Photos by Billie Winter

“BOOOO!”

“GO HOME, SEATTLE!”

The attempts to establish a rivalry between the Vancouver Goldeneyes and the Seattle Torrent, the two newest additions to the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL), had clearly worked. The playful jeering started the moment the Torrent took the ice on Friday, November 21, for the teams’ inaugural game at Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, BC.

After the showy staff and player introductions, the flashy hype videos, and the national anthems, a man yelled out one more “Fuck Seattle!” for good measure, and the puck dropped. Cheers filled the rafters of the sold-out, 57-year-old arena, where the Vancouver Canucks established their NHL career in 1970, and 14,958 hockey fans witnessed history.

Their game wasn’t perfect. Training camp started just 10 days prior, giving all these players (most of whom have never skated together before) barely a week to find their rhythm, but the crowd didn’t care. A Disney movie couldn’t have written it better.

Seattle scored first, with Julia Gosling collecting the first goal in Torrent history. Three minutes later, after the Goldeneyes had been edging fans by racking up nearly a dozen shots, alternate captain Sarah Nurse tied it up. With less than a minute to go, Gosling struck again. Hilary Knight laid a beautiful body check on Vancouver’s Ashton Bell to grab control of the puck before passing it off to her linemate, who ripped it past Emerance Maschmeyer. And that was just the first period.

The Torrent lost 4-3 in overtime, and though a fair number of Seattle fans had made the trip up north—by the busload, in some cases—no one left disappointed. Everyone was thrilled.

The history of professional women’s hockey in the US and Canada is a dense web, and sorting it all into manageable, bite-sized nuggets of information can make you feel a little bit like Charlie Kelly trying to find Pepe Silvia in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But here’s the gist: Before the PWHL was founded in 2023, there was the Premier Hockey Federation (PHF), which ran from 2015 to 2023. It was the first professional women’s hockey league to pay players a (meager, very meager) salary. The PHF was renamed from the National Women’s Hockey League (1999–2007), which absorbed some teams from the Western Women’s Hockey League (2004–2011) and was renamed from the Central Ontario Women’s Hockey League (1992–1998). There was also the Canadian Women’s Hockey League, founded by former players of the NWHL in 2007. That folded in 2019 after 12 seasons. Do you see what I mean? Carol! Carol! Carol! 

The leagues were always small, and budgets were even smaller. Most didn’t have enough money to pay players, though some did offer stipends when possible. The women often had jobs on the side, and there were few to no resources for the players off-ice. In a story the Victory Press published in 2020, former NWHL players recalled abysmal working conditions, including having to pee in a trash can during practice because they didn’t have access to locker rooms. (A boys’ junior varsity team had dibs.) 

It’s no wonder some people were brought to tears at the sight of professional women’s hockey players finally getting their due, breaking merchandise and season ticket records, being supported by thousands of fervent, passionate fans in a sold-out 15,000-capacity arena on the West Coast of North America, and having access to their own bathrooms. It was about damn time.

***

No one was surprised when Amy Scheer, Executive Vice President of Business Operations for the PWHL, held a press conference at Climate Pledge Arena on April 30 to confirm that Seattle and Vancouver, BC, would be home to the league’s next two expansion teams. Rumors had been swirling that women’s hockey was on the way for months. In January, the PWHL’s Takeover Tour had stops in both Seattle and Vancouver. More than 12,000 hockey fans filled Climate Pledge to see the Boston Fleet beat the Montréal Victoire 3-2 in a shootout, and a whopping 19,000 people filled Vancouver’s Rogers Arena to see the Montréal Victoire take on the Toronto Sceptres. The Pacific Northwest was clearly ready for PWHL action.

What was surprising, however, was the time that both cities had to pull it off. Puck drop was in November. They had 205 days to build an entire professional hockey team, from the ground up.

The PWHL’s first big move in Seattle was hiring general manager Meghan Turner. She had helped launch one of the original PWHL teams, the Boston Fleet, in 2024. A May 21 start date meant her first shot at signing players for the 2025–26 season, during the exclusive signing window and expansion draft, was just two weeks away. She didn’t even have a permanent office space in Seattle. (And still doesn’t, by the way—the Torrent facilities in Northgate are still under construction.)

Still, Turner was able to make a move no one saw coming.

The PWHL 2025 expansion process worked like this: Seattle and Vancouver each got to kickstart their rosters by picking 12 seasoned PWHL players from the six existing teams—Boston Fleet, Minnesota Frost, Montréal Victoire, New York Sirens, Ottawa Charge, and Toronto Sceptres. Each team could protect just three players from being snatched up. The exclusive signing window was first. Starting on June 4, Seattle and Vancouver had four days to sign up to five players each from the pool of players who were left unprotected. Then came the expansion draft on June 8, with the remaining unprotected players. If any of the original six teams had already forfeited two players, they were allowed to protect one more player before Seattle and Vancouver could pick at least seven more players from the pool to bring their roster to 12.

It’s like a game of chess. Because all the teams have different goals and are considering a variety of factors—some known to the public, some not—it’s nearly impossible to predict whose names will end up on the final lists. Drama can ensue. And this year, that drama came on June 3, when the Boston Fleet announced they would not be protecting their team captain (and Team USA captain, Olympic gold medalist, IIHF gold medalist several times over, and literally one of the most decorated hockey players in the world, male or female), Hilary Knight.

The Athletic called it “shocking.” Days later, Fleet GM Danielle Marmer said it “was the hardest decision I’ve ever made in my professional career to date.” Turner, wisely, signed her immediately. On June 4, Knight became the first player in Seattle’s PWHL history.

Knight was as surprised as anyone that Boston left her dangling. At the team’s jersey launch in October, she told me, “When they announced Seattle being an expansion location, I immediately was envious. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, how cool to have a team out there, I wish I could be out there.’ So, subtle foreshadowing. Then the unprotected thing happens, and the opportunity to get out here presented itself. It was like, ‘Yeah, why wouldn’t I do that? That’s kind of everything that I wanted.’

“But on a human level, we had a great room in Boston. We did such a tremendous job building that foundation there, and you know, [there’s] unfinished business, too. I think you get a little remorseful, in that way, leaving friends.”

Turner, for her part, says she didn’t know Knight would be left unprotected either.

“I respect the process, so [I] made sure to remove myself from those conversations as they got going, when I knew that I was in the pipeline for this role,” she said during a preseason media scrum. “I found out when everyone else found out, and we went from there.”

That week, Turner also signed defensive player (and 5-foot-2-inch firecracker) Cayla Barnes, forwards Danielle Serdachny and Alex Carpenter, and goalie Corinne Schroeder. And on June 20, with a few more players in her pocket, Turner hired the franchise’s first head coach, Steve O’Rourke (who’s from British Columbia, but started his hockey career here in Washington with the Tri-City Americans in Kennewick).

Turner has, over and over again (as much as one can do in a few months, anyway), praised O’Rourke for looking to coach a “direct, fast, physical” game. “That’s how we constructed this roster, and what we wanted going into it,” says Turner. “It’s gonna be a physical game, and I expect our opponents to feel it.” To make good on that, they signed Emily Brown, Aneta Tejralová, and Lexie Adzija, three players who all racked up enough hits last season to make it into the league’s top 20.

Now, before anyone can start to regurgitate some brand of “ThEy DoN’t GeT pHySiCaL iN wOmEn’S hOcKeY” nonsense you read on a message board in 2017, let me say this: Yes, they fucking do. PWHL players crunch one another into the boards at full speed to force a turnover, they get scrappy in the crease if someone gets too close to their goalie, and they can deliver a hip check that would make Dan Hamhuis blush.

The Torrent are no different. Less than seven minutes into the inaugural game in Vancouver, rookie Jenna Buglioni performed a picture-perfect shoulder check on Vancouver’s Michelle Karvinen. Karvinen fell to the ice, and Buglioni was visibly annoyed when she was called for an illegal body check.

Seattle’s Megan Carter left a mark, too. In the third period, when Vancouver’s alternate captain Sarah Nurse got the puck and tried to skate through Carter while charging the net, Carter stood her ground, and they both went flying through the air. During a replay of the move, commentator (and Olympic gold medalist hockey player) Becky Kellar remarked, “Woof, that’s a big, strong girl, taking Sarah Nurse out.”

Minutes later, Carter, who was clearly displeased that Vancouver’s Gabby Rosenthal fell into Seattle goalie Corinne Schroeder while attempting to score off a rebound, tugged at Rosenthal’s sweater hard enough that she started pulling it up and over her head. Rosenthal rose to her feet, and Carter shoved her a bit more to ensure she got the message: Stay away from the fucking goalie.

Carter delivered six hits that night, the most on either team.

“This is such a physical league, and a lot of girls on this team have been around the league enough to know that you’ve got to use the body, you’ve got to play physical,” said the Torrent’s alternate captain, Emily Brown, at Sunday morning practice after the season opener. “I think a lot of us embrace that, too, and really enjoy it.

“Even before the formal checking rules were put in place, we’ve always been teetering—‘Where’s the line? How hard can we push it?’ I mean, you look back five to 10 years to look at the US-Canada rivalry, that’s not a gentle game, ever. But I love it, I love a little physical spice.”

O’Rouke liked what he saw Friday night, too. Though the Torrent lost in overtime, he still praised the team for roughing their opponents up a bit. “That’s gonna be our trademark,” he said during the postgame press conference. “We want to have an identity that’s hard to play against, and I thought we established that tonight. Bugs [Buglioni] took a nice big penalty, showed what her physicality is, and her style of play. That’s where we’re gonna go, that’s how we’re gonna play the game.”

These players are just as physical as NHL players. They may only have 30 games a season (for now), but they put their bodies on the line night after night, all the same. On Friday, Torrent forward Aneta Tejralová had to be helped off the ice after taking a hard hit against the boards, and her leg appeared to twist in a direction a leg should not twist. She attempted to play another shift or two after assessing her injury, but the Torrent eventually announced she’d be out the rest of the game. At press time, she was still out with a lower-body injury.

There is one glaring difference between the PWHL and the NHL, but it’s off the ice. For the 2025–26 season, the PWHL’s salary cap is $1.3 million per team. In the NHL, it’s $95.5 million. The PWHL’s cap will increase by 3 percent every season as part of the PWHL’s collective bargaining agreement, and there are restrictions on how a team can distribute it. The minimum annual salary this season is $37,131.50 (up from $35,000 last year), and at least five players have to make at least $80,000. Players do get some money if they need to relocate, a $1,600 per month housing stipend, and meal per diems for road games. Teams also get bonuses when they make the playoffs. But no one is in women’s hockey to get rich. In November, KOMO reported that “a single adult needs to earn $135,265 annually to maintain a comfortable lifestyle in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area.”

That $1.3 million season salary cap means that the $29,400,000 contract Seattle Kraken defenseman Vince Dunn signed in 2023 could fund the entire PWHL’s eight-team roster for two years and still have several million left over to add a few expansion teams.

Still, the fan base—and therefore the amount of money coming in—is growing. PWHL merch sales doubled from season one to season two, according to league statistics, and “Seattle set the record for highest first-day jersey sales of any team at launch.” Seattle and Vancouver brought in more than 5,000 season ticket member deposits each, and, as of September, the league has sold more season tickets in every city than ever before. During a business conference in September, Dodgers CEO Stan Kasten, who’s also a member of the four-person governing board of the PWHL, said, “We are going to be adding more teams much sooner than other people thought because the demand is there, the players are there.”

***

Professional women’s hockey in Seattle may have felt like a long time coming, but this is just the start of what will hopefully be a very long, exhilarating journey. Management and marketing meetings only take a team so far; who the Seattle Torrent become now is largely up to us, the city, the fans. And the PWHL didn’t choose Seattle as their next expansion city by shooting a puck at a map and seeing where it hit. They knew exactly what they were doing, said Amy Scheer during a media scrum ahead of the team’s first game.

“Seattle’s interesting. Having worked in the WNBA for so many years and running the New York Liberty business, as a league, you always look to other teams and [ask yourself], who do you want to be, who do you not want to be, and everybody always wanted to be Seattle. Because you go to Seattle, and the Storm games were always full, and they had so much support from the get-go. Seattle just does such a wonderful job supporting their women’s teams. It was almost like, ‘Hey, Captain Obvious, you must come here.’”

Now, we get to see where Seattle takes it. What taunts will fans yell after the Torrent score on the opposing goalie? What rallying cry will echo through Climate Pledge’s rafters when the team is down by one with a minute left in the third period? What song will play after the Torrent score, and what kind of cheer will fans weave into it? Will the crowd emphasize a word from the National Anthem, like when Kraken fans bellow “RED GLARE!” as a nod to the team’s crimson-eyed logo? Will anyone make a tradition of throwing some kind of seafood—why is it always seafood—onto the ice?

The culture of this team will grow in the fan base, game by game. They’ll decide if that rivalry with Vancouver pans out, or if we’ll take a longer, harder look at Boston and decide that Bean Town, former home of the Torrent’s GM and two of the team’s three leadership players, is Enemy #1. They’ll decide which players will earn endearing nicknames that end up on merchandise, in commercials, or even in mayoral campaigns. Who will be Seattle’s next Sir P, Big Dumper, or DB?

Only after hockey fans from across the region crowd into Climate Pledge, after the puck drops and the songs play, can a fandom’s identity come to fruition organically, in a way even the best marketing teams could never predict.

And it’s clear the fans are ready. They’re hungry for it. Jen Barnes, owner of sports bar Rough & Tumble in Ballard, said sales of their Knight’s Cheese Curds, named after Hilary Knight when the pub opened in 2022, increased 26 percent when Knight signed with the Torrent. Now Barnes has to order about 60 pounds of curds a week to keep them in stock.

And all those cheers for the Goldeneyes after they won Friday’s game? They were for Seattle, too. They were for women’s hockey, period. That was clear by all the little girls waving their “Hockey is for everyone” and “Everybody watches women’s sports” signs in the air. 

Which isn’t to say there isn’t die-hard team loyalty when the puck is in play. At one point, in Friday’s game, Seattle’s Hannah Bilka ricocheted the puck into the net off Vancouver goalie Emerance Maschmeyer, and the Torrent players on the ice cheered. There was commotion. From one angle, it looked like it hit the post but didn’t cross the line. Referee Kyle Bauman waved it off. Torrent players pleaded for a review, and the crowd joined in the debate. Pockets of Seattle fans screamed “Good goal!” as the moment replayed on the Jumobotron. Swaths of Goldeneyes supporters replicated the ref’s “no goal” hand signals.

After several minutes of review—and several minutes of 15,000 fans pleading their case—referee Bauman walked back his initial call. It was a good goal. Goldeneyes fans booed and jeered. The Torrent had taken the lead. I heard another “Fuck you, Seattle!” ring out and chuckled. God, I love hockey.