How the PWHL Is Capitalizing on Olympic Momentum and Redefining Women’s Hockey Growth

2026 is officially the year of ✨The Hockey✨. We will never be the same after watching Ilya and Shane fall in love in Heated Rivalry (was there even that much hockey in that show we don’t know and don’t care), and we are still researching how we can inject Megan Keller’s Olympic gold medal winning overtime goal directly into our veins.

But while this year is particularly hockey forward, there’s a league we love that has been working hard to meet this moment. The Professional Women's Hockey League is in its third season, and had already been setting records this year before skates hit ice in Milano-Cortina. But the hockey craze hit another level after the Olympics, and the PWHL is riding that icy wave. So where is the PWHL three years in, how did the 2026 Olympic Games change the game, and, most importantly, how has the PWHL risen to meet the momentum?

The PWHL Pre-Olympics

Like we said, the 2025-2026 season marks the third time that PWHL pucks have dropped over the United States and Canada. For the first time this season, there were 8 teams competing for the Walter Cup, with expansion teams Seattle and Vancouver moving the league out west. The PWHL now has teams in Seattle, Vancouver, Boston, New York, Montréal, Ottawa, Minnesota and Toronto.

Throughout the games played before the Olympic break, average attendance was over 8,500 fans per game, which represented a 17% increase from the year before. A large part of this attendance bump is due to the PWHL Takeover Tour, which the league ran for a second time this season. Inaugurated during 2024-2025 season, the Takeover Tour featured games at 9 neutral sites, designed to bring women’s professional hockey to cities without teams. Of course, Seattle and Vancouver, two of the neutral host cities, would be awarded their very own expansion teams the following year. The Takeover Tour was hugely successful, with the Canadian locations especially drawing huge crowds. This season, the Tour expanded to 16 cities across the United States and Canada, with attendance and hype remaining high across all of the stops.

The PWHL at the Olympics

The PWHL had 61 players representing 8 countries at the Milano-Cortina Games, sending over 100 players, staff and coaches to Italy. The entire roster for Team Canada plays in the PWHL. 39 PWHL players took part in the gold medal game. For a league of just over 180 women, these numbers represent a huge percentage of the players. So it really shouldn’t be any surprise that the PWHL is so competitive.

Obviously the hockey was thrilling and competitive, because it always is! The level was sharp and dazzling, and the finals came down to lightning decision making and ringing slapshots. But while this might have been news to some fans, the leadership of the PWHL already knew what they had. They have seen these exact women day in and day out produce entertaining hockey so they knew that the Olympic stage wouldn’t be any different.

The PWHL leadership understood: they needed to spend money to make money.

Too often women’s sports league’s leaders, sponsors or fans don’t understand that without proper investment there can be no growth, no revenue. The PWHL is on track to be profitable by 2031, 8 years after its founding. There are varying opinions on when exactly the NHL became profitable, but many agree that the league did not achieve financial stability across all of its teams until after the 2012-2013 lockout which prompted the 50/50 revenue share between players and owners. The NHL was founded in 1917. We are talking just shy of one hundred years of stop and start, trial and error before the league had widespread financial health. Anyway. We don’t need to tell you that women are constantly held to different standards from men!

And luckily, the team running the PWHL understands the business of women’s sports. They understood that to take advantage of the Olympic spotlight, they needed to be prepared. The league spent extra money on marketing, branding the Olympic tournament as “The Ultimate Away Game” and flooding their site with special player profiles, interviews and engaging articles. There was a huge uptick in social media content creation, there were activations in Milan and the team was working overtime to respond to requests from new sponsors.

And the fans responded.

The league’s YouTube channel saw a 200% jump in subscribers, and the league’s Olympians gained over 760,000 combined new followers. During the Olympic period, 73% of the league’s website traffic was from new users. Amy Scheer, the executive VP of the league summed up both the excitement and the challenge ahead: “We’ve got these fans, we’ve got these new followers, we’ve got this attention, now what do we do with it?”

The PWHL after the Olympics

With an average of 1,000 more fans per game after the Olympic break, stadiums were starting to fill. So the PWHL did the only logical thing: they booked bigger stadiums. And they didn’t just pass the puck a little further up the ice, they slapped it straight into the top corner of the net: they booked Madison Square Garden and TD Garden for two matchups.

The New York Sirens hosted the Seattle Torrent at MSG, while the Boston Fleet hosted the Montréal Victoire at TD Garden. Both of these games set attendance records, with the 17,850 fans who showed up in Boston coming in second all time for US attendance only behind the 18,006 who showed up in New York. Also, let’s not forget that the games were both absolute cinema. Come from behind wins, goalie duels and rivalries reheated? Yes, pleeaase.

So what’s next?

With over 100,000 women and girls participating in USA Hockey for the first time this year, it’s clear that hockey is not just a moment but a movement. If the success of the Takeover Tours has been any indication, there are countless cities and fans who are clamoring for their own team to follow, through victoire and heartbreak. A hometown team just hits different.

The PWHL plans to expand by either two or four teams for the 2026-2027 season, but one of the hurdles they are facing is they have too many fans and not enough seats. Many rinks they have available seat between 5,000-6,000 fans, and that just won’t cut it anymore. As you can imagine, it’s no small thing to build and maintain a hockey arena. But since the NHL and PWHL seasons overlap, it’s hard to share one too. So to expand to cities that already have an NHL team could mean bigger and better facilities, but could come with a crowded calendar. However and whenever the PWHL decides to expand, in Billie Jean King we trust. We know that the leadership team will continue to grow the league responsibly, and that the demand will continue to grow as the league does.

In the meantime, it’s not too late to enjoy the beautiful game right in front of us! The PWHL season ends on April 25th, with playoffs starting shortly thereafter. Don’t wait to get your tickets, if it’s not clear already, they are, like super in demand. Too far away to catch a game in person? All PWHL games can be streamed on their YouTube channel in the US, with TSN carrying all regular games in Canada. For the first time, ION will nationally broadcast the Walter Cup Finals, which means even more new fans will be able to watch these athletes take the ice. We’re so excited to celebrate the PWHL’s success, and know that theirs will be a model many will hope to emulate. If you put players first and spend money making them shine, the rest will take care of itself.