So what are we to call the nickname-less local club in the fledgling Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL), spawned from the consolidation of two rival organizations?
The Minnesota Whatevers? The Twin Cities TBAs? How about The Purple Gang, after its primary color, though purple might not be the primary color next season?
It’s no help going to practice, where 20-plus players hit the ice at TRIA Rink in St. Paul recently in generic white and black sweaters with the PWHL logo on the front. That’s consistent across the whole six-team circuit, three in the U.S. and three in Canada. Get used to it; fans probably won’t see nicknames and logos when the season begins in early January.
“Obviously, year one is a little bit different,” said Minnesota general manager Natalie Darwitz, the former University of Minnesota standout and a U.S. Hockey Hall of Famer. “In year two you’ll see us build into a brand, a name and a logo.”
This is what happens when a startup league with a deep-pockets benefactor like Mark Walter – CEO of a major global financial services firm, controlling owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and the guy who just gave a record-breaking $700 million free-agent contract to megastar Shohei Ohtani – decides women hockey players have waited long enough to play in a league that’s truly professional, top to bottom.
“When we first started going, very smart people in sports said to me, ‘Stan, you have to put it off a year. You can’t do this,’” he said. “And I knew they weren’t wrong. If you had told me I had to stand up an expansion team in an existing league with an existing hierarchy in six months, I would have told you, that’s nuts.
“We weren’t going to put it off another year. I had made that commitment. Mark had made that commitment to the players who had been fighting for this to so long, not to put it off another year.”
That meant doing everything in haste, with the understanding that some things – like uniforms, logos and nicknames – might not happen.
“I’m glad we took the challenge of standing this league up in six months, because the stuff that’s important – getting the best players, getting them on teams, getting them in places where fans are really going to enjoy them – that we got right,” Kasten said. “It’s not just that it’s historic. What we have done is important. It’s important to this generation of players. It’s important to the generations of players that follow, to female hockey players and all female athletes to have one more place to be professional, if that’s where they want to be.”
All this leads to a whole bunch of questions, which we’ll try to answer.
Hold it. Wasn’t there already a women’s pro hockey league?
Yes. What happened to it is, well, complicated.
True professional women’s hockey in North America – as in, where players are actually paid to play – has only been in existence for eight years. Before that, various semi-pro leagues and teams scuffled along in the U.S. and Canada, populated by college graduates with Olympic aspirations. Crowds were small, gate receipts meager. Players supplied their own equipment and paid out of their pockets for ice time and other expenses.
In 2015, a former college player named Dani Rylan launched the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL), the first North American entity to pay its players. Salaries were modest, $10,000 to $25,000, and Rylan was sketchy about the finances, but at least it was something.
Relations between the two entities remained strained even after Rylan quit as NWHL commissioner in 2020, the NWHL rebranded as the Premier Hockey Federation (PHF) in 2021 and salaries rose. The PWHPA, backed by Walter, acquired the PHF earlier this year.
What happened to the Minnesota Whitecaps?
Founded in 2004 by Jack Brodt and Dwayne Schmidgall to give their daughters a team to play on after college, the Whitecaps – the oldest continually-operating semi-pro or pro club in North American women’s hockey – no longer exist.
Brodt sold the Whitecaps to the NWHL in 2018 when the club was admitted as an expansion team. (The NWHL owned all the franchises at the time, though individuals later purchased the Whitecaps and others.) The Whitecaps won the Isobel Cup championship their first season, selling out every home game at TRIA (capacity 1,200, with 500 season tickets) while becoming the first NWHL team to turn a profit.
The PWHL owns the rights to the names and logos of the seven PHF franchises, though so far it’s shown no inclination to use any of them. Fans widely panned a list of potential new nicknames when they became public.
Technically, there’s still a chance league officials will relent and call the Minnesota franchise the Whitecaps, given the name’s history and positive name recognition. Hold all tickets, as they say at the racetrack.
What makes this league “professional”?
Pay, for starters. The league says player salaries will range from $35,000 to $80,000.
Then, facilities.
Minnesota’s team recently moved into a 23-stall dressing room at TRIA built specifically for them; no more lugging gear to and from their cars. Players get snacks before practice, a catered meal after, and access to TRIA’s off-ice weight training facility. There’s a full complement of coaches and support staff, all paid. USA Hockey provides this level of support for the U.S. National team during camps and Olympic years, but no previous league in North America ever did.
“When we all as a group were looking into what our ideal sort of league would be, there were a couple of things that always stood out, something we’ve all been lucky to do as a national team,” Stecklein said. “I think that’s what we’re seeing already.
“In every itineration of women’s hockey that has come before, we’ve had amazing staff and helpers, but they had to do just because they love hockey and love us. So to have them be able to do this and have it be a career as well is so really awesome.”
So who’s playing on this new Minnesota team?
Lots of Minnesotans and/or U.S. National Team veterans. Besides Stecklein, the 23-player roster includes U.S. Olympians Kendall Coyne Schofield, Maddie Rooney, Nicole Hensley, Grace Zumwinkle and Kelly Pannek, along with U of Minnesota great and Patty Kazmaier Award winner Taylor Heise.
Former Whitecaps captain Sydney Brodt will start the season on injured reserve with a lower body injury sustained in training camp. Another Whitecaps fan favorite, Amanda Leveille, returns in goal.
Darwitz tabbed former Bethel University men’s and women’s coach Charlie Burggraf, who coached Darwitz as a Gophers assistant in the early 2000s, as head coach. Darwitz had two stints as a Gophers assistant and coached Hamline to two Division III Frozen Fours, but felt she had too much to do as GM to coach the team, too.
How good will this team be?
Put it this way: When your third goalie is Rooney, the Minnesota-Duluth standout from Andover who backstopped the U.S. to Olympic gold in 2018, that says a lot about your depth. At the league’s evaluation camp last week in Utica, N.Y., Minnesota won all three of its scrimmages in regulation. (Rules were a little different; each scrimmage featured overtime and a shootout no matter the score.)
Where will Minnesota play, and how do we get tickets?
Minnesota is the only team slated to play home games in an NHL arena (the Xcel Energy Center). The league secured college or college-quality venues for the others.
How does a team sell tickets and get people to follow with no nickname, no logo and only generic merchandise?
That’s business operations director Glen Andresen’s job.
“I really think our wheelhouse will be to get in front of young girls, high school hockey players, youth hockey players and women hockey players,” he said. “My big thing will be to connect our team to those associations and teams across the state. That’s my big priority.
“(The Whitecaps) set a great model for us. I think it’s going to be just personal connections. We’re going to have to reach directly to these teams and associations. We have to think of creative ways to get teams and groups here, to bring in as many kids as we can. We hope the on-ice product will be so great off the top that we’ll get more kids coming to our games and more kids interested in hockey. That helps everybody.”
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