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As she stood on the ice earlier this month in suburban Boston, with the national anthem filling the arena, Nicole Hensley took to heart the advice of friends who reminded her to drink in the atmosphere and appreciate how she got here. goalie mask bag
They weren’t referring to her team’s travel from Minnesota, though the trip featured small luxuries that bore no resemblance to the low-budget hockey trips of earlier years. They meant how she got here, in the broad sweep of history, to her inaugural game in the fledgling Professional Women’s Hockey League, a well-backed and promising effort to create new opportunities in her sport.
So Hensley, 29, took a minute to revel in a moment so long in coming, from her days on boys’ recreational youth teams in Colorado to girls’ select squads to a college program struggling through its infancy to elite international competition to … well, a professional future that once seemed anything but a sure thing.
“We can call ourselves truly professional athletes now,” she says, recalling the prelude to that first puck drop. “So that was pretty cool, to stand on the blue line during the anthem and just appreciate everything that’s been done up to this point.”
For the past few years, the sport’s most talented women had worked feverishly toward a player-centric wish list for a top-flight professional league, contingent on the emergence of one key ingredient — substantial financial backing. A little more than six months ago, the right investor emerged: Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter, who owns all six of the league’s teams (big-time hockey markets Minnesota, Boston, New York, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal) operating under an eight-year agreement with the players.
No less a legend than tennis great Billie Jean King, a minority owner of the Dodgers, also has been instrumental in advancing the PWHL as it scrambled to fast-track a season — a 24-game schedule that began Jan. 1, plus playoffs — rather than wait until next fall.
Suddenly, everything converged to place Hensley, Colorado’s only representative on the league’s opening rosters, on the ice as Minnesota’s goaltender — and part of a potentially game-changing venture. She quickly got down to business, withstanding a furious late surge by the Boston team to preserve a 3-2 victory for Minnesota. It marked the historic first win for a squad that, like the league’s other five entries, was so hastily assembled that it doesn’t yet have an actual name.
A few days later, Hensley would witness another moment that pointed toward an auspicious start. A crowd of 13,316 converged on the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul for Minnesota’s home opener — shattering the previous mark of 8,318 for a PWHL game in Ottawa only days earlier.
That might have been the most forceful hint yet that, after many failed attempts to test the viability of women’s pro hockey, players, fans and financial backing had finally coalesced around a plan to gradually bring the sport into the public eye.
After years of futility, it was game on.
For Hensley, it all began as a little kid in a Lakewood cul-de-sac. A neighbor boy who played ice hockey was getting in some practice on his inline skates, shooting on an empty net.
“One day he asked if I wanted to play, too,” Hensley recalls. “And his parents came over one day and started talking to mine, saying, ‘Why don’t you let her try it for real?’”
She gravitated to the goalie position slowly, trying it once at age 7 when her recreational team rotated the pads among anyone who wanted to give it a shot. The next year she served as backup goalie, and the year after that split her time between playing in net and skating at other positions. By the next year, though, the transition to goaltender was complete.
To this day, she’s not totally sure what enticed her to take up such a high-stakes position in front of increasingly harder shots as the years went on. But she suspects her attraction echoed the usual reasons — lots of really cool gear and getting to be on the ice for the entire game — but with a local twist.
“At the time, the Avs had Patrick Roy, and obviously he’s, in my opinion, the best of all time,” she says of the Hall of Fame goaltender who helped win two Stanley Cups with the Colorado Avalanche. “So it doesn’t hurt having him to watch on TV night in and night out.”
She progressed in youth hockey with the Foothills Flyers organization, playing out of the Edge Ice Arena in Littleton, where she competed on boys’ teams into her high school years, including her last year in a club program under coach Geoff Riegle.
At that point, Hensley was 15, playing “up” against 16- and 17-year-old boys for the Flyers, splitting time in net with another goalie.
“Her compete level was always high, her work ethic was always top on the team,” Riegle says. “And she really focused on the details — her angles were good, her quickness was good. She was always trying to make more than just the first save and the team in front of her fed off of that.”
The first of two career watershed games Hensley played came that season in the state playoffs, when her Foothills team faced a talented Boulder squad that eventually would advance to the national playoffs. Riegle recalls Hensley finishing the game with an amazing 50-save performance despite a 2-1 loss.
That sealed her decision to move from the rec league to the Colorado Girls Select program, where she once again played up as a 16-year-old on a U19 team, hoping that the exposure might trigger interest from college coaches.
“It was a good fit for her,” Riegle says. “They were set up more from a recruitment standpoint, more national attention to the players and more support for the next level than we were. It made sense for her.”
But Hensley’s only college opportunity came from a fledgling program at Lindenwood University just outside St. Louis. In 2013, nearing the end of her freshman year, a playoff game in Pittsburgh against Robert Morris University turned out to be her second watershed moment, the game that changed everything.
A 1-1 tie after regulation sent the teams into a sudden death overtime period. And then another. And another. A gathering crowd added to the tension. A men’s game scheduled for the rink after the women’s game brought another wave of fans who found themselves witnessing something special.
Hensley turned away a barrage of Robert Morris shots — until, halfway through the third overtime period, one slipped by her to hand Lindenwood a 2-1 loss. Afterward, an NCAA official approached Hensley with a scoresheet. Despite the loss, Hensley’s mind-boggling 90-save effort was record-setting. Not officially, because technically Lindenwood was still in transition to the NCAA’s Division I ranks, so Hensley was denied a place in the record book.
But her performance caught the eye of Brianne McLaughlin-Bittle, a Robert Morris assistant coach who also happened to be a two-time Olympic medalist with the U.S. national hockey team. She got on the phone to advise the program that she’d seen a promising young goalie who might deserve their attention.
“Honestly, it’s one of the coolest things,” Hensley recalls, “because (McLaughlin-Bittle) was still in the (U.S.) program. She wasn’t a coach, wasn’t a consultant or anything. She was a player on the team who was like, ‘Hey, we should give this kid a look.’”
We can call ourselves truly professional athletes now.
By the time the 2018 Olympics were on the horizon, Hensley was in the mix, competing in a string of international tournaments before eventually attending a camp of between 80 and 100 invitees.
Ultimately, she earned a backup goaltender spot on the U.S. Olympic team that won gold. Hensley got one game in net and made the most of it with a 13-save shutout of Russia. She would go on to be part of the 2022 Olympic silver-medal team and play in more international tournaments, becoming an elite talent among a handful of other goalies whose intense competition for playing time now has shifted to the professional ranks.
“Even when there were multiple professional leagues, it was still the national team, the Olympics, that was the pinnacle for us,” Hensley says. “And the Olympics are still like our big dreams and our big goals, but I do think that having a sustainable professional league where you’re making a living wage makes it more real than any professional league we’ve had before.”
Low pay. Subpar facilities. Players digging into their own pockets to cover expenses. These were just a few of the realities that plagued efforts — well-meaning but often ill-fated — to carve out a sustainable space for women’s pro hockey.
Hensley felt relatively lucky. She played briefly with the Buffalo Beauts, a team financed by the owners of the Buffalo Bills NFL franchise and the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres, whose commitment to quality would become part of players’ wish list for the future.
When the Canadian Women’s Hockey League folded in 2019, players had had enough and began to take matters into their own hands. They formed the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association and launched the Dream Gap Tour, lashing together four teams that barnstormed across North America playing weekend exhibitions — almost as a proof of concept that women’s hockey at the highest level could attract a significant audience.
“Over the course of the next three, four years, basically we created something where we could play in very competitive games with top level players,” Hensley says, “while creating the awareness of what was needed for a sustainable professional league.”
The PWHPA also created a board and began to craft the framework of a collective bargaining agreement. Then came the effort to find someone with whom to bargain — the right people to invest in a sustainable women’s league.
Jayna Hefford, the longtime Canadian national team star, helped pitch the business model to Mark Walter, and — after a furious six-month run-up to the Jan. 1 launch — now serves as the PWHL’s senior vice president of hockey operations.
“We didn’t want to put it off another year,” Hefford says. “We didn’t think it was fair to the athletes. We just thought that this was the best way to get going, knowing that everything wouldn’t be perfect and that we may make some mistakes in the first year. But we would also have the ability to fix those mistakes.”
Karell Emard also participated in the early stages of the players’ efforts to create the framework for a pro league. She played in PWHPA events until last summer, when she retired to devote full time to her role as director of operations for women’s hockey, and as a player agent at Quartexx Management in Montreal. At that point, she stepped away from negotiations to avoid conflicts of interest.
She now represents 11 women in the PWHL, including Hensley.
“We did it backwards, in a sense — or maybe this is a new way of doing things moving forward,” Emard says. “But we unionized ourselves. We protected the players right from the beginning. Any female leagues before in the history of women’s sports, you usually see a league being created. And then there’s a formation of a player’s association and then you fight for your treatment, equality and all of that.”
Something I’ve always said is that we want to leave the game in a better place than we found it.
— Nicole Hensley, on women’s hockey
Hefford notes that having a collective bargaining agreement in place was “critically important” to Walter as a framework that could provide cost certainty in mapping out a long-term future. Similarly, players could move forward with confidence and a measure of security.
The agreement with ownership calls for at least a 30-game regular season after the first year. The leaner schedule — at least compared to NBA and NHL 80-plus games — leaves room for players to represent their countries and reflects the enduring importance of international competition to the women’s game.
Players also came away from the negotiation with a housing allowance, per diem on road trips, health insurance, expenses for visa processing, among other details. There’s a salary cap, but with the proviso that it grows by 3% each year and teams must spend to that limit. Currently, Emard says, the average PWHL salary is $55,000.
Hefford says that team names, logos and mascots weren’t regarded as a “need to have” as the league hustled to get up and running. Year one, she says, is focused more on building the PWHL as a brand and learning how its teams fit into individual markets. Branding individual teams and translating that into merchandise and more sharply defined identities was “one of those decisions you don’t want to get wrong.” So for now, the PWHL’s original six are known simply by location.
With proven ownership, King’s star power and an advisory board with names like Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten, longtime CEO and commissioner of World Team Tennis Ilana Kloss, and Dodgers business strategist Royce Cohen, momentum turned into a whirlwind. Hensley was a believer by the time the league held its first draft Sept. 18.
“It all felt real when we got to the draft in Toronto,” she says. “To walk in and see how professionally that event was done, to see how it was broadcast — it was something we’d definitely never experienced. And I think that was the first aha moment that I felt like, OK, this is going to be good.”
Hensley sat off to the side of the event’s staging area, a vantage point that allowed her to glimpse the teleprompter — so she knew, seconds before it happened, that she’d been drafted 12th overall, by Minnesota.
Exactly where she’d hoped to land.
The self-proclaimed State of Hockey stood up to its reputation with that opening-night record crowd — played in the 20,554-capacity St. Paul arena that’s also home to the NHL’s Wild.
But the PWHL has chosen to anchor most of its teams in more modest facilities, preferring to build on the atmosphere of a smaller but mostly full venue over a cavernous site where fan energy might be diluted. Average attendance has hovered around 5,000 per game in the league’s first month.
“In a perfect world, we would have five-to-seven thousand seats in every market,” Hefford says, noting that attendance expectations have been exceeded. “Five thousand a game, that’s a good number for us in our first year.”
Will the PWHL expand beyond its “original six”? Hefford sees no rush. For now, the focus remains on maintaining the quality of competition and ensuring that the league’s level of professionalism aligns with the players’ vision.
“Every time we talk to players we ask: Do you feel like a professional? Do you have what you need to perform?” Hefford says. “And when we get a yes, that’s a validation point for us.”
While enthusiasm for the new operation runs high, it remains a work in progress that hopes to prove itself and establish its widespread appeal once fans become familiar with TV and livestreaming options and the league’s marketing machine has shifted into high gear.
The first game in league history, the Jan. 1 contest featuring New York at Toronto, captured 2.9 million viewers in Canada on New Year’s Day through three broadcast partners. Streaming of the league’s first five games on its YouTube channel generated more than 634,000 views. (The stream of Montreal’s game earlier this week at Minnesota, where Hensley was in goal for a 2-1 loss, her first of the season, hovered around 9,000 viewers.)
At 29, Hensley is philosophical about the timing of this opportunity.
“I wouldn’t have complained if it had been a couple of years earlier,” she says. “But something I’ve always said is that we want to leave the game in a better place than we found it. I think this group has worked so hard for this league and to have this come together, it is truly doing that.”
Her three-year contract with Minnesota lends the kind of stability that, even for someone with a U.S. national team pedigree, allows her the luxury of not feeling like she’s living every moment of her career on the edge.
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“With the national team, it’s very much like, if you don’t perform you can be out the door pretty quick,” she says. “When you know that a team has put their trust in you for three years, that’s something special and shouldn’t be taken for granted. It does help you put some of the external worries out of the way and just play hockey.”
Minnesota Coach Ken Klee — a former NHL defenseman who spent the 2006-07 season with the Colorado Avalanche while Hensley was honing her skills in a nearby rec league — has the team off to a quick start that finds it battling Montreal for the league lead. Hensley also has been chosen to play in the PWHL’s 3-on-3 showcase Feb. 1 in Toronto, as part of the NHL’s All-Star Weekend.
She remains committed to growing the game, participating in specialized goalie camps and often engaging with young players on her returns to Colorado.
Over the holidays, just before the start of the PWHL season, Hensley took to the ice at Ball Arena and answered questions about college recruiting at an event for girls prior to an Avalanche game. Marketing strategies are great, she says, but ultimately there’s nothing more powerful than coming face-to-face with someone who’s living her dream.
“It’s still the person-to-person that I think will sell the league,” she says. “And sell us.”
Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Kevin Simpson is a co-founder of The Colorado Sun and a general assignment writer and editor. He also oversees the Sun’s literary feature, SunLit, and the site’s cartoonists. A St. Louis native and graduate of the University of Missouri’s... More by Kevin Simpson
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