Hockey-stick growth: The year of the PWHL

Women’s hockey found massive success on the international stage this year, with record-breaking viewership of the overtime Olympic gold-medal game between Team USA and Team Canada.

But until last weekend, the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) had never had a nationally televised game in the US.

PWHL games air on regional sports networks across the league’s four US markets and stream on YouTube, but the March 28 matchup between the New York Sirens and the Montréal Victoire was the first nationally televised game, airing on Scripps’s Ion sports network. The Walter Cup Finals are also set to air nationally on Ion in May.

The national broadcast deal, facilitated with help from PWHL sponsor Ally Financial, comes as demand for women’s hockey continues to grow. Amy Scheer, the league’s EVP of business operations, said it’s a trend that was bolstered—but not initiated—by the Olympics. National linear broadcasts present an opportunity to level up the PWHL even further, she said, and the league has plans to continue the momentum beyond this season.

“To have our games air side-by-side with the WNBA and the NWSL puts us in the company that we belong in, which is the top three women’s professional sports leagues in North America,” Scheer told Marketing Brew. “For us, it legitimizes our product, our brand.”

Hockey-stick growth

There’s no denying the effect that the US women’s national ice-hockey team’s gold-medal run had in the states. The Boston Fleet sold out their first game back home, and the Seattle Torrent set a US attendance record on Feb. 27 with 17,335 fans. A sold-out game between the Torrent and the New York Sirens at Madison Square Garden this weekend is expected to break that record.

The effect stretches outside of the US. In Canada, where the national team brought home Olympic silver, PWHL players returned to sold-out crowds in three of the first four games after MilanCortina. Through 78 games, the PWHL saw an average of about 9,000 fans per game, an increase of 23% from last season, according to the league.

During the Olympic period, 73% of PWHL web traffic came from new users to the site, and according to the league, video views on its YouTube channel increased by more than 200%. But interest was growing prior to the Olympics: The MSG game, as well as a game at TD Garden between the Fleet and the Montréal Victoire on April 11, were both essentially sold out before the Olympics, Scheer said.

“We are just on a rocket ship, and our trajectory has been straight up,” she said. “We spent a year working on the Olympics to be prepared and ready for what we were hoping might happen, and then I think our rocket ship got an extra booster.”

National broadcasts are expected to add more fuel to the fire. The team at Ally, known for its early and consistent work in women’s sports and which helped to get the NWSL Championship its first prime-time placement in 2022, has talked with the PWHL about growing its TV footprint since the league’s early days, according to Stephanie Marciano, Ally’s head of brand and sports marketing; coming out of the Olympics, it made sense to act fast.

“A national broadcast serves the growing fanbase that we know the PWHL has, because they’ve proven it with the sell-out crowds and the growth across every metric,” Marciano told us. It “also drives that discoverability for new fanbases. You’ve got to be on TV to give casual fans an opportunity to experience the game.”

Lace up

Amid the Olympic growth, there’s been a spike in PWHL sponsorship interest, Scheer said. In recent weeks, the league has been having more conversations with brands, she said, and those conversations have moved beyond the education stage, a common obstacle for marketers who sell women’s sports and find themselves explaining the basics, like the number of teams in the league.

“Some of that goes away now, which is really nice,” Scheer said.

Existing league sponsors also seem to be doubling down this year: e.l.f. Cosmetics, which has been an official PWHL partner since the league’s inaugural season in 2024, is activating at this weekend’s MSG game as the title partner, with product samples and an interactive hockey game for fans.

E.l.f. Beauty Chief Integrated Marketing Officer Patrick O’Keefe said national broadcasts add value for fans by making games more accessible, and for his team as they seek to leverage sports to grow the brand.

“We want to connect with our community at the intersection of sports and culture, making an impact wherever women are changing the game to create meaningful connections and reach new, underserved audiences,” O’Keefe said in an email.

Power play

Beyond the national broadcasts, the PWHL isn’t letting the puck push itself. The league has rolled out a number of initiatives to further foster fandom, like its PWHL 101 with Professor Puck series in which an animated hockey puck explains things like the league and its rules. PWHL execs have also had conversations with broadcasters about making games more accessible, like calling players by their full names instead of nicknames, Scheer said.

The players, too, have been integral in the effort to support growing interest in the league, she added. Take Fleet captain and Team USA’s golden-goal scorer Megan Keller: During one recent weekend, she helped her team win an overtime game in Ottawa before immediately flying to New York for a guest appearance on Saturday Night Live alongside Team USA and Torrent captain Hilary Knight and Jack and Quinn Hughes of Team USA and the NHL. Knight and her Torrent and Team USA teammate Hannah Bilka attended the Oscars not long after.

Pop-culture moments are essential to raising player profiles, Scheer said, and will remain a focal point as PWHL execs look for additional avenues to develop the league’s fanbase. Moving forward, she said, those efforts will ideally include more nationally televised games, more expansion teams, more merch, and more partners to help promote the league.

“We just can’t rely on our own bullhorn; we need other people’s bullhorns as well,” Scheer said. “Women enter sports in a different way…and so we just have to cover off all of the ways that people fan, and continue to grow that outreach and interest.”