When Canada’s women’s hockey team beat the U.S.A. 2-0 in February to win Olympic gold in Vancouver, all 19,000 seats were full at Canada Hockey Place and, according to rating site Channel Canada, 11 million Canadians watched on TV.
While this still paled in comparison to the 26 million who watched the men win three days later, Canadians seemed to recognize the women’s team, like the men’s, represented the best Canadian sport had to offer.
A dozen players from that game played their season openers this past week in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League, where attendance at last year’s championship game was about 1000. That’s in the same range as the Northern Ontario Junior Hockey League – think high school-age male players in huge markets like North Bay and Blind River.
After the euphoria died down from Sidney Crosby’s winning goal, Canada’s Olympic men’s team returned to multi-million-dollar NHL careers and all the attendant raucous crowds, bright lights and packed press conferences. The women, by contrast, returned to relative obscurity.
The Canadian Women’s Hockey League has been around since 2007. There are currently five teams – Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Brampton and Burlington, Ont. – who play a 40-game season. In the league’s first season there was also a team based at the Bell Sensplex in Kanata, but the team no longer exists and the website does not say why.
Ten of the league’s players were on either the U.S. or Canadian national teams that were so closely followed during the Olympics. Angela Ruggiero, Jennifer Botterill, Tessa Bonhomme . . . you probably vaguely remember those names. Despite being among the best in the world at what they do, the players are not paid, resulting in a professional-level league playing in amateur conditions.
“We’re a professionally run league going into this season, and yet we’re not a professional league in that the players don’t get paid, and the general managers and coaches don’t get paid,” league founder and former Olympic goaltender Sami-Jo Small says in an interview with TSN. Small says the league does cover players’ travel and equipment costs, but league officials say the compensation is not enough to attract top talent. Players are drafted from their home regions only.
“We’re not paying enough to make a woman move from (Toronto) to Boston,” CWHL executive director Brenda Andress tells TSN.
If this is the first you’ve heard of the league, you’re probably not alone. Despite making the playoffs two seasons in a row with a solid group of Olympians, the Montreal Stars only got a half dozen mentions in the Montreal Gazette over that time frame, usually as part of a roundup with university and youth games.
The league’s sputtering marketing machine – an amateurish website – is probably partially to blame for its low recognition.
But a league with this level of talent shouldn’t have to beg for support.
Hockey fans should know their favourite female Olympians don’t just disappear for three years and 11 months between tournaments. Young female hockey players in particular, the ones who have been joining a Hockey Canada program that has grown ninefold in the past 15 years according to the organization’s statistics, should know they too have a chance to play in a major league someday.
Maybe that would also address the enormous women’s hockey talent gap between North America and the rest of the world that the International Olympic Committee says may eventually get the sport cut from the Olympics.
But to attract this talent, the league needs to pay its players, and to pay its players it needs fans in the seats.
Women’s hockey – It’s not just for the Olympics anymore.