Blayre Turnbull was used to playing in front of raucous, sellout crowds in LaBahn Arena. But after her illustrious four-year Badger career concluded last spring, Turnbull traded in her red and white Wisconsin jersey for a red and white Calgary Inferno jersey.
The fans didn’t follow.
Turnbull and the Inferno, of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League play at WinSport in Calgary, the site of four different hockey rinks. It has one rink twice the size of LaBahn. The Inferno, though, don’t play there. They play in one of the smaller practice rinks that seats about 300 people.
To be a professional athlete means being the best at your craft. Athletes are supposed to get the private planes, the huge endorsement deals, multi-million dollar salaries and the top-of-the-line facilities.
But for professional women’s hockey players, being the best does not always mean getting the best.
Compared to most other North American professional sports, professional women’s hockey is not glamorous. Ironically, in a game without any hitting, it might be more gritty. In the United States and Canada, there are two leagues, the CWHL in Canada and the National Women’s Hockey League in America. One of those leagues does not pay its players. Sellout crowds of 15,000-plus are non-existent. Big time endorsement deals are few and far between.
But professional women’s hockey isn’t about the material benefits. Sure those things are nice, but it’s about inspiration, it’s about doing something you genuinely love purely because you love doing it. It’s about family.
In late October, Wisconsin Badger and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan native Emily Clark was out to dinner in Madison with her teammate, Jenny Ryan, when her phone rang. She got a call from Hockey Canada. She had made the roster for the World Championships this spring in Kamloops, British Columbia. She told her teammate, and then she called her family.
Whether immediate or extended, women’s hockey is a family affair. Players like Clark, and fellow Badger, and Laguna Hills, Calif., native Annie Pankowski began competing against each other when they were still in high school. And as the hockey bible says, American hockey players can’t root for Canadian players.
Unless, somehow they then become family.
Pankowski and Clark, both sophomores at UW, are now rooting and supporting each other. The duo represents the newest line in Madison’s hockey genealogy, a lineage that unites people from across the northern border.
“Em and I talked about it a little bit and it was like, ‘I’m Emily’s biggest fan.’ I want her to do great and I want her to do really well for team Canada, but you can’t root for team Canada,” Pankowski said reflecting on her experience playing for American in this spring’s World Championship.
“I told her that when we were standing on the blue lines after the game and looked at her face and I was like, ‘I really wish Emily, could have this medal too.’”
Hours after the United States defeated Canada in the World Championships, like any close family, Clark and Pankowski, Canadian and American, flew back to Madison together.
But unity in women’s hockey is few and far between. While the university serves as a melting pot, wedding people from various backgrounds under one collective identity, professional women’s hockey is more like a divorced family.
Their players might have grown up together playing under the same roof in college, but post-college life has forced Canadian and American women’s hockey players to go their separate ways. The leagues don’t interact at all.
Last March, in response to the creation of the NWHL, the CWHL published a press release that’s tone was more like an annulment form than a confirmation letter.
“It has come to the League’s attention that an organization called the NWHL has announced that it will begin operations in April of 2015,” the release said. “Rest assured, the CWHL is taking all necessary steps and measures to protect its interests. Please know that the CWHL, first and foremost, is committed to growing women’s hockey in both Canada and the United States. We have no further comment at this time but will provide updates as more information becomes available.”
The two leagues operate on vastly different principles. The NWHL is the first North American league to pay its athletes. The CWHL does not.
Meghan Duggan, a Wisconsin Badger in the late 2000s, was part of a group of U.S. National team players that decided last spring to leave the CWHL and venture to the NWHL.
“And from a player's standpoint, it was fantastic, like everything that was promised came true,” Duggan said in a phone interview. “The buildings were full and they did a great job. I enjoyed playing in it. The competition was high, the players were obviously paid which is a step in the right direction for the women’s game so it was an exciting inaugural season to be a part of.”
The NWHL doesn’t pay much. According to Bloomberg News the $270,000 salary cap for last season spread among an 18-player roster worked out to an average of $15,000 per player. By comparison, the minimum player salary in the NHL for this past season was $575,000. Nevertheless the NWHL’s player salary is $15,000 more than what the CWHL paid its players last year. Anything is more than nothing.
Almost all players in the NWHL are forced to find other jobs. For the past two years, Duggan was an assistant women’s hockey coach at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., but she resigned April 22 though to focus on her training for her third Olympics in 2018.
Duggan’s NWHL team, the Buffalo Beauts, is more than a four-hour drive from Clarkson, so for much of the year Duggan spent her time either on the ice or in her car.
“It’s crazy. It made my life crazy. I pretty much didn’t have a single day or hour off all season long. And my personality is pretty go, go, go, so I was able to make it work,” Duggan said. “But yeah I put in a lot of hours everywhere in the gym, on the ice, in my car traveling, with my team, in the office. It was nuts.”
Depending on the weekend, Duggan might have actually coached in bigger arenas than she played in, but she was just happy to have a competitive place to play the game that she loves.
Across the northern border, former Badger and current CWHL rookie Blayre Turnbull’s similar passion for hockey has motivated her to partake in a league devoid of player salaries.
Athletes in the CWHL do get a little bit of funding from Sport Canada, and the league covers all their ice time, and their travel, but not one player in the CWHL makes a salary. Much like in the NWHL, players are forced to get a second job. But a strong tie to Hockey Canada and a passion to play the sport they love, nevertheless drives players to the CWHL.
“I don’t know about others, but for me the decision to play in the CWHL was an easy one, just because out in Calgary that’s where the National Team is based out of,” Turnbull said in a phone interview. “It just made sense for me to go out there and train out there with the trainers that work with Hockey Canada and deal with coaches who work directly with Hockey.”
In Turnbull’s eyes, while making some money for her services would be nice, the Calgary Inferno rookie admitted that moving to America would not have been the best life decision she could have made. In her mind to be the best player she can be in both the CWHL and Hockey Canada, staying in Calgary was the best thing she could do.
For Pankowski, Clark, Duggan and Turnbull the Olympics are the crown jewel of women’s hockey.
Of the four, only Duggan has played in the Olympics. After her junior year in Madison, Duggan actually took a year off from school to play in the Vancouver Olympics, an experience she said was pretty incredible on all fronts. More recently, the captain of team USA played in the 2014 Sochi Olympics, and her recent resignation from Clarkson was also a result of her drive to play in Pyeongchang in 2018.
Such emphasis on international competition motivates players to play close to home. Both country’s hockey federations want their athletes being a part of their family year-round. Women’s hockey, after all, is a family affair.
But no matter their nationality, one reason both players from the United States and Canada play professional hockey is to promote the game and inspire younger generations of women hockey players.
“For women’s hockey, we certainly take it upon ourselves to push the game forward everyday,” Duggan said. “Would we love if it got to NHL status, absolutely, it’s just not where the game’s at now, so we take all the opportunities we can to continue to push the game, to continue to help it grow.”
While still student athletes, Clark and Pankowski feel a similar obligation.
“Like if you look at [Ann-Renée Desbiens’s] fan base, a lot of them are little girls who love coming to the game and love seeing Ann. They want to be Ann, they want to be a hockey player,” Pankowski said. “And so I think that if we can be those role models, for types of girls, I think that people will start to understand what else goes with coming to the games, its [women’s hockey] is going to take off exponentially and the fan base will be huge.”
“I think there is definitely a different mindset with women’s hockey,” Clark said. “ And everyone has the same goals, more to grow the game and it’s more about that than individual success.”
But while individual success might be diminished, individual love for the game is a key motivator as well.
“It’s just one of those things that it’s not glamorous,” Pankowski said. “There’s not a whole lot of money in it. And it’s something we do because we love [it], not because we have too. It’s just a game that we love. And it’s a huge part of our lives so I don’t think that it’s such a bad thing to say we have to work another job to do it. I think it just shows how much we love the sport.”
Intense love for the game motivates players to play. But questions about how to best grow the game lack concrete answers. Some players believe firmly in more media coverage, others believe that more funding and support from other financial sources would help boost the sport’s notoriety. The answer is probably a combination of a number of factors.
But the ultimate combination that would likely boost the sport’s brand is the combination of the two leagues.
“I mean I honestly don’t know too much about the NWHL,” Turnbull said. “But I think yes we want the game to grow, and at some point the leagues will have to sort out some partnership so that the top players in both American and Canada can play against each other.”
In other words, to create a stronger women’s hockey family, to grow the game for future generations of women’s hockey players, the leagues need to get re-married and end their divorce.
But until that happens, the love of the game and the drive to inspire the next generation of female athletes will keep driving women’s professional hockey players. It’s still a family affair.
