PWHL’s strong first season coincides with a growing appetite for women’s sports

Less than a year since getting off the ground, the Professional Women’s Hockey League has staged its inaugural season with 72 games around North America televised or streamed and attendance records broken over and over, putting the sport in the spotlight like never before.

It could not be happening at a better time.

The PWHL’s launch finally brings together the best players in the world on a regular basis and beyond the annual world championships or Olympics every four years. And it has placed the game firmly on the map at a time of heightened interest in women’s sports, led by the Caitlin Clark effect in basketball and a quarter-century since Brandi Chastain and the U.S. soccer team rose to international prominence.

While it will still take time to catch up in a crowded landscape, the PWHL is off to a blazing beginning after decades of frustration, featuring fitful starts and stops, by putting it all together on the ice with a chance to capitalize on a growing appetite for elite women’s sports.

“We all wanted things to happen faster, and it felt really difficult and challenging at times,” Hall of Famer and PWHL senior VP of hockey operations Jayna Hefford told The Associated Press. “But now when you look back on it, you have to wonder if everything happened like it should have been and at the right time to allow us to see the success that we’ve seen to date.”

That success is still in its infancy, though the first four-plus months of the PWHL has raised expectations of how fast and how much it can grow beyond the current six-team structure based in Boston, New York, Minnesota, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. A total of 392,259 fans attended games during the regular season at venues that included various NHL rinks and highlighted by a women’s hockey record crowd of 21,105 turning out at the Canadiens’ Bell Centre for a Montreal-Toronto showdown last month.

Television broadcasts nationally in Canada and regionally in the U.S. markets have also attracted even more viewers to women’s hockey in following the same path of progress the WNBA and the various pro women’s soccer league incarnations previously enjoyed since the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“This has been in the works for quite a long time,” said Amy Scheer, the PWHL’s senior VP of business operations, who has also worked in the WNBA and NBA and for the NFL. “This has not happened overnight, and it continues to…