PROFESSIONAL WOMEN'S HOCKEY LEAGUE: FOR POWERING WOMEN'S HOCKEY INTO THE MAJOR LEAGUES

HILARY KNIGHT had seen this movie before.

- Paul Mueller

It was summer 2023, and over the past two and a half decades, three women's professional hockey leagues had launched and collapsed, victims of fragmented ownership, insufficient funding, and infrastructure that couldn't support elite athletes trying to build full-time careers.

"They were missing a lot of the things that you see in successful leagues," says Knight. “They didn’t have structures for business ops, for hockey ops, for all these different roles that go into making one team successful.” So when Knight—the most decorated women’s hockey player in U.S. history—joined a players’ committee to negotiate terms for yet another new league, she was skeptical.

But the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) shattered the mold. A few months after its January 1, 2024, launch, the league set a world record for pro women’s hockey attendance with 21,105 fans for a single game, which had sold out in minutes. In March 2025, the league—which started with six teams and has expanded to eight—crossed 1 million in total attendance, a milestone no previous women’s hockey league had reached. Attendance jumped 52.5% season over season in 2025 to 737,455, with average attendance rising 27%, to 7,230 fans per game. Merchandise sales doubled. Before the Seattle and Vancouver expansion teams played their first games this past November, they had secured more than 10,000 season ticket deposits combined.