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PWHL Begins Expansion Process for up to Two More Teams

eben novy-williams
·3 min read

The PWHL is looking to add two more franchises to begin as early as 2025, a quick expansion for the women’s hockey league that began play last year.

The league is launching a request for proposal (RFP) process for prospective new clubs, according to Amy Scheer, the PWHL’s senior vice president of business operations. They’ve asked groups to submit plans for how the single-entity league, financed initially by Mark and Kimbra Walter, might best open up to new fans, partners and athletes.

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“Expansion is the first question we get asked, at every event we’re at,” Scheer said in an interview. “It just seems like the right time to look into it. And I think once we have these conversations and understand what the real interest is, we’ll understand if this is the right time or not. But it was the right time to put the word out.”

The PWHL’s teams don’t have “owners” in the way that single-entity structures like MLS or NWSL do—each team has a business director and staff, all employed by the league—and this RFP process does not include expansion fees that are common in those leagues. Instead, the PWHL is hoping to evaluate markets on a handful of criteria: 1) market size and media reach, 2) available facilities and infrastructure, 3) local economic opportunity and corporate sponsorship leads, and 4) community fan base and youth hockey presence. Scheer said the RFP’s respondents could be arenas themselves, city governments or individuals that have a facility plan.

Expansion will also add space for the PWHL to attract more of the best women’s players in the world. Current rosters are 23 active players per team, plus three reserves, for a total of 156 athletes. There’s been increased interest from European players, according to Jayna Hefford, SVP of hockey operations, and the NCAA has one more year of graduating a larger class of seniors due to the extra year of eligibility granted during COVID.

“Starting with six teams, we knew it was going to be very difficult to make a roster,” Hefford said in an interview. “The depth of talent is really high right now. So from a hockey point of view, we want to make sure we can match that level. If there are good female hockey players out there, we want them in the league.”

Born out of years of instability in North American women’s professional hockey, the PWHL formed in 2023 after Walter’s firm purchased assets from the Premier Hockey Federation (PHF) and reached an agreement with athletes in the Professional Women’s Hockey Players’ Association (PWHPA). The PHF had seven teams in North America and operated for almost a decade, but the PWHPA included many of the sport’s biggest names, members of the U.S. and Canadian national teams that had refused to play in the league over concerns about the level of investment. The creation of the PWHL was the final consolidated entity that many around the sport had desired for years.

The PWHL’s advisory board includes former tennis players Ilana Kloss and Billie Jean King; Dodgers president Stan Kasten and Dodgers SVP Royce Cohen.

The PWHL launched with its inaugural six teams last year, each playing with a generic name of their home market: Toronto, Boston, Montreal, Ottawa, New York and Minnesota. In September, they released their team names and logos. The 2024-25 season starts next month.

The league is hoping to have proposals in hand by the end of the year, with decisions coming in 2025.

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