It’s been a month for the reason that finish of the Beijing Winter Olympics. It’s normally the time when sports activities which get public adulation as soon as each 4 years angle for extra consideration.
After which, there’s the world of ladies’s ice hockey.
For the reason that mid-2010s, ladies’s professional hockey gamers have been competing below two separate flags, each of which have modified over time.
Again in 1999, a Canadian-center ladies’s league referred to as the Nationwide Girls’s Hockey League was shaped. It aimed to be a coast-to-coast circuit all through Canada. The issue is, the salaries and different advantages have been a pittance compared to their NHL bretheren. The NWSL developed into the Canadian Girls’s Hockey League in 2007, gaining increasingly national-team ladies and enjoying a fairly good stage of hockey.
By 2015, a second American-centered league calling itself the Nationwide Girls’s Hockey League took to the ice, aiming to pay a better price of wage and advantages. A few years in the past, the league took on a brand new identify, the Premier Hockey Federation, and doubled crew wage caps from $150,000 to $300,000 per crew.
The ladies from the Canadian Girls’s Hockey League noticed their league dissolve in 2019, and the gamers from the league have been enjoying in quite a few cities throughout North America because the Skilled Girls’s Hockey Gamers’ Affiliation (PWHPA). The affiliation boasts gamers like American stars Hilary Knight and Kendell Coyne-Schofield and Canadian gold medalists Saran Nurse and Natalie Spooner.
Bringing the 2 sides collectively are the individuals who run and fund the NHL. The rationale why I point out “and fund” is that there are hundreds of thousands of {dollars} at stake on each side. The PHF’s wage cap has been rumored to be raised to greater than $700,000 for subsequent season, and there’s supposedly a PHWPA professional deal for upwards of eight to 10 years and within the multimillion-dollar vary.
A merger of the Premier Federation and the Gamers’ Affiliation may wind up being an infinite profit to ladies’s ice hockey as as skilled assemble.
However I don’t have the most effective feeling concerning the skilled males’s league, the NHL, coming in to be the knight in shining armor. I at all times thought that the easiest way for professional ladies’s ice hockey to develop is a league by ladies and for girls.
And but, sticks aren’t low cost. Neither are pads, helmets, pucks, or ice time. I simply hope that, no matter circuit comes out of those negotiations, it will likely be a sustainable league with individuals prepared to return out to see these world-class athletes on both aspect of the border.
