as a part of the PWHL’s launch, additionally introduced on tennis legend Billie Jean King and her accomplice Ilana Kloss as members of the PWHL’s advisory board.

Regardless of a brief timeline (the league was introduced in August 2023 and performed its first recreation on Jan. 1, 2024), the PWHL has seen success over its first three seasons. The now-eight-team league has drawn followers throughout North America, set a number of attendance data, attracted main sponsors, and, maybe most significantly, was a platform for the very best girls’s hockey gamers on this planet as they ready for the 2026 Winter Olympics.

The league ready for the stage the 2026 Winter Olympics would offer.

“We understood it was going to place a digicam on our league, in contrast to anything,” mentioned Stan Kasten, Los Angeles Dodgers president and CEO and a member of the PWHL advisory board.

When the Olympic rosters have been introduced, 61 of the league’s roughly 184 gamers have been named to nationwide groups, with 39 of these gamers showing within the gold medal recreation.

“Proper then, we talked about it: it should require further funds, it should require further folks, let’s get a facility in Milan and put together to take sponsors, buyers, and a world of assembled media who’re all seeing the foremost girls’s hockey league on this planet for the primary time,” Kasten mentioned. “We considered it as a launch pad for our subsequent wave of curiosity. I’ve to let you know, like with a whole lot of issues from the primary day we began this league, I couldn’t have predicted it could end up this properly.”

The Olympic momentum has carried over into arenas. The PWHL set a brand new U.S. enviornment file with 17,335 followers on the first-ever sellout of Local weather Pledge Area in Seattle on Feb. 27, marking the third time the league set a brand new attendance file this season alone. The primary weekend the league returned to play, it set a brand new league weekend attendance file with 49,343 followers.

In complete, attendance by 71 video games of the 2025-2026 PWHL season was at 616,795 followers, a mean of 8,687 and a 20% improve in comparison with the earlier season.

Through the month of February, merchandise gross sales have been up 101% in comparison with the gross sales previous to the Olympics. The PWHL noticed its video views on YouTube, the place it predominantly broadcasts video games, improve 200% over the Olympics interval. It additionally noticed site visitors to its web site develop by six occasions in the course of the Olympics interval, with 73% of web site site visitors coming from new customers.

“It is nice to see the numbers right this moment, however the onerous work truly begins now,” mentioned Amy Scheer, PWHL government vp of enterprise operations. “We have these followers, we have got these new followers, we have got this consideration, now what will we do with it?”

For Scheer, who was named to the 2026 CNBC Changemakers checklist alongside Hefford, which means serving to the league take its subsequent large steps on the business aspect, pushing for larger valuation sponsorships and main media rights offers. “We’re trying to strike whereas the iron is scorching, and the worth proposition has modified for us,” she mentioned. The league has greater than 75 company sponsors now, and the PWHL not too long ago signed a partnership with Oak View Group to assist it safe further offers.

In March, the PWHL signed a cope with Scripps Sports activities to broadcast the league’s Walter Cup Finals on Ion, which is able to mark the primary time it will likely be aired throughout the U.S. on a linear community. Ion additionally aired a recreation on March 28, marking the league’s first nationally televised recreation. Scheer mentioned the league is in talks with a wide range of companions over potential media rights offers for subsequent season, declining to offer further particulars.

The rise in reputation helps the league fill greater and greater arenas, and in cities the place there’s not a PWHL staff. Because it launched, the PWHL has used a “Takeover Tour” barnstorming technique to play some video games exterior of dwelling arenas to check new markets or attempt to refill bigger arenas.

That technique might be on show on Saturday when the New York Sirens, who usually play on the Prudential Middle in Newark, dwelling of the NHL’s New Jersey Devils, will play at Madison Sq. Backyard versus the Seattle Torrent. The sport has already been marked as a sell-out of the greater than 18,000-seat enviornment.

The league has additionally bought out a scheduled recreation at TD Backyard in Boston on April 11 between the Boston Fleet and the Montreal Victoire. That enviornment seats greater than 17,800 folks.

Scheer mentioned that on earlier stops of the league’s Takeover Excursions, upwards of 60% of the followers attending had by no means been to an NHL recreation at these arenas. That’s informing the league’s enlargement technique, with plans so as to add as many as 4 new groups subsequent season.

“The checklist of cities that need us is so long as any checklist you would have,” Kasten mentioned. “The issue we’ve got, notably in American cities, is that essentially the most acceptable venue for us is not the 5,000- or 6,000-seat enviornment; it is the large venues, and so they do not have dates for us. I’ve talked to the NHL groups in these buildings, and the homeowners of these buildings, and discovering dates is our greatest difficulty now in cities.”

All of this stuff add up because the PWHL seems to be a sustainable – and in the end worthwhile — league. Kasten mentioned the league has outpaced its expense projections every season, however that “it has all the time matched the expansion in income, so it turned out to be price it.”

“The income progress has been constant, and subsequent 12 months it should take one other soar,” he mentioned. “We’re nonetheless within the crimson once more, however that is what we deliberate for, and the hole is closing.”

The league signed a CBA with its gamers by 2031, and it hopes to be worthwhile by that time.

Kasten mentioned there aren’t any present plans to promote groups to particular person homeowners, however there was some current speak about bringing on further buyers, particularly as extra folks strategy the league searching for engaging sports activities alternatives.

Hefford mentioned that as she’s watched the league develop, “it is a lot completely different than something that is ever existed earlier than, and folks perceive that.” Hefford herself performed in earlier skilled girls’s hockey league iterations and likewise served as a commissioner, and he or she mentioned the PWHL has the chance to supply gamers and followers one thing these different leagues hadn’t.

“For a very long time, it was all the time in regards to the nationwide groups, and now I feel we’re seeing a shift the place there is a loyalty in the direction of the PWHL groups and the communities,” she mentioned. “Nationwide groups will all the time be an unimaginable alternative, however there’s simply a lot extra now that they are often enthusiastic about as properly.”

When Laura Stacey returned from the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing after taking part in for Canada, she mentioned she needed to ask herself a tricky query.

“You come again, it is like, ‘What’s subsequent? The place do I am going? Do I maintain going for one more 4 years?” she mentioned. “It is this four-year cycle scenario of gamers pondering if they will afford to proceed taking up an Olympic dream.”

Stacey mentioned that the Olympics have all the time been the “pinnacle” for ladies’s hockey gamers, a dream that she’s been in a position to reside 3 times, together with successful two gold medals.

“The truth that now we get to play all 12 months lengthy, each single 12 months in an unimaginable league, after which each 4 years, gamers who’re on the high of their recreation get an opportunity to symbolize their nations on the Olympics after which come again and nonetheless have this skilled league behind them, it is simply unimaginable,” she mentioned.

Nonetheless, there’s work to do. Stacey, who’s the president of the gamers’ affiliation, mentioned the gamers are working carefully with the league to ensure amenities and different points of the participant expertise stay excessive because the league expands. The gamers additionally need to see salaries develop because the league does – league common salaries are roughly $55,000, in line with the CBA.

Kasten mentioned the league is pushing for extra visibility and protection. At present, the league’s scores are usually not highlighted on ESPN’s app or its web site.

Scheer mentioned whereas she not has to teach potential sponsors about what the PWHL is or why girls’s hockey is a horny alternative, the dialog is now shifting to asking supposed supporters to “put your cash the place your mouth is.”

Hefford mentioned whereas the league has launched a number of initiatives encouraging younger women to play hockey, there’s nonetheless lots to do to encourage the following technology of PWHL stars and followers.

Nevertheless, Stacey mentioned it’s not misplaced on her or the gamers that the PWHL has already made important progress.

“We have had each model [of a league], and so they all haven’t labored out for a lot of numerous causes till now. However none of that was even near the place we’re at now,” she mentioned. “So for us, it is like we’re right here. We have made it. This has been created now. We have to do no matter we presumably can to guarantee that that is greater, higher, stronger after we all go away.”