Skilled ladies's hockey: May it work in Vancouver?

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There’s little doubt of the desire to make ladies’s skilled hockey work in North America.

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However how a lot of that may is there in Vancouver?

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Vancouver has a powerful historical past of supporting ladies in sports activities. And there have been efforts twenty years in the past to convey ladies’s professional hockey to Vancouver, with a squad first known as the Griffins, then later known as the Breakers.

What was as soon as known as the Western Girls’s Hockey League was even headquartered within the Decrease Mainland at one level.

However as ladies’s professional hockey has advanced into its current type — with a seven-team circuit known as the Premier Hockey Federation (PHF) primarily based in Japanese North America and a rival group, centralized across the Skilled Girls’s Hockey Gamers’ Affiliation (PWHPA) — Vancouver is never, if ever, within the dialogue anymore.

And as you discuss to folks across the ladies’s recreation, a transparent query emerges: who could be the champion for such a group in Vancouver? Minor league sports activities want house owners who’re able to sink their money into an endeavour, not as a result of they actually assume they’ll make a return, however just because they imagine within the venture.

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The Griffins/Breakers have been bankrolled by a pair of native businessmen, Gary Berman and Len Edmondson. Neither appears concerned in hockey anymore. However the idea is there; a brand new proprietor might come from anyplace.

“It will be somebody to construct the second, to create that buzz,” one veteran Vancouver sports-watcher informed Postmedia. “That was a part of the problem of the 2030 Olympic factor and in contrast to the the 2010 bid, if you had Gordon Campbell or initially Glen Clark.”

“For a ladies’s hockey group, I don’t know who that will be.”

Past the query of who may be a neighborhood investor, there’s the query of “what league to hitch?”

Spencer Gillis is a participant agent for plenty of gamers within the PHF and he’s skeptical whether or not both league would look to Vancouver for enlargement.

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“In my view it’s simply too costly, with the journey,” he informed Postmedia.

“The PHF has seven groups however they’re all fairly shut. PWHPA, looks like it may be just a little extra unfold out.”

The PWHPA is predicted to launch a six-team circuit subsequent fall, bankrolled by Billie Jean King Enterprises and the house owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Stan Kasten and Mark Walter.

It’s anticipated that one of many groups can be in Los Angeles. Sportsnet’s Jeff Marek urged earlier this 12 months that the league would have 4 American groups and two Canadian groups.

“When you’ve got a group in L.A., it could make sense to have a western Canada group,” Gillis mentioned. 

“However then you definately’re flying industrial, in order that’s an enormous price. I don’t know the way it will go. You may go to Calgary over Vancouver due to the Olympic hub there.”

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The PHF is the successor to the U.S.-based Nationwide Girls’s Hockey League, whereas the PWHPA has a connection to the defunct Canadian Girls’s Hockey League (CWHL), which collapsed in 2019 after 12 years of play.

The CWHL by no means paid correct salaries, simply bonuses. The NWHL, which now boasts groups in Montreal and Toronto, in addition to 5 American groups, pays salaries, however PWHPA supporters argue their mannequin is much from complete or sustainable.

“It’s important to play on the highest degree. The expectation is that there’s no weak spot. It must be across the clock,” defined Marlène Boissonnault, a 25-year-old goalie from New Brunswick who has signed on with the PWHPA.

Boissonault was talking forward of the PWHPA-sponsored Scotiabank Women HockeyFest, which occurred earlier this month in Burnaby.

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“The folks concerned are so dedicated and united to that one similar aim. Everybody could be very invested,” she mentioned.

“That is about having insurance coverage. Having constant entry to a dressing room, to a coaching facility. We’re not going small. You’ve received to stroll the discuss. You possibly can’t simply throw out the phrase skilled — there must be infrastructure.”

There are many examples of how profitable skilled ladies’s sports activities will be.

Final 12 months, 91,000 followers watched Spanish giants Barcelona host German powerhouse Wolfsburg in a ladies’s Champions League soccer match. Italy’s feminine groups repeatedly draw almost 40,000 followers to video games.

“All of the sports activities have the identical values. All of us need the identical factor all of us wish to be organized,” Boissonault mentioned.

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Followers will end up if ladies’s professional hockey is finished appropriately, that’s clear. And when that occurs, Boissonault is aware of there’ll solely be optimistic suggestions.

“Once I first began I by no means had the entry to see different ladies taking part in. There was just one different lady on my group,” she recalled.

“I wish to present that visibility to the youthful athlete, about pleasure and variety.”

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