Antecedents and the PWHPA Top-level and professional women's hockey in North America has developed in starts and stops since the late twentieth century. The
National Women's Hockey League (NWHL) launched in 1999, featuring teams mainly in
Ontario and
Quebec. Some teams from
Western Canada competed intermittently, but a
Western Women's Hockey League was formed in 2004. The
Canadian Women's Hockey League (CWHL) effectively replaced the NWHL and ran for twelve seasons, from 2007 to 2019, with teams competing for the
Clarkson Cup. The CWHL, which operated on a non-profit basis, did not pay player salaries, but it did at times offer stipends and bonuses as it aspired to become a professional league. However, the league lacked financial stability and it abruptly folded in 2019. A new National Women's Hockey League—later renamed the
Premier Hockey Federation (PHF)—which did offer player salaries, was established in the United States in 2015, before expanding into Canada in 2020. However, after the dissolution of the CWHL, hundreds of prominent women's players, including Canadian and American Olympians, founded the
Professional Women's Hockey Players' Association (PWHPA) and opted to boycott existing leagues in pursuit of a unified, financially stable professional league. In the meantime, the PWHPA attracted partnerships with corporate sponsors and
National Hockey League teams, organizing exhibition tournaments to generate support for their goal. In 2022, the PWHPA entered a partnership with the Mark Walter Group and BJK Enterprises—led by
Los Angeles Dodgers owner
Mark Walter and
Billie Jean King, respectively—with the intent to launch a new professional league. In 2023, the two business partners purchased the assets of the PHF, which ceased operations. The PWHPA negotiated a
collective bargaining agreement ahead of the launch of the new professional league the union had been working towards.
Founding and inaugural season The establishment of the Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL) was announced by the Mark Walter Group in August 2023, along with the location of its six charter teams: Boston, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Montreal, New York City, Ottawa, and Toronto. Teams began constructing their rosters that summer, with an initial ten-day
free agency period to sign three players.
Emily Clark,
Brianne Jenner, and
Emerance Maschmeyer became the league's first players when they signed with
Ottawa. The
inaugural draft took place in September at the
Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto, where
Minnesota chose
Taylor Heise as the first pick in a fifteen-round, ninety-player draft from a pool of 286 eligible players. The league announced that, due to time constraints, the teams would not be given nicknames until after the inaugural season, and would wear
jerseys featuring the name of the teams' locales in a diagonal wordmark. 's first home game was one of four during the first season that set professional women's ice hockey attendance records. Prior to the start of the
inaugural season, all six teams congregated at the
Utica University Nexus Center in early December for a five-day evaluation camp, including scrimmages used to experiment with new rules. The first game took place on January 1, 2024, when
Toronto hosted
New York at the
Mattamy Athletic Centre. New York's
Ella Shelton scored the league's first goal en route to a 4–0 win. The game's Canadian television audience of 2.9 million viewers was the largest for a sports or entertainment broadcast that day, beating the
2024 NHL Winter Classic. The attendance record for a professional women's ice hockey match would be set multiple times during the ensuing season: 8,318 at Ottawa's first home game at
TD Place Arena on January 2; 13,316 at Minnesota's first home game at the
Xcel Energy Center on January 6; 19,285 at the inaugural "Battle on Bay Street" at
Scotiabank Arena on February 16; and 21,105 at the "Duel at the Top" at the
Bell Centre on April 20. The latter two drew the largest ever crowds for women's ice hockey, surpassing the 18,013 that watched Canada play Finland at the
2013 Women's World Championship. Minnesota defeated Toronto in a five-game series, while Boston defeated Montreal in three straight games, with every decision coming in overtime. In the final, Minnesota defeated Boston in a five-game series to capture the first Walter Cup championship.
Natalie Spooner was the league's first scoring champion and the inaugural winner of the league's Billie Jean King Most Valuable Player award, while
Taylor Heise led the playoffs in scoring and was given postseason MVP honours.
2025 expansion teams Prior to the start of the 2024–25 season, the league announced that it was exploring expansion, opening up a process for proposals and stating that it would ultimately look to add two new teams when possible; by November 2024, the league had received more than two dozen expansion proposals. On April 18, 2025, reports suggested that the first new expansion team would be in
Vancouver, with
Seattle reportedly a top choice for the second. On April 23, 2025, the league announced that Vancouver would receive the first expansion team in league history, with the team playing home games at the
Pacific Coliseum beginning in the 2025–26 season. One week later, on April 30, the league announced that Seattle would receive the second expansion team for the 2025–26 season, with the team playing home games at
Climate Pledge Arena, home of the NHL's
Seattle Kraken, who will have a supporting role with the team after supporting its expansion bid. On May 21, the PWHL named Meghan Turner as
general manager for the Seattle team. Two days later, on May 23rd, the PWHL named
Cara Gardner Morey as the GM for the Vancouver team. ==Organization==