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By Dave FeschukSports Columnist, and Kerry GillespieSports Reporter
There was a time when hockey sold itself in Canada. But in the wake of the pandemic, the Burlington Barracudas Girls’ Hockey Club assessed dwindling participation numbers and decided hockey required a sales pitch.
Looking to bolster flagging registrations in their beginner programs at a time when participation in many youth sports had been decimated by the effects of COVID lockdowns, it was a few years ago that the organization made an offer even the thriftiest parents found difficult to refuse: free hockey, complete with free equipment, for an entire season of the under-seven learn-to-play program. Uptake was swift, with all of the approximately 300 available spots gone in a couple of weeks.
“People were all up in arms like, ‘How do we get in? How do we get in?’ But we didn’t have any more ice (time),” said Will Short, the Barracudas president. “And we took a pretty big hit financially as an organization to subsidize it.”
Indeed, the Barracudas dipped into cash reserves and rounded up sponsors — most prominently Bauer, which provided the free equipment — to make the program work. It was too good to be repeated. The following season, parents were asked to fork over between $200 and $250 for the year, still a heavily subsidized figure. This season, some 90 per cent of the girls who got their start in the free-of-charge program are still playing — well above the organization’s hoped-for retention rate of 50 per cent. The Barracudas organization, once seen at risk of withering, currently boasts about 1,000 players with about half at the under-nine level and below, and with bigger numbers projected in the coming year.
Long story short: The Barracudas are growing, and they appear to be part of a larger trend in Canada. Though participation in boys’ and men’s hockey has been on a gradual decline, registrations by girls and women have jumped about 25 per cent over the past decade. And Hockey Canada is anticipating a participation boom among females, from a record 108,000 players in 2023-24 to an organizational target of 170,000 by 2030.
Given that backdrop, and that Ontario is home to about 45 per cent of Canada’s registered female players, this is the first in a series of articles in which the Star will look at the landscape of girls’ and women’s hockey, the reasons for the ongoing expansion and the potential impediments to its continuing rise. There’s been an acknowledgment from Hockey Canada that certain things need to change if that lofty target of 170,000 is to be reached, which is why the organization is in the midst of a cross-Canada fact-finding mission to survey players, parents, coaches and administrators, among others, for input on the barriers to growth and how they might be overcome. Formal recommendations are expected by the summer.
“(The 170,000 number is) definitely not something that we would hit if we just kept the status quo and didn’t do anything,” said Gillian Apps, a former national team player and the chair of Hockey Canada’s steering committee for women’s and girls’ hockey. “All of the work that we’re doing right now comes with the hope that we can make women’s hockey a better experience for people in Canada and that in better understanding the sport, how people interact with the sport, can we reduce the dropout rate, can we increase registration and can we get more new Canadians playing?”
What’s driving the growth of the female game? The birth of the Professional Women’s Hockey League, now in its second season, is being lauded for providing girls with an aspirational north star beyond a spot on the women’s national team, which has been battling the archrival United States for world supremacy since the first IIHF women’s world championship was contested in Ottawa 35 years ago. There have been other women’s pro leagues, but none with the PWHL’s combination of high visibility and financial heft, backed as it is by billionaires Mark and Kimbra Walter.
Celina Clark, the on-ice coach and under-seven program lead for the Barracudas, said the significance of the PWHL’s presence can’t be overstated. The 25-year-old Clark, who played NCAA women’s hockey, grew up playing in boys’ leagues until age 13 and mostly idolized high-profile NHL players — her favourite was Scott Hartnell during his run with the Philadelphia Flyers. It was only as Clark got older that she became fully aware of great women’s players such as Jayna Hefford, the national team legend and Hockey Hall of Famer who is now the PWHL’s executive director of hockey operations.
But Clark said the young girls she coaches on Saturdays in Burlington are far more inclined to see PWHL players as heroes. Emma Maltais and Renata Fast, both members of the Toronto Sceptres and the national women’s team who hail from Burlington, rank as particular favourites. After an inaugural season at the 2,600-seat Mattamy Athletic Centre, the Sceptres are playing this season at the 8,140-capacity Coca-Cola Coliseum, and the six-team PWHL has plans for expanding as early as next season.
The trickle-down effect on girls’ participation is a byproduct that’s been seen before, only differently.
“I think if you look back and prior to the PWHL, or a true professional league, the peaks of registration and excitement around women’s hockey sort of followed the four-year cycle of the Olympics since 1998. And that’s when there’s the most energy around the sport. That’s when there’s the most visibility. And little girls (could) say, ‘Hey, I want to do that,’ ” Apps said.
Said Troy Ryan, coach of both the Sceptres and the national women’s team: “Now we’re not just having a world championship every April or an Olympic gold-medal game every four years, it’s three times a week on TV that young girls are getting to see the people they look up to. I can’t imagine how it couldn’t drastically increase the size of the women’s game. And I think it’s just going to continue to grow. The timing is perfect for it.”
Women’s pro sports is in the midst of a boom on multiple fronts. The WNBA is expanding, with the Toronto Tempo slated to begin play in 2026, thanks in no small part to a swell of popularity fuelled by the stardom of Caitlin Clark. A 2024 estimate said franchises in the North American Women’s Soccer League are worth an average of $104 million (U.S.), up 57 per cent from a year earlier. In Canada, the Northern Super League, a six-team pro women’s soccer league, is hoping to chart a similarly positive trajectory when it launches in April.
“There’s a lot of excitement around women’s sports in general,” said Marin Hickox, Hockey Canada’s vice-president of girls’ and women’s hockey. “We’re kind of at this wonderful tipping point.”
The PWHL, meanwhile, has announced its intention to expand. Recent returns from the so-called Takeover Tour (neutral-site games in potential expansion cities) were beyond promising, with sellout crowds showing up in Vancouver, Quebec City and Edmonton.
For all that, as the folks who run the Barracudas will tell you, growing the game at the grassroots level is far from simple. Launching the free-of-charge learn-to-play program required no end of effort, including lobbying for more ice time at municipal arenas, where the per-hour cost typically runs about half the price of privately owned pads.
“I can’t explain to you how much work it was to get this program off the ground, and the amount of hours that our volunteers had to put into going out and talking to the sponsors, advertising it — it was a lot of work,” said Short, the Barracudas president and regional clerk for the region of Waterloo. “I understand why some not-for-profit organizations would look at it and be like, ‘Oh, we only have five people on our board, and that would cause an extra 100 hours a week of work, and we just don’t have that capacity.’ ”
Clark said there’s organizational pride that this season only four of the 288 registered girls in the U7 learn-to-play program haven’t returned. If retaining players for the long haul has historically proven a challenge — Hockey Canada data estimates the average boy stays in the sport about 2 1/2 years longer than the average girl — there is hope that can change. That and more will have to change from the grassroots all the way up to elite players for Hockey Canada to have a chance to meet its growth targets.
Clark said there is a philosophical point of emphasis that has gone into building the learn-to-play program: the idea that girls’ hockey ought to be different than boys’ hockey. That’s a topic that has been raised among Hockey Canada’s steering committee: that as the girls’ and women’s game expands, it should be custom made for its constituents.
“The world is ready, we’re ready. We need to stop treating (girls) sport as a bit of a bolt-on to what’s happened typically in boys sports,” Hickox said.
Said Clark: “That’s something people are sometimes afraid to talk about — that you need a different approach for girls.”
Clark said she typically bakes a treat for the players every week — sheet-pan brownies are a favourite — and that she and her fellow coaches take pains to create “a positive space that’s welcoming and supportive and fun,” including prominent use of on-ice props such as balloons, bubbles, bean bags and bingo daubers, a common practice when teaching young children how to skate. It’s more than just skills and drills.
“It’s a lot of interactive learning techniques to keep the girls stimulated and distracted, and maybe not realizing the skill they’re actually working on when they’re doing it,” Clark said. “Girls hockey is different than boys, and that’s OK.”
It’s different, indeed. It’s growing.
“I definitely think we’re in the midst of a boom,” Clark said. “If we can, as a hockey community as a whole, make the game more accessible, I can see it growing even more.”
Dave Feschuk is a Toronto-based sports columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @dfeschuk
Kerry Gillespie is a Toronto-based sports reporter for the Star. Reach her via email: kgillespie@thestar.ca.
