Finally, The Walter Cup

June 7, 2024

It took way longer than it needed to.

I spent much time during May watching the PWHL Professional Women’s Hockey League playoffs play out. I am amazed at the amount of time I am spending watching women play sports. I never used to be interested in this kind of thing at all.

But the Walter cup was hoisted, last week already, and I need to get this completed and posted. One very big reason for my interest has been the unusual story behind this. It is a league which was actually created by the players.

I really like a story where people take initiative and create things for themselves. Yet there is a downside to this tale. The Players association, PWHPA, almost ruined it for themselves. This aspect to the story is mostly covered over by the coverage of the league.

I have written a lot about the development of PWHL. I will likely write less in future about it. The story is now essentially complete.

This piece will briefly review and summarize what has been going on. Then I will put the cap on it with the first league championship.

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Back in ye olden days, women often played ice hockey. Then it started to get rough, turn into a goon game with participants losing most of their teeth. In the 80’s the sport got cleaned up. Helmets and body protection were required.

So women gradually started playing again. But they needed places to play. There has been a long struggle to build leagues at all levels. Girls who wanted to be hockey stars were told they were supposed to want to be figure skaters.

The IIHF, International Ice Hockey Federation, began holding women’s tournaments in 1990. Women’s ice hockey became an olympic sport in 1998. The USA and Canadian teams have never finished outside the medals.

Women’s college teams emerged. Women began getting sports scholarships in ice hockey.

Little girls started demanding to be allowed to play hockey. In many places they merely played on boy’s teams until age twelve. Girl’s leagues formed at all age levels and local rinks were compelled to reserve space for girl’s teams.

Soon there was an abundance of lady hockey players. The skill level has kept rising. However, after college, unless they made the national teams, there was nowhere for the best of them to play.

There has been a need for a professional league for a long time. This was likely to happen first in North America and particularly in Canada. Canada has the biggest pool of girls registered to play. Hockey is not a ‘niche’ game in Canada, but is considered the ‘national sport’.

However, there has been one very big obstacle to establishing this professional league. Discussing it is the main theme of this essay.

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It is generally understood that there can be only one professional league in a sport in any country. Fans demand to see the best players gathered into one league. This is shown to hold true with women’s leagues as well.

Women’s sports leagues are a generally new phenomena. It is shown that they can be highly profitable. There is some discussion about how to get them established.

There is growing evidence that starting them as adjuncts to men’s teams tends not to work well. There are successful women’s basketball and soccer leagues in the USA, which after some dramatics, have had to separate from men’s organizations to work properly.

It is also shown that there must be some money and expertise behind a league. You cannot just start it on a wing and a prayer and hope it works out.

A problem with getting a hockey league going, based in Canada, has been the fixed idea that it has to be run by the NHL. The NHL has always been very uninterested in a women’s league. They seem to think it would not make them enough money and so is not worth bothering about.

NHL is really a sleaze ball organization. Its business model is centred on owning big white elephant hockey arenas in the middle of every city. The local government must give them huge tax breaks and subsidies or the team owner threatens to move the team.

The NHL organizational structure is based on one very wealthy team owner in every ‘market’; every city. They are focussed on ticket sales. They seem to see television revenues as something secondary.

Lately this business model has not been working so well. The league seems to have over expanded. Many teams are losing money and are organizationally dysfunctional.

NHL is always full of scandals. Entitled punk players cause sexual harassment and assault cases. Injuries caused or exacerbated by official negligence are then covered up. Officiating is often rigged to insure more convenient outcomes, such as keeping losing teams in contention longer.

This generally sets a bad tone for the sport. However, a women’s team must come from NHL, like Adam’s rib, or so it was thought. They have the big arenas, the publicity machines, all the other infrastructure.

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I first started tracking women’s hockey in 2014. I watched the amazing gold medal olympic game, where Canada came back from being down two goals with two minutes on the clock. I heard that the Canadian team played in something called the CWHL, Canadian Women’s Hockey League, when they were not winning international gold medals.

I had trouble tracking down this organization. I finally caught up with them and began watching those games I could reach. The tickets were very cheap.

I was saddened that the players were not paid anything to play. They had to play in really bad conditions. Worse, nothing at all was being done to promote the league. It was like a national secret.

The CWHL had started in 2007. I am not a hockey historian, but it seems CWHL was the latest of a succession of amateur leagues intended to give women a place to play hockey. They kept falling apart because they were not fiscally viable. Yet people kept trying to set up something new on the fly.

CWHL was thrown together after the previous iteration, called NWHL, collapsed. It seems the western teams did not want to keep spending money to travel east for games. It had the same problem as previous efforts in that it was organized as a non profit.

The Governor General of Canada, dear old Adrienne Clarkson, had an idea to encourage girl’s hockey by sponsoring a cup which the new league could play for. It might not have been a good idea to encourage this mode of organization.

The cup itself had a troubled history. A group of aboriginal artists in the North West Territories were commissioned to create it. They thought they were not paid enough, so they held onto it for several years.

The problem with a non profit as a hockey league is that it cannot take in advertising revenue or sponsorships. So, there is not enough money to run things. Everything was on a shoe string with the staff trying to do five jobs at once.

A common problem with non profits is they tend to become the personal empires of one manager or a small clique. It is focussed on creating and perpetuating a safe job for these people. That was part of the problem with CWHL.

A few stratagems were tried to get out of the revenue dilemma. Partnerships were attempted with other organizations. The Chinese put some money into the league in order to train their own national team. However, flying back and forth between China is expensive.

In 2015, CWHL got into some kind of deal with an ‘entrepreneur’ who would start up a new team in the league, in a way that would bring in some money. Instead, this chancer decided to just start her own league.

This league was originally called, like several leagues before it, NWHL. It was described as a ‘startup’. This meant, started up by someone on the hustle, with no money behind her.

This was the ‘startup’ era in American business, fueled by zero interest money. Any scheme could find investors willing to put a little cheap money into it in hopes that something would come out of it. The expectation of NWHL always seemed to be that NHL would eventually buy it out at a good price.

NWHL, later called PHF, Premier Hockey Federation, was garbage. Players had no insurance. There was a suspicion that the contracts they signed would have made them liable for the league’s debt if it folded. It was constantly running short of money, and cutting salaries of staff and the expense allowances of players.

Working conditions made CWHL seem luxurious by comparison. National team players generally despised it. Very few played in it.

The best players, if they ever played outside universities and the national teams, played in CWHL. However, these also seemed to operate under the delusion that eventually uncle NHL was going to take them under his wing and get a real league going.

NHL has never had any interest in a women’s hockey league and never will. However, they seem to have a policy of stringing women’s leagues along, just in case they develop into something which might interfere with their own revenues.

One line they ran is that they did not want to start a league while another was in operation. This was a nonsense. There was always going to be women’s league of some kind; they weren’t going to just stop laying in hope that NHL would then come up with something.

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CWHL abruptly collapsed in 2019, right after the Chinese federation withdrew support. The news landed on the key players when they were in Finland competing at world’s. The manager who failed for ten years to put the league on a more sound basis had left the organization a few months before, leaving her interim replacement to break the news.

For a few months, the cretins at PHF acted like they had won the world and started making expansion plans. However, the CWHL players quickly came up with a new plan. They founded the professional Women’s Hockey Player’s Association PWHPA.

PWHPA, benefitting from past experience, did not try to create another league. They organized a series of ‘barnstorm’ exhibition matches to advertise their abilities and keep themselves in practice. They also began a systematic search for real investors who could set up a real league which met their basic conditions.

People liked this story and PWHPA soon had plenty of sponsors and fans. However, there was a less edifying side to this. It is ignored or glossed over in most coverage of the league.

Much of the membership still could not get off the idea that a league could only come about under the auspices of the NHL. Some even started to think they should unite with PHF to create a bigger pool of sponsorships. This despite a good option quickly becoming available.

The tennis star Billy Jean King had become a very wealthy investor in sports. She had a record of building up women’s sports organizations. Early on, she expressed a keen interest in PWHPA. She drew in other real investors, with real money.

It is a tribute to the patience these people had, and the faith in the potential of a women’s hockey league, that they were willing to wait while the players got NHL out of their systems. A long, secretive, three way negotiation process went on for four years. PWHPA people were always convinced that a breakthrough was imminent.

Early in 2023 the crunch point finally came. PHF had found some more investors/ suckers. They could pay meagre salaries for awhile.

Some PWHPA players were going over to PHF just to play more and have some money coming in. Sponsors had become concerned about the lack of progress and were starting to pull back. The PWHPA project was going to have to take the best option available or start to disintegrate.

There was a climactic meeting between PHF, NHL, and PWHPA. The representatives of the latter left the meeting very angry. They were finally ready to put plan B into effect.

At this point PHF knew that the game was up. They folded, leaving a lot of people in the lurch. PWHL paid them a small sum to go away and not cause further disruption.

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The investor group King had put together had clearly been doing some planning in this time. Once the PWHPA agreed, things proceeded very rapidly. A contract was agreed to between the new owners and PWHPA, which from then on would act as a player’s union.

Six teams were established and six managers appointed. These had weeks to assemble staff. A player’s draft was organized, and teams assembled and began practicing. A league rule book was drawn up.

The first puck dropped on January 1, 2024. From the start almost every game was sold out. From the start, coverage of games, by PWHL’s own production group, was excellent. Sponsorships and advertising have been rolling in.

PWHL is a good example of how capitalism works when it is working right. I agree with the Chinese that there is no particular problem with capitalism as an economic system, when combined with socialism. It is only unacceptable as a political system and ideology.

Note, however, that PWHL is not an exemplar of workplace democracy. For decades, the players made every mistake possible. They finally gained clarity about what they really needed and realized it was right there waiting for them.

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The players are now clearly very happy with what they have. They can make a living doing what they like. The only catch is, PWHL will continue to be very hard to get into. There is a large talent pool now, and limited spots on the teams.

The fans, old ones like me now, and newer ones, are liking what they see. The differences between the teams are small, and it is impossible to predict who will win any one game. The games are intense and exciting, and usually close.

The players themselves are often old TikTok hands, good at making short videos. They create very entertaining intermission content about life as a pro hockey player.

I think the owners, King, Kloss, and Walter, are liking what they have created. They have a business model well suited to this type of league, and to these times. They are staying away from the real estate business. They understand that the real money in pro sports is increasingly, these days, in televising the events.

I will keep watching on television. The only thing which saddens me is that I will likely never see another live hockey game. It is not just the never ending menace of covid, for old and wheezy people like me.

PWHL is now charging pretty steep for tickets. It is not like in the CWHL days, when I would pay fifteen dollars and there would be a dozen people in the stands. Some of the players would even recognize me and wave, and I would wave back.

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Everyone wondered what trophy the teams would finally be playing for. Many wanted the Clarkson cup dusted off. But instead we got the Walter cup, designed and made by Tiffany’s, no less.

So it looks like “Clarkie” is in the museum for good. Some people are sad about that. To me, that cup is really a symbol of failure.

As for the Isobel cup, which the PHF commissioned and awarded, no one seems to know where it is now. Given the way those people rolled, it was likely silver plated pot metal. It should be sold for scrap.

So it seems the Walter cup will be the prize for women’s hockey from here forward. It is the symbol of finally getting things right.

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Now that the first season is over, I can make some comments and conclusions about it. I am not interested in being a hockey commentator. Ice Garden and Victory Press do that much better.

There is always a lot to say on this topic. I wrote a piece about it only a few weeks back. This one is really a continuation of that one.

I will not go very far into it, because this piece is long enough. But just this shortened season has been a drama full of twists and surprises. The teams were all thrown together very fast, and were not very predictable. Any one of them could beat any other on a given day.

At the start, everyone bet on Minnesota to win the cup. Of course, they are the ‘“state of hockey”. They had Drew’s mom playing for them.

Minnesota struggled through the regular season but started to click after the return from the world championships. They got into the playoffs. Then to everyone’s amazement, they eliminated Toronto 3-2, out of a ‘best of five’ series.

Everyone predicted at the start that Toronto would be at the bottom of the league. Everyone knows that Toronto is the city of losers. I predicted they would win the cup because the core of the team was the Canadian national team, including the coach.

Toronto lost the first game ever in the league, 0-4. They lost the next few. Then they went on an eleven game winning streak. They finished the regular season on top of the league. Natalie Spooner was the league’s top scorer.

Then they went against Minnesota. Spooner went out with a bad injury. Team Toronto seemed to fall apart after that. It lost the series 2-3. It is baffling that one player can make so much difference on a team.

Boston had also struggled all season, then also snapped together at the end and got into the playoffs. They defeated Montreal in a “three game sweep”. Then they beat Minnesota in their first game.

Minnesota snapped together and won games two and three. Then in game four, Boston won an epic battle with Minnesota. It was scoreless through two periods of overtime, eighty minutes of play.

Then something happened to the Bostonians in game five. They lost 0-3. So the Mighty Minnesotans hoisted the Walter cup.

Mommie Kendell Coyne-Schofield, the fastest skater in hockey, team captain of Minnesota, sat little Drew in the cup. What an ending!

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The only thing left is to decide names for these teams. I have made a couple of suggestions. Maybe ‘Torontosaurus Rex’ is a little off the wall. I will go with my original suggestion of ‘Toronto Unity’.

If that is too abstract for people, we could call them ‘Toronto Raccoons’. They are the official animals of Toronto, are they not? 

Is it not appropriate? Everyone loves to hate Raccoons. Everyone loves to hate Toronto.

I expect they will have this sorted out by next September.

I will not write anything about PWHL until next spring at least. I will likely write something about the Olympics. Writing about women athletes is a break from the grim topics I usually blog about.