Goal Oriented: Telling the Real Stories of Women Hockey Heroes

Supporters of the Professional Women’s Hockey League are ecstatic. The first game at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena set a women's hockey attendance record with a crowd of 19,285. The stories the next day reflected a game that was part sports event, part political rally, part recruitment session.

It’s hard to know how many of those in attendance paid the actual price on their ticket and how many tickets were donated by corporations, charities and sports leagues papering the house. Some were probably Maple Leafs season-ticket holders who got tickets as part of their seat license.

But, hell, they showed up, didn’t they? True. And that’s part of the challenge for the PWHL. They’ve set a high bar that will be tough to sustain as the season rolls along. The media will slavishly pump the PWHL’s tires, but if gaudy attendance numbers dwindle and TV ratings falter people will notice.

As you can see from the breathless CBC coverage you had to read a long way down to even see the score of the event. Because, frankly, that’s not what the PWHL is about for the Canadian media. 

While the players are trying for the umpteenth time to establish women’s hockey as a “thing” in the Canadian sports firmament, Canada’s progressive media are ready to use these attendance figures to make arguments for women’s hockey as “equal pay for work of equal value”. They’ve seen how women’s soccer has leveraged high-visibility events into pressure for a woman to be paid the same as Lionel Messi or Erling Haaland.

The activist U.S. women’s soccer team was relentless in working the media for equal pay despite the fact that their sport draws a small percentage of the revenues generated by men’s soccer. The Title 9 political pressure finally caused governments and sports organizations to give in to the equal-pay narrative. 

Canada’s women’s soccer team has had a tougher time getting the same traction from Canadian soccer officials who have fewer dollars to distribute. And women hockey players will have an even tougher time than that should the PWHL level off in support. For all the attempts to make women’s hockey into an Olympic event the sport is still just Canada and the USA and no one else.

It’s a shame that the storylines for women’s hockey are so constrained by political correctness. Because, even as the NHL’s LGBTQ outreach is restricted to rainbow-coloured tape and Pride jerseys, women’s hockey has fully adapted to openly gay players. At one point the captains of the Canadian and American teams married each other. (The Canadian, Gillian Apps, is the granddaughter of Toronto legend Syl Apps, Sr. and the daughter of NHL star Syl Apps Jr.)

You’d think a story about the challenges of coaching high-level sport when the players are romantically attached would be interesting. (We can remember one newsroom we worked in being shattered when two female colleagues split over a third colleague.)  There have also been stories about romantic relations between female WNBA coaches and their players. The Robert Towne 1982 movie Personal Best vividly portrayed the tempestuous romance of two female track stars aiming for the Olympics.

But the tone of most stories is Hallmark romance stuff. It’s not that women’s hockey doesn’t have its own controversies. In 2023 The Athletic alleged that the women’s hockey program at Harvard “conducted annual ‘Naked Skates’ and pressured underclassmen to mimic sex acts and drink alcohol at ‘Freshmen Fun Night’, among other instances that players within the program considered to be hazing. 

“First-year players were pressured to ‘put condoms on bananas, fake orgasms and act out skills that referenced their sexual orientation’ in some instances, according to the report from Katie Strang and Hailey Salvian. Harvard said that longtime head coach Katie Stone was not involved in the activities. But one player said that “Stone would tell them that ‘there’s not a single thing on this team that goes on that I don’t know about.’” Coach Stone remains with the program. 

But Canadian sports media, unwilling to besmirch the purity of their women’s hockey narrative, largely stay away from sensitive questions that might harm women’s sports. The ultimate goal of the PWHL is to empower young women to take control of their destiny. Using the examples of the PWHL to establish a separate league for young women of all backgrounds and orientations. An admirable goal, indeed. 

Ironically these positive steps forward contrast with radical Feminism’s retreat to the Victorian notion of women as helpless waifs who need to be protected. Gone is libidinous freedom. “In” is victim culture. Men must now assume full responsibility, because even women over 18 no longer have agency to decide their own capacity for consent. The onus is 100 percent on the man.

For instance, the University of Tulsa, among many schools, has decided “that the only person to blame for sexual violence is the perpetrator… An intoxicated person cannot give consent.” The prescription from Gender Studies radicals is checklists and legal documents to protect innocent coeds from predatory men before any hookups.

Hardly the independent dream of feminist pioneers. Or the example of reliance that PWHL is trying to establish. 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.