On Jan. 1, 2024, hockey historical past was once made. On that day, about midway during the first duration, ahead Alex Chippie, a two-time Olympic silver medalist for Workforce USA Hockey, slid the puck over to her Canadian-born teammate Ella Shelton, who promptly snuck it previous the goalie and into the online, all in entrance of a sold-out crowd in Toronto’s Mattamy Athletic Centre.
What is so history-making a few easy objective? This was once the 1st objective scored throughout the first-ever sport of the brand-new Skilled Ladies’s Hockey League, the 1st skilled girls’s hockey league that provides girls athletes a approach to make a full-time dwelling doing what they love and do absolute best.
Constructed from six groups from the northeastern U.S. and Canada — New York, Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto — the PWHL has been a very long time coming. The primary skilled girls’s hockey league, known as the Nationwide Ladies’s Hockey League (NWHL), was once shaped in Canada in 1999. Regardless that the U.S. and Canada have a storied ice hockey contention, the NWHL sooner or later included U.S. groups. However in 2021, the since-rebranded league (now known as the Skilled Hockey Federation, PHF) folded, leaving an opening in alternatives for ladies to play skilled ice hockey.
“When the league first folded, I used to be nonetheless in faculty, and a few of the ones ladies had been handiest making $7,500 a 12 months,” Shelton tells PS. “A large number of them had facet jobs or had a full-time activity and the league paid simply sufficient for them to play hockey after their day jobs.” Shelton herself labored on her circle of relatives’s farm in Ingersoll, Ontario on every occasion she heads house from her staff’s house base in New York. Saroya Tinker, a retired participant who now works as a girls’s hockey analyst and broadcaster, says that she handiest made $5,000 her first 12 months within the NWHL in 2020 (prior to it changed into the PHF).
As is the case with many ladies’s sports activities, avid gamers had been advocating for truthful pay. There have been indicators of development, however it was once incremental. Tinker made $15,000 her 2d season. “We had been heading in the right direction, however nonetheless no longer earning profits salary,” Tinker says.
One of the most major objectives of the PWHL was once to modify that. “We have now been at this struggle for a long time. We play very heated suits, however now we have banded in combination to create a certified atmosphere that girls’s hockey hasn’t ever observed, and that has created a mutual admire for every different,” says PWHL Toronto’s Canadian famous person heart Sarah Nurse, who just lately was once named the PWHL’s First Big name of the Week after her game-winning extra time objective towards Minnesota on Feb. 27.
The league is recently striving to pay its individuals a full-time wage, and a few avid gamers could make as much as $80,000 according to season. That stated, CBS reviews that the common wage PWHL avid gamers make is simply $55,000 and the league minimal is $35,000. Or even the top earners are making nowhere close to males’s ice hockey salaries. The minimal salary for the NHL was once $775,000 in 2023, in line with The Athletic, and .
While you believe that the six groups within the PWHL are made up of the most productive girls’s hockey avid gamers on this planet, together with Olympic gold and silver medalists, that vast salary hole is particularly infuriating. However the phrase PWHL avid gamers use to explain the brand new league is “sustainable.” They need to create a league that lasts, and to do this, they are beginning conservatively.
Any other step within the PWHL’s plan is to extend avid gamers’ publicity, says Nurse. Boston’s Megan Keller — who, as a kid, insisted on dressed in complete hockey tools to her first skating courses — hosts a podcast, The Keller and Kess display, along with her Workforce USA teammate Amanda Kessel. The display objectives to get hockey personalities and different feminine athletes out in entrance of an target audience and stocks their untold narratives. “You do not usually get to listen to those tales from avid gamers,” Keller says. Extra publicity can lend a hand translate into upper viewership, which permits girls’s leagues to safe extra investment — all crucial because the PWHL strives to pay its individuals the full-time salaries they deserve.
Any other objective of the PWHL is to make hockey extra culturally and economically numerous, Nurse says. “Hockey tradition as an entire wishes to modify in regard to how inclusive we’re culture-wise, other people being welcome within the enviornment, and the phrases which might be being utilized in locker rooms,” Tinker says.
In 2022, Tinker, who is additionally the PWHL’s supervisor of Variety, Fairness, and Inclusion Projects and Neighborhood Engagement, co-founded Black Woman Hockey Membership Canada. The non-profit outfits Black ladies in complete hockey tools, which will price upwards of $3,000, and offers younger Black hockey avid gamers a protected area to totally take part within the sport. Tinker had previously volunteered as a mentor with the U.S. arm of Black Ladies Hockey Membership, and used the platform she constructed after kneeling throughout the nationwide anthem in protest of the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor throughout the 2020 season to lift cash to permit her to open a Canadian arm.
Avid gamers hope that the PWHL’s commitments to truthful pay and a extra inclusive hockey tradition will give a contribution to the league’s longevity.
For now, there are two months left of the league’s 2024 common season, throughout which the six groups will struggle it out for a place within the playoffs, and the avid gamers are playing the risk to whole-heartedly pursue their hobby.
For Keller, that implies taking part in for what she now considers her homeland staff. “Boston has felt like house for some time. Once I performed at Boston Faculty and graduated, I did not need to go away the town — so I used to be fortunate that I used to be drafted to the Boston PWHL staff, which was once my primary selection,” Keller says. She stocks her hopes to take PWHL Boston to the playoffs for the league’s inaugural trophy. Within the off season, she’ll teach for Workforce USA with the objective of creating the roster for the 2026 Milan Olympics, the place she’d face off towards avid gamers like Nurse and Shelton on Workforce Canada.
Whilst Keller is attempting to concentrate on playing the prevailing second, she can not lend a hand however consider what lies forward for PWHL and, by way of extension, for ladies hockey avid gamers who hope to move professional. Because of the extent of skill and the stage of strengthen throughout the league, she’s positive. “I feel numerous us would say it simply feels other,” Keller says. “This looks like the one who’s going to final.”
Mara Santilli is a POPSUGAR contributor, freelance creator and editor focusing on reproductive well being, wellness, politics, and the intersection between them, whose print and virtual paintings has seemed in Marie Claire, Glamour, Ladies’s Well being, SELF, Cosmopolitan, and extra.