It’s one thing to control the pace of play on ice, another entirely to govern the speed and direction of the sport.
And yet, the executives at the helm of the Professional Women’s Hockey League know the future of the game hinges on their ability to do just that.
The stakes are clear.
The past encompasses a graveyard of acronyms — WWHL, NWHL, CWHL, PWHPA, PHF, North American women’s leagues that have come and gone, grown too fast or too slow, with reckless abandon or, even worse, not at all.
The future lies in the PWHL — in decision-makers’ collective ability to roll with the momentum and the chants of the crowd when the time is right and, when it is not, to collect the puck behind the net, to let the play develop, to take what is given when the ice opens up.
Even before the puck was dropped that know-how was put to the test.
On Oct. 26, 2023, just over two months before the inaugural PWHL season was set to begin, names for the league’s Original Six franchises were leaked online. The findings, uncovered through a US Trademark Database search, were published first by DetroitHockey.net and quickly picked up traction across the internet.
Names like “Ottawa Alert” paid homage to the history of the women’s game, but still, fans were less than enamored with the prospects. “Boston Wicked” and “New York Sound” drew particular ire from fans on social media and, by and large, media outlets concurred.
Yahoo Sports amassed a dizzying array of critiques from social media and published them under the headline,“Trademark filings met with backlash.” The Hockey News concurred, opining that “It should be back to the drawing board for PWHL names.”
The name leak was one of the first major stories about the league to break since its founding had been announced some six months prior. And considering the league hadn’t yet played its first game, had no standing or authority in the minds of fans and the media beside what it said it was going to be, the leak threatened to undermine the buzz that had been built to the point.
But while the league itself was young and green, the executives behind the enterprise were not.
“I just didn’t feel that, from a brand and story perspective, we were ready to put any names into the universe [at that time], whether they were the leaked ones or other ones we had planned,” Executive Vice President of Business Operations Amy Scheer told The Post in a recent interview.
The leak would not force rash action, nor would it change the league’s timeline.
There were an untold number of other decisions that had been hurried during the six-month lead-in to season one, but team names and logos were the branding PWHL executives hoped would define their Original Six teams for decades to come. There wouldn’t be any second chances.
Plus, there were plenty of other logistics to be ironed out. If the PWHL was going to meet its stated goal of dropping the puck on Jan. 1, 2024, arenas, schedules, team front-offices, and rosters were all indispensable.
Team names and logos were not. Leak be darned — the world could wait.
The Name Game
The world, though, was less than thrilled.
By and large, fans reacted to the league’s announcement that team identities would come the following offseason, ahead of year two, with cynicism and disappointment.
The idea that a full season would be played with just “New York,” “Minnesota” or “Ottawa” striped across players’ chests didn’t jive with the narrative that the PWHL was going to be the most professional league in the history of women’s hockey. While European soccer fans were accustomed to monikers that represented a state or city rather than a team, the phenomenon was foreign in North American leagues.
And yet, if the PWHL were to survive long-term, if the league were to surmount the myriad hurdles that had spelled the end of all the defunct leagues that preceded it, these were the kinds of risks execs would need to take.
Dictating the pace of play meant moving a million miles-per-hour until the league could afford not to, and that would be a balancing act for the foreseeable future. Though if those names and logos missed the mark, there was real concern their future might be a short one.
Enter Kanan Bhatt-Shah. The PWHL’s vice president of brand and marketing joined the front office in November 2023, around the same time as the leak, and made it her first order of business to survey the state of suggestions. There were many.
Team names were being ideated from the moment the league was formed, she said. And in the six months between then and puck drop, and all throughout season one, new ideas continued flying in from players, team executives and fans — both in arena and on social media.
Her office tracked these suggestions and judged top prospects by a set of criteria: names had to be ones fans could get behind and ones the league could trademark. As much as anything else though, Bhatt-Shah says the PWHL sought identities that would “represent the soul of the market, the soul of the team.”
Names slowly began transforming into visual identities with the aid of an agency, FlowerShop. The color schemes teams were playing with in Year One added a new wrinkle.
“It was really important to keep the same primary colors,” Bhatt-Shah told The Post. “Our fans embraced those colors, and we wanted to make sure that they continued to feel at home.”
Although names and jersey designs weren’t going to be revealed until November 2024, the PWHL needed to provide its equipment partner, Bauer, almost six months of lead time for production.
Bhatt-Shah’s office kicked into overdrive to hit their May deadline. That sprint, of course, wasn’t without precedent in PWHL’s fast-paced history.
“Not the first, not the last,” she said.
Fast to launch, measured to grow
The (re)introduction to the PWHL’s Original Six came on Nov. 7, 2024, and the response from fans and players alike has been overwhelmingly positive.
According to a league spokesperson, PWHL set a new high for sales on the day jerseys were released and an updated and expanded order for additional merchandise has already been placed.
The decision to delay names and jerseys seems to have been vindicated, not unlike the way the race to get the league up and running on that audacious six-month timeline was.
During season one, the world record for attendance at a women’s hockey game was broken on the league’s second day of play, Jan. 2, at Ottawa’s home opener. It was reset four days later in Minnesota, reset again in Boston in February, and reset once more in Montreal in April.
“[Going into year one], we really didn’t know what to expect … We did the best work, as fast as we could, to get the season open,” Scheer says. “And our fans, in the way they showed up, far exceeded our expectations.”
Already there has been chatter that the PWHL should be looking to expand into new markets, but Scheer — an industry veteran with over thirty years experience at organizations including the Nets, Liberty, Connecticut Sun, NYCFC, Red Bulls and NFL — says the league will do its due diligence first.
The PWHL could add up to two teams as early as next season, but if and how expansion comes to fruition depends, among other measures, on how the second iteration of the “Takeover Tour” unfolds.
Building off of the venture that began in Year One and featured neutral-site games in two American cities, the PWHL has expanded the “Takeover Tour” in 2024-25 to include stops in nine different locations across both the U.S. and Canada.
Fans came out in droves during the tour’s first three stops, including at Denver’s Ball Arena, where 14,018 fans (a new U.S. attendance record for a professional women’s hockey game) made their thoughts known with a vehement “We want a team!” chant.
Pushing into new cities and engaging a larger cross-section of the continent’s fans is only one piece of the rationale behind expansion. In contrast to the previous iteration of pro women’s hockey in North America, the PWHL’s launching with six teams significantly shrank the number of available roster spots. And as a result, a number of highly capable players were forced overseas or into early retirement.
The PWHL’s successes in year one have only increased demand among young women coming up through the NCAA or international leagues. But with just six teams, only 42 could be selected at the PWHL’s most recent draft in July 2024.
As of December, the league was still receiving requests for proposals from interested markets and wasn’t yet ready to identify finalists for expansion — let alone when new teams might join the league.
“As [PWHL advisory board member and Dodgers CEO] Stan Kasten likes to tell us, ‘Every time we play a game, we learn something new,’” Scheer says. “And we do — as we learn … what the players want and what the fans want, we’ll continue to talk expansion.”
When league executives do decide the time is right to expand — a decision, like names and logos, they’ll make on no one’s timeline but their own — they’ll do so without reservation, much less fear of diluting the product on the ice.
“The game,” Scheer says, “I’m least worried about.”
