Committee to chart national course for women’s and girls’ hockey

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This article was published 31/05/2024 (586 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The growth of female hockey has been a roaring success across the country but Hockey Canada CEO Katherine Henderson and her colleagues want the game to be even bigger and better.

To that end, the national governing body has minted a 15-member volunteer committee, chaired by former national team star Gillian Apps, to develop a discussion paper that would lead to recommendations to guide Hockey Canada’s strategic plan for women’s and girls’ hockey.

With the number of Canadian girls enrolled in hockey passing the 100,000 mark for the first time in 2023-24, Henderson has set a goal of increasing the number of female players to 200,000 — edging closer to the 402,000 boys currently registered in the country.

Formulating a national plan could be an important first step to achieving that goal.

“Women and girls need different things out of a hockey system than what boys do, so it’s a matter of putting the player at the centre of the equation and asking them what they need rather than us deciding what they need,” said Henderson on Friday, following the completion of Hockey Canada’s spring congress in Winnipeg. “There’s going to be facilities issues and access to ice that we have to get through.

“The other thing is our system, unlike the men and boys system where we have a path to the professional leagues, we don’t have a CHL (for females). We don’t have major junior or junior A type hockey, so it’s looking at our universities and saying, ‘Are they doing (enough)?’ The other thing, too, is there aren’t beer leagues and intramurals for women. We need to find spaces and places for women to enjoy hockey their whole life and developing the people around them… You also need coaches and officials and on-ice people.”

Henderson is hoping the committee’s recommendations could be unveiled by March 8, 2025, which happens to be International Women’s Day.

“The people I’ve met love hockey — they really do,” said Henderson. “There is some pushback (to change) but people like hockey and they want to see it do well. They want to see it succeed and they want to see it grow and they want to give the experiences and memories that they have to others. I think hockey’s at a pivotal point right now where there’s a number of things we need to do if we want to make sure we’re healthy and growing in the future.

“Everything from the facilities and the culture of hockey to growing it for women and girls and to make sure new Canadians have access to it.”

Apps, who retired from the national team in 2015, joined Hockey Canada’s board of directors last year only months after Henderson was hired in 2023 to rebuild the scandal-plagued organization.

“I think what our committee is doing right now is looking at the broad spectrum across the country, from professional leagues down to the grassroots level and trying to figure out where are the gaps,” said Apps. “What are the areas that need to be addressed? I don’t know the answer to that, and I think we have some real diversity of thought on our committee. We’re going to be engaging Canadians from coast to coast. It’s going to be a big undertaking but, hopefully, gets us to the point where we have a really good road map for the future…

“It will involve change and change is hard,” Apps added. “I think that’s part of the process we’re going through, really bringing people along in the process so people are connected and we hear voices from across the country.”

A veteran sports administrator who served as CEO of Curling Canada from 2016 to 2023, Henderson admitted lowering the barriers to participation remains a key concern.

“Hockey is expensive and for the people that we’re welcoming into the country right now, it may not be a top-priority sport as they’re coming in,” said Henderson. “What I will say… is that the No. 1 way to integrate a child into a community and help them make friends is to play sports together. It’s magical to watch. And we do know that a lot of people entering Canada for the first time associate hockey with being Canadian, and so we have kind of a competitive advantage if you’re interested in entering the sport.”

The inaugural season of the Professional Women’s Hockey League, with Canadian teams in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, has sparked interest. Expansion to Western Canada, with an established presence on national television, would further raise the game’s profile.

“That’s always going to be the question — how fast can we grow this and when are we going to see teams across the country and when are we going to see teams in more cities in the United States?” said Apps. “I would give a lot of praise to the people working behind the scenes in the PWHL and how they thought through those hard questions. It seems as though they picked some great locations for the first season and I’m sure behind the scenes, there’s a lot of questions about where they should go next.”

mike.sawatzky@freepress.mb.ca