How the Canadian Women’s Hockey League fell apart

Sami Jo Small believed that the 2018-2019 season would be a leap forward for her Toronto Furies. She was in her first year as a general manager, but had helped start the Canadian Women’s Hockey League 12 years prior, and played goaltender for the Furies for eight seasons. She knew the team could do great things.

So she dedicated herself to turning the Furies into one of the top programs in the league. She bought the players extra practice ice time, jackets, and more out of her own pocket. “I did all of those things knowing what I was getting myself into, and hoping that when it came time to seek out sponsors, that we would have created a product that people wanted to be a part of,” Small says.

She also brought on a new head coach, former player Courtney (Birchard) Kessel, to lead a team that had 14 new players on it. While the Furies had a rough start, they finished the regular season with five straight wins to make the playoffs.

The team trended positively off the ice, too. Small raised the Furies’ mandated fundraising goal of $65,000 solely off ticket sales. “I thought it was really important that the girls play in front of big crowds,” she explains. She had been planning on finding new sponsors in the offseason. In her view, everything was great.

Then everything changed on March 31, a seemingly normal Sunday morning.

The call did not seem out of the ordinary to Small and the other general managers. The group had weekly calls, and the season had ended just a week prior. “We were obviously speculating, ‘Maybe it’s a new sponsor coming in, or maybe it’s a different schedule, or maybe it’s something that just really needed to be done.’ Never in our wildest dreams did we speculate this,” she says.

The first sign of trouble was that interim commissioner Jayna Hefford was on the call, a rarity. “Jayna is never on the call. And so when Jayna was on the call and just her tone that she started with was very … ominous.”

Hefford, along with board of directors chair Laurel Walzak, handed down the stunning news: The Canadian Women’s Hockey League would cease operations in 29 days, citing an unsustainable business model.

After two more phone calls and a press release, nearly every one of the CWHL’s 150 players and hundreds of volunteers knew, along with the public, sending shockwaves across a sport that grew in popularity after the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics.

Everyone was left with the same question: How did this happen while no one knew?

From the outside, the 2018-19 season was great. The Clarkson Cup was broadcast on three channels across North America with more than 175,000 people watching, while 4,696 people packed the Coca-Cola Coliseum in Toronto.

“There was in my mind zero indication,” Small says. “A lot of times I kind of equate it to a breakup, you look back like, ‘I should have seen that minor issue or this sign.’ I even look back and I don’t see signs.”

Small’s team budget was never cut. She was never asked to slow down spending nor increase fundraising. “That’s what’s the strangest thing. At any point there was never an indication to spend less or bring in more.” Small had even started planning for the next season, talking to her current players and recruiting new ones.

Chelsea Purcell, a former player and second-year general manager of the Markham Thunder, echoes Small’s sentiments. Everything was business as usual for her, too, including the day-long general manager meetings held at the Clarkson Cup.

The five general managers spent the day before the championship game, eight days before the announcement, debriefing on the season. “We’re talking all like what we need to improve, what were big steps for next year to continue this movement of growing and how we can get to the next step,” Purcell says.

Purcell was preparing to leave the Thunder to become the league office’s head of strategic partnerships, a move that meant she had to quit her non-hockey day job, as well.

All the while, the board of directors knew that the league was going under.

“It’s not something that happens overnight,” Hefford says.

Hefford was named interim commissioner of the league on Aug. 1, 2018, after the only commissioner in the history of the league stepped down. She was tasked with performing the annual offseason audit ahead of the 2018-19 season, a short timeframe considering the puck typically dropped in early October, roughly two months later.

“When it was all said and done, we weren’t able to make up that revenue we needed, and then moving forward we felt like this was not the right model for the league to be sustainable,” Hefford says. “Our goal was to operate in a way that continued to grow the game, put a great product on the ice, provide the athletes with an environment that they were proud of, and I think we’re successful in doing all that.

“I think, as it came down to the last few weeks, we realized that we had some things to figure out.”

According to Walzak, the league wasn’t salvageable. “It was a very clear picture that our model — looking at our financials, looking at the future, looking at the funding sources today, the funding sources for the future — that we didn’t see that this was going to be viable any further.”

The board of directors came together to vote Friday, March 29. Of the 11 members, one was not present. The 10 members voted unanimously to cease league operations.

“This one point is critical,” Walzak stresses. “Financially, it was not viable, 100 percent financially not viable.”

It’s important to understand that, off the ice, the CWHL institutionally looks very little like a men’s professional league. A lack of resources, support, and infrastructure posed significant structural barriers that put the league in a compromised position from the very start.

Nearly everyone involved in the league— from the front office to the players — held full-time day jobs, even after the league began paying players for the 2016-17 season. Players signed with teams in locations where they could make a living, not where it best suited their playing careers or where they were traded. This led to powerhouse teams wherever national team-caliber players clustered in certain cities.

The staffs were small. Where there might be a ladder of five people in a men’s league, there was one person doing five jobs in the CWHL. For example, general managers like Small and Purcell handled not only the hiring of coaches and recruiting, but also day-to-day operations, like managing gameday staff and volunteers, and coordinating merchandise. In short, everyone pitched in everywhere.

Budgets were miniscule compared to the men’s leagues, as well. The entire CWHL had an operating budget of $3.4 million in 2018-19. In addition, each team was required to fundraise at least $65,000, a number that went up every season.

“It’s just like a chicken and an egg for me. We need more money and to get more money, we need more resources so we need more time,” Purcell says.

The North American teams were centrally owned by the league, which was operated by the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Amateur Women’s Hockey, a not-for-profit, tax-exempt organization. The league had been run by a board of directors, a group appointed yearly at the annual general meeting (AGM), and a board of governors, a loose group of people with clout or connections in the hockey industry that acted, roughly, as league advisors.

But for the 2018-19 season, the governance structure changed.

“One of the things that we talked about in years past and put actually in our strategic plan from last year to this year is to enhance organizational governance, something we wanted to do to overall professionalize our organization,” Walzak explains.

One way they tried to do so was by eliminating the board of governors, which included people such as Brian Burke, Mike Bartlett of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, Cassie Campbell-Pascall, and venture capitalist and former Bauer chairman W. Graeme Roustan. “One of the things that was very clear was that a lot of board members were questioning ‘what is the role and what is the difference between the board of directors and the board of governors?’” Walzak adds.

The new Board was made up of 11 people who, as a unit, oversaw the “fiduciary responsibility and the overall corporate governance responsibility of the organization,” according to Walzak. The last iteration of the board of directors was voted in in late November 2018, and was made up of seven women and four men. Two former players sat on the board. As interim commissioner, Jayna Hefford also was on the board, but did not have a voting position.

According to Walzak, the decision to discontinue the board of governors was because of its loosely-defined role. “Because they [the governors] didn’t have the fiduciary responsibility that a board of directors in corporate governance does, they don’t have the same liabilities nor the same decision making as we do. So we decided to change the board of governors and remove that role completely and focus on building the board of directors, which is the board that is the one that has the governance responsibility.”

These changes appeared to have an effect that rippled all the way out to the eventual end of the league. For starters, seven of the 11 members were new to the CWHL board of directors. To Small, this was a bit unnerving because she had been so involved in the front office for so long.

“When Jayna [Hefford] came in and then a different board came in, I think all of a sudden I didn’t know what was happening on that end. But I didn’t really have time to think about that either. You’re so engrossed in your team,” she says. “I just trusted in the process, I trusted in who was in place. I just tried to do my best within my organization what was asked of me by the league. I felt like we did a good job of doing that and doing everything that they asked of us.”

While doing her audit, Hefford noticed the CWHL particularly needed help generating sponsorship. “Knowing our not-for-profit status, you can rely on donations, sponsorship, but they only take you so far. I think as the game started to grow and the league started to evolve and players get paid, the demand in those areas became much higher.”

Walzak echoes the same sentiment.

“You’ve got conversations throughout the year for the new year about the renewals, or about increasing their sponsorship, or any new sponsorship. And in some cases people weren’t prepared to give rights fees,” Walzak says.

“The answer was, ‘We’re also looking for a new model where we get a higher return on our investment. You and your current model doesn’t work.’”

Low regular-season attendance exacerbated the league’s problems. While the league never released attendance data, game streams showed a wide range in crowd sizes — from regular sellouts in Montreal, to fewer than 100 people per game in Worcester, Massachusetts. The league prided itself on keeping ticket prices low, with single game tickets usually priced around $15. Walzak says the pricing was “not sustainable” for growth.

According to Small, any issues with sponsors or low box office numbers were never communicated down to the general managers.

“Had I known that it was different, had I known it was eminent that these sponsors needed to get in — I mean I used to run the sponsorship for the CWHL, that was sort of my first tasks within when I used to sit on the board,” Small says, trailing off.

“I just felt like at some point they could have indicated to us and we could have helped. Maybe they didn’t know and maybe they didn’t have an idea of their financial scope until then, and that’s sort of what they have indicated to us. But yeah, it’s hard to not be asked. It’s hard to not be part of the process that — you know, we as general managers felt like we worked for the league. We could have assisted in some way.”

Purcell agrees. The second-year general manager had extensive experience with sponsorship. She spearheaded the Thunder’s move from Brampton to Markham in the summer of 2017, partially because she had seen sponsorships dwindling. She also had seen a growth in sponsors in Markham during their first years in the city. She says that the CWHL’s financial issues were never brought to her attention either.

After joining the front office as the head of strategic partnerships in mid-January, she immediately jumped into meetings with sponsors and partners. Her focus was on selling March’s Clarkson Cup. “It was really tough because the biggest thing is that we wanted to bring in money — which, now seems like for obvious reasons — but we wanted to bring some big new partners on. The focus was all for next season.”

This focus shifted when, Purcell says, there was a realization that money needed to come in and fast — faster than she, and probably the league, realized. “But the thing was the money is never gonna come in [that fast]. We were setting up like we were going to be in a good place that we would have grown next year. That was the whole point in bringing me on was to increase a bunch of dollars.”

The move to cut the board of governors didn’t just impact sponsors, but also independent financial contributions. In the days just before the new board of directors was named, Roustan, the former Bauer chairman, publicly pulled his investment in the CWHL, citing a lack of transparency by the board of directors. Roustan was, according to the league’s governance page, the “most senior member of the CWHL leadership.”

“He resigned on the eve of the AGM,” Walzak says. “Thirty days earlier he was made aware that we were voting on this decision.”

Roustan declined to be interviewed for this piece.

In his letter announcing the withdrawal of his financial support, Roustan said he was told by “the past commissioner” that he was “the single biggest financial and other contributor to the CWHL since its formation.” His support of the league began shortly after the league was founded when Bauer, the company he chaired, became the league’s first corporate sponsor.

At the time, the CWHL asserted it was in a strong position. It announced its new 11-member board (with no acknowledgement of the dissolution of the board of governors) while downplaying his financial contributions.

“While the inaccurate statements and assumptions published give an impression that the CWHL may have difficulties in meeting its mandate in the future, nothing could be farther from the truth. The strength of the CWHL leadership is self-evident, and we have every confidence in the success of the CWHL in all future endeavours,” the league said in a press release.

And, according to financial documents obtained by The Athletic, the CWHL was in good shape. The Athletic reported that, as of November 2018, the league had an excess of $200,000.

But that figure perhaps doesn’t properly take into account the weight of the league’s most ambitious investment.

In the summer of 2017, the CWHL formally announced its largest expansion: two teams based in China — Kunlun Red Star WIH and the Vanke Rays — would join the league that season. Advertised as a “strategic plan by the Chinese government,” the goal of the teams was to help the Chinese National Team prepare for the 2022 Beijing Olympics. The teams would be owned by a Chinese corporation, not the league, that has a holding of men’s teams as well.

The Kunlun Red Stars paid an unnamed fee to have the women’s teams join the league, and also footed the bill for the North American teams traveling to and from China. According to SportsNet, the deal with China injected $1.5 million into the CWHL budget, raising the total to $3.7 million.

The deal seemed to be positive at the outset. “That funding allowed us to be able to start to pay the players and do a few new things,” Walzak says. “But that also caused, of course, the new expenses, new travel, and new risk.”

A few months after the Chinese teams were introduced, the league announced that, for the first time in its history, the players would be paid. Described as a stipend and not a salary, pay ranged from $2,000 to $10,000 for the whole season, depending on a player’s service time, with a cap of $100,000.

Expanding to China brought an influx of challenges, however. Each North American-based team spent a week in China during the season. While games in North America were almost always played on the weekends, accommodating full-time work schedules, intercontinental travel meant that players had to request time off their day jobs.

Conversely, the players on the two Chinese teams spent extensive time living out of suitcases and hockey bags in hotels while they traveled to Canada and Massachusetts to play.

According to players quoted in Kristen Rutherford’s retrospective for SportsNet, nearly every aspect of the China partnership was disorganized. Texts with updates on practices times would come at all hours. Plane tickets would show up only a day before players were set to leave the country. Before the 2018 season, the Rays folded into KRS, likely due to the teams’ large expenses and relative lack of talent.

Yet even with concerns about the China deal, it’s unclear how much it contributed to the CWHL’s collapse. Chief among the questions: Why did the league have to fully close rather than simply adjust its approach? And why right then, after 11 seasons and a budget expansion thanks to China, did it suddenly not work anymore?

“I think it’s funny that we last 10 years without China’s money, and then China comes in and it’s like you get a bunch of money, and all the budgets increase, and then that’s when you fail,” Purcell says, comparing the situation to when people get rich fast and spend their money too quickly.

Walzak says the board explored all of its options to cut the budget, from shortening the schedule, to cutting roster sizes and the number of teams, to decreasing the player stipends.

“We would argue we’ve been hanging by a thread for 12 years,” Walzak says. “All of our stakeholders have worked very hard to grow this game and it has grown. That is critical. But we also can’t go backwards.”

The league left it at that. It was folding and the CWHL as it had stood for the last 12 years was gone. No one offered any suggestion for the future.

“I think that that’s what is disappointing in the way the CWHL did it, was to not have a thought for the transition process,” Small says. “It is in a way hurtful to us as general managers because a lot was placed on our shoulders. And I mean, we’re more than willing to work hard for that next iteration or whatever is to come out of this. It’s just that there is no indication from the CWHL what they think it should be. There is the mantra that the future is bright. I mean it is bright, but there are so many different options.”

The league may have been too preoccupied to think about an easy transition. The CWHL was apparently so deeply in debt, capital was needed to pay players salaries and close other accounts.

Within days of the announcement, the general managers were told to auction off all league-owned gear. To rub salt in the wound, the front office also had to auction off the end-of-season trophies.

The league was able to save some face at the very end. In its final public communication, the CWHL announced that seven of the 10 trophies would head to the Hockey Hall of Fame instead of private donors.

If there’s one positive to come from the story of the CWHL’s end, it’s that women’s hockey in Canada has gone through similar turmoil before.

The CWHL was founded in 2007 by a group of players after the original National Women’s Hockey League disbanded. And the CWHL’s progress isn’t lost on Small or Hefford, two of the women who were there at the beginning.

“It is just history repeating itself in a way,” Small says. “When we first started the league, we operated the entire league on $350,000 that first year, which is incredible. That’s now what each team operates on.

“Sometimes you think that one system is broken simply because there’s one aspect of it that breaks down. But the reality is that there’s a lot of great things about the CWHL that I hope the next iteration of a league takes a look at, utilizes, and then fixes what was broke.”

The league’s fan base was growing. Small points out that after Christmas, as the Furies made a hard push for the playoffs, they drew an average of 500 fans per game, up from their average of 200 before Christmas. The Clarkson Cup saw record numbers of fans attend and tune in on three different television stations.

The games were becoming more and more competitive, with the last playoff spot coming down to the final game of the season and multiple playoff games going to overtime. The teams were becoming smarter about their social media outreach, notably promoting the fact that so many CWHL players were appearing in international tournaments like Four Nations and the World Championship. The players were thinking about their life off the ice. The CWHL Players Association partnered with a marketing firm to help the players grow their personal brands.

Hefford sees the changes as a new beginning as well. “As sad as it is that this is the end of the CWHL, to me, it’s sort of another chapter in the history of the game.”

And, that next chapter has already started, with players once again leading the charge.

On May 2, the day after the official closing of the league, nearly 200 players announced they would be sitting out of any professional hockey league in North America. Soon after, the players officially created the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association. They laid out goals for living wages, guaranteed health insurance, and an overall better league experience, and rallied around the hashtag #ForTheGame.

Their message is clear: expanding the existing NWHL — a five-team professional league based in the US that is entering its fifth season — is not the right step for women’s hockey.

Founded by former college player Dani Rylan in 2015, the NWHL paid players from the start, billing itself as the first league to do so. Salaries initially ranged from $10,000 to $25,000, with the average near $15,000. But in its second season, the league slashed salaries by a reported 50 percent, and they’ve stayed low.

Since then, the NWHL has been working its way back into players’ trust and rebuilding its budget. This season, players’ salaries will range from $4,000 to $13,000. In addition, for the first time, players will receive “a 50 percent cut of all revenue from league-level sponsorships and media deals,” according to a May press release.

But playing in the NWHL still means playing hockey as a part-time job. Players practice late at night after working or attending graduate school. They travel on the weekends by bus or commercial flights with per diems smaller than the federal standard. Few teams have dedicated locker rooms. Resources are limited, especially when compared to the National Team or Division I college programs.

In short: the players don’t want to step right back into many of the same problems of the CWHL. They want more.

Where that more will come from is still unknown.

The NWHL seemed to acknowledge the criticism lodged against it in a May 30 press release, saying, “If any individuals or groups come forward and declare they are ready to start and invest in a new league where women can receive a substantial full-time salary and medical insurance, we would be ecstatic to have a conversation about a partnership or passing the torch.”

The prevailing hope is the NHL can step up, but league commissioner Gary Bettman has been hesitant to up its investment beyond the extra $100,000 it gave the CWHL to ensure that salaries could be paid out. On May 27, during a press conference at the Stanley Cup Finals, Bettman stated, according to ESPN reporter Emily Kaplan, that the NHL was “letting the dust settle before they decide whether to run a women’s hockey league.”

Many have also questioned where USA Hockey and Hockey Canada have been throughout this process.

The CWHL and NWHL provided year-round training for athletes in the pipeline or currently on the senior team. In recent seasons, they also have seemed to be a proving ground for players who may not have been on the National Team radar in college. Ann-Sophie Bettez played her way onto Canada’s Senior National Team after many successful seasons on the CWHL’s Les Canadiennes de Montreal. Hayley Scamurra did the same with Team USA after three strong seasons with the NWHL’s Buffalo Beauts.

An NHL-backed or federation-backed model isn’t new to women’s sports. The WNBA is backed by the NBA. The NWSL is partially funded by the U.S. Soccer Federation, including the league’s office expenses and the national team player salaries.

Hefford thinks women’s hockey could draw upon those examples for long-term success.

“There’s probably a few different models that could work but to me it’s really about some sort of infrastructure behind it,” she says. “I’m really optimistic for the future and the opportunities that are going to be out there for the players. There’s the emotional side and the disappointment and sadness that this league is over. But, in order to really trigger positive change, sometimes you have to go through the hard times.”

As someone who has gone down this road before, Small tried to impress on players the need to come together after that fateful phone call. But Small herself, as a general manager, will take a back seat. The six general managers are letting the players take the reins on the future of the game.

“I think that’s the hardest thing about right now. We are seen as the gatekeepers, as the general managers, and a lot of people come to us and heave presentations, ideas, have all these things for us,” Small says. “But ultimately, by the CWHL no longer operating, it has taken away, essentially, the power of the general manager in that there is no program. There is no team.”

Her work wasn’t done when the league closed, however. The CWHL still had more administrative tasks to complete. Small coordinated the selling of the Furies’ assets, from jerseys to leftover merchandise, to help the league recoup capital to pay players, staff, and creditors. There were still twice-weekly meetings or calls with the board of directors about final odds and ends. In the end, the people who truly helped make the CWHL great — the players, coaches, and general managers — were still the ones working overtime to make sure their jobs were done right.

“I think one of my saddest things about the league no longer in operations is that whatever iteration of a league is in the future, it just will never be this team again,” Small says. “It’ll never be those 25 players and those 25 staff. What we were starting to build was really exciting.”