Inside the 1st stop of the PWHL’s Takeover Tour, as the league eyes further expansion

Kids banged on the glass and cheered every drill and shot the pros made inside Scotiabank Centre, hoping to catch a player’s eye and maybe even a puck.

The Toronto Sceptres and Montréal Victoire opened their practices to the community in Halifax on Tuesday, to the delight of kids who got to skip school to watch their favourite players. One waved a sign saying they’d missed their school’s Christmas concert for the opportunity.

A couple hours later, Victoire players coached youth players in a clinic on the Scotiabank Centre ice, where the Victoire and Sceptres will play game one of the league’s 16-stop Takeover Tour on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. ET.

It’s all part of Halifax’s quest to be the next city to secure a PWHL franchise, as the league eyes rapid expansion.

Twelve is the magic number the eight-team league is looking to reach, and it could happen as soon as next season. The PWHL has teams in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver, Boston, Minnesota, Seattle and the New York area.

The Takeover Tour, which sees the league visit cities across North America to showcase PWHL play, is the “starting point” for considering a city for expansion, the league’s executive vice president of business operations, Amy Scheer, told a crowd of community and business leaders inside the Halifax Convention Centre on Wednesday morning.

Professional women’s hockey comes to Nova Scotia

Next is infrastructure, including the arena where players will compete and the facilities where they will train.

But there are plenty of other factors on the table, too, including travel, business opportunities and community engagement.

If the Takeover Tour is the starting point, Halifax has struck the right tone so far. Both Wednesday’s game and another Halifax game on Jan. 11 between the Boston Fleet and Ottawa Charge sold out.

“We actually had to hold tickets back from the presale to have tickets on sale for the public the next day,” Scheer told the crowd in Halifax.

Signs of the league’s arrival were visible throughout downtown, including players’ faces on lampposts on streets around the rink.

That tickets sold quickly didn’t surprise Jayna Hefford, the league’s executive vice president of hockey operations. She won gold with Team Canada in Halifax when it hosted the 2004 world championship.

“This is a market that we had circled on the calendar as something that would be a huge success,” Hefford said.

Events East, the company that operates Scotiabank Centre, has been planning these games for months. In addition to open practices and a Halifax clinic, the group also organized a coaches’ panel and a pop-up clinic in Pictou County, where Sceptres captain Blayre Turnbull grew up.

“I think we know that they’re looking for a market that will show up, and a fan base and a community that will welcome them,” Suzanne Fougere, Events East’s executive vice president, said in an interview.

“Our job is to make sure that [Wednesday night] we put on a great hockey game, we show them how proud this community is, and then ultimately the decision on where they’ll go in the future is really up to them.”

With a capacity around 10,500 for hockey, Scotiabank Centre is around the size the PWHL is looking for in a home arena. It’s also home to the QMJHL’s Halifax Mooseheads and the National Lacrosse League’s Halifax Thunderbirds.

Creating a practice facility could also be a possibility, should Halifax be in consideration for a team.

“I think if we’re pursuing a team more fully and those conversations are progressing, absolutely, that takes the right kind of infrastructure,” Fougere said. “For us, that’s Scotiabank Centre as the home arena and then absolutely looking at opportunities for practice venues. We know that there’s support for that from our various levels of government.”

Travel could be trickier, without direct flights to some of the PWHL’s markets. The league will get a sense of how that works later this week, when the Victoire head from Halifax straight to Vancouver, where they’ll play against the Goldeneyes on Saturday.

The tour continues in Chicago on Sunday, with a game between the Ottawa Charge and Minnesota Frost.

The PWHL will visit 11 different locations on this season’s Takeover Tour, and Halifax is one of five cities that will host more than one game. Chicago, Detroit, Edmonton and Denver will also get two visits.

Beyond the audition to someday host a PWHL team, the first stop of the tour is a homecoming for a number of players and staff on the Victoire and Sceptres.

Victoire head coach Kori Cheverie grew up in New Glasgow, and was excited to show her world to her friends and family. 

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“My family’s super proud and they love our team, and they want to be involved and they want our team to feel extremely welcome,” she said.

On the other bench, Sceptres head coach Troy Ryan, who’s from Spryfield, N.S., played his first university hockey game for the University of New Brunswick inside what is now Scotiabank Centre. Before that, he watched AHL teams play there.

As his team flew in on Monday, and was welcomed by fans at the airport, it felt like coming home for Ryan, who mentioned how strange it felt to be staying in a hotel in his hometown.

“I can’t think of a better place to have a PWHL team than Halifax,” Ryan said. “I know there’s support. The growth of women and girls hockey through Hockey Nova Scotia is a leader around the country. It would be a great location.”

Sceptres defender Allie Munroe was one of only about four girls playing hockey when she was growing up in Yarmouth, N.S. 

She couldn’t have dreamed of playing a pro hockey game in her home province.

“It’s still surreal to me,” Munroe said. “It’s a dream to come true to play professional hockey for a living. Just to be at home, to have all the support, I feel it in Toronto. All throughout my career, I’ve had amazing support from the province, especially my hometown of Yarmouth.”

The story is similar for Turnbull, who didn’t have the option to play with girls when she grew up in Stellarton, N.S. 

Now, the summer camp she runs alongside fellow Nova Scotian Jill Saulnier sells out within minutes. Last summer, they coached about 300 girls.

It will be Turnbull’s second game in Halifax in a calendar year, after the Canadian national team played a Rivalry Series game against the United States at Scotiabank Arena last winter. Turnbull scored a big goal in front of her home crowd to tie that game.

Authoring another big moment at home, for the PWHL team she leads, would be something else entirely.

“I think [Wednesday] we can expect a ton of kids in the stands, a lot of little girls who know a lot about the PWHL,” Turnbull said.

“They’ve got teams that they follow, players that they follow. For Montreal and Toronto to be the first two teams to play against each other here in Halifax, I think it’s something that you can’t really put into words. It’s going to be awesome.”