PWHL announces expansion to Vancouver for 2025-26 season: ‘A great day for women’s sport’

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The Professional Women’s Hockey League officially announced its first expansion franchise will be in Vancouver, with the team set to debut in time for the 2025-26 season.

The team, which was unveiled as PWHL Vancouver at a news conference on Wednesday, will play at Pacific Coliseum, the former home of the WHL’s Vancouver Giants and the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks.

“It is a momentous day for us,” said executive vice president of business operations Amy Scheer. “Each day we’re so grateful and appreciative of how the fans and the cities have embraced us.

“To be able to grow this fast is just a testament to the great sport, our great athletes, and how people feel about the work that we’re doing and what our players are putting out on the ice.”

The team will use the adjacent Agrodome as its main practice facility. Both arenas will undergo renovations with comprehensive upgrades to locker rooms and training facilities. A new centre-hung scoreboard will also be added to the Coliseum, said Scheer. Those upgrades are being funded by PNE, which is owned by the City of Vancouver, as part of a larger capital improvement plan for the venues.

“This is a great day for women’s sport in Vancouver, and a great day for professional hockey at the PNE,” said PNE president and CEO Shelley Frost in a press release. “We are honoured to have worked with the PWHL to be chosen host venue for this expansion franchise, and we are thrilled to support driving professional women’s sport in this city and at the Pacific Coliseum, a beloved venue continuing to deliver memorable player and guest experiences.”

PWHL Vancouver will be the primary tenant at both facilities, a first for the league with most teams playing at professional or minor hockey rinks where they do not get priority dates.

The PWHL currently has six existing franchises in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Boston, New York and Minnesota. The teams played the inaugural season with market-specific team names (PWHL Toronto, for example) and played with boilerplate jerseys. The league and its teams are owned by Mark Walter, the billionaire owner of MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers, and his wife, Kimbra.

According to the release, the league’s newest franchise will operate as PWHL Vancouver until its real name and branding are unveiled.

There is currently no timeline for that announcement. However, the league did reveal that the Vancouver team’s primary colour will be “pacific blue,” with cream as its secondary colour.

The PWHL’s expansion comes less than two years after its launch in January 2024. League executives announced in October they were preparing for expansion due to the success of Year 1, which included record-breaking attendance and impressive television numbers. The PWHL received more than 20 proposals from interested parties and markets seeking to bring a PWHL team to their city.

There was a long list of criteria that the league examined when deciding where to expand, including market size, infrastructure and economic opportunity. Vancouver, Scheer said, checked off a lot of boxes.

“Vancouver being the third largest market in Canada made a lot of sense,” she said. “To go into an arena and be the primary tenant is a pretty cool opportunity for us … and there’s a great hockey community in the city.”

The January 8 Takeover Tour game at Rogers Arena drew 19,038 fans in attendance, the second-largest crowd of the PWHL season. That game stood out near the top of the league’s nine-game barnstorming tour this season.

“There was just a special energy,” said executive vice president of hockey operations Jayna Hefford. “To be there and feel that, (Vancouver) certainly felt like a great place for us to be.”

There’s also a strong grassroots movement in British Columbia — Vancouver, specifically — with a wave of top hockey prospects coming out of the province. North Vancouver products Connor Bedard and Macklin Celebrini were the No. 1 picks at the NHL Draft in 2023 and 2024, respectively. Chloe Primerano, also from North Vancouver, recently became the youngest defender to play for Canada at women’s worlds and is poised to become one of the best defenders — and players — in the women’s game.

“The grassroots development and growth is strong and healthy in this market, and that’s definitely one of the pillars we look at,” Hefford said. “If we can help even expedite that and add to that growth, that’ll be something that will be really special as well.”

According to the news release, the PWHL will extend its grassroots efforts into the Vancouver community by hosting camps, clinics and other events to help grow the game and “foster meaningful connections between the team and local fans.”

That the league decided to expand so far west is significant and somewhat surprising, given the travel requirements and the expected cost. The league currently operates largely in Northeastern U.S. cities and eastern Canada. But executives said it’s important that the league expands its footprint beyond the East Coast (minus Minnesota).

“We want to build a long-term sustainable league, and part of that is having more than six teams based on a region,” Scheer said. “We need to be past (being) a regional league.”

The league’s collective bargaining agreement mandates commercial air travel for trips more than 400 miles away. That amount of travel is a consideration for the league, said Hefford, but they don’t expect it will negatively impact performance. The schedule, Scheer said, will be made in a “smart” way to ensure that travel doesn’t become a detriment to the players.

Teams could use Minnesota as a gateway on the way to the West Coast, for example, to not have to go all the way from, say, Montreal to Vancouver. Scheer also said the league could strategically use future Takeover Tour games to make road trips easily from east to west. “We’re going to ensure our athletes are able to do the travel required,” said Hefford. 

Of course, the franchise still needs staff and players. How an expansion draft might work still remains to be seen. But the league’s priority will be to keep the parity and competitiveness across the league strong.

“As we discuss and design a player disbursal process, that’s top of mind for us, ensuring that these teams will compete in the first season,” Hefford said.

Details about the expansion draft and how Vancouver will be integrated into the 2025 PWHL Draft on June 24 will be announced in the coming weeks. The league utilizes the “Gold Plan” to determine its draft order, which means the draft order is determined by how many points a team earns after being eliminated from the playoffs.

According to the PWHL, the Gold Plan will be used again this season, and the team that accrues the most points after elimination will get the top pick among the league’s current six franchises. That doesn’t necessarily mean Vancouver will get the No. 1 pick. The WNBA’s Golden State Valkyries drafted No. 5 on April 15, with the Dallas Wings (the lottery winners) drafting No. 1.

In October, the PWHL said it was exploring the addition of as many as two new franchises. Scheer said the league is “hopeful” there will be a second team, but added it would be premature to say anything else.

It stands to reason that a second team could be geographically close to Vancouver. A PWHL website gaffe on Monday might have revealed Seattle as the league’s second destination, with a link to “Shop Seattle” (and a similar one for Vancouver) visible before being taken down.

The PWHL’s Takeover Tour opened in Seattle at Climate Pledge Arena with more than 12,000 fans in attendance.

(Photo of Rogers Arena ahead of the PWHL Takeover Game on Jan. 8: Jimmy Jeong / PWHL)

This news was originally published on this post .

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