This week, the second season of the Professional Women’s Hockey League began with the same six cities as last year’s inaugural season, but with actual team names and somewhat larger facilities than the days of the Premier Hockey Federation, where you were liable to be going to a cold rink that usually serves as a practice rink for an NHL team.
Not anymore.
Two of the teams, the Minnesota Frost and New York Sirens, play in large-scale arenas used by NHL teams. The rest either play in buildings which either are or were AHL home rinks. The smallest, for the Boston Fleet, used to be the home of the Lowell Lock Monsters, but is now the home to the University of Massachusetts-Lowell hockey teams.
In the days when there was a split between the pools of players in top-level club competition, Boston was the only market common between the NWHL (Boston Pride) and the CWHL (Boston Blades). It’s a little discouraging to me to see that the market’s PWHL franchise is in a suburban rink at the edge of the I-495 beltway in Boston’s northern suburbs.
But what’s also discouraging to me is the management situation for the defending champion Minnesota Frost. After the successful inaugural season, the team dismissed general manager Natalie Darwitz and three coaches, eventually installing Melissa Caruso as the new GM and Ken Klee as the new head coach.
There has been scrutiny on everything the team has been doing this offseason, including scrutiny of social media posts. No one person’s social media has been dissected more than Britta Curl, the team’s first-round draft picks. Fans called out her transphobic and racist activity online, something Curl addressed via Twitter last June.
I guess we’ll see if the franchise is going to survive all of the drama; the Frost are at the top of the table after the first 10 days of the 2024-25 season.