Roughly halfway through the Professional Women’s Hockey League’s third season, its plans for expansion are very much top of mind.
Growing its original slate of six teams, the PWHL welcomed the Seattle Torrent and Vancouver Goldeneyes for the 2025–26 season. But shortly after the newly minted eight-team league began Year 3, the PWHL made clear expansion was not only a desire, but an imperative for its next season.
“In a perfect world, if we could work on the timeline that we did last year, that would be great,” PWHL EVP of business operations Amy Scheer tells Front Office Sports. The exact timeline, Scheer says, “remains to be seen.”
The addition of Seattle and Vancouver was fast: The league looked at data from its barnstorming Takeover Tour, in which the PWHL played out-of-market games to gauge potential landing spots for its new teams. By the end of last season, it had zeroed in on those two markets as preferred expansion targets, which kicked off a whirlwind process of securing venues and building brand identities so the teams could hit the ice in the coming months. In November, the Torrent and Goldeneyes debuted.
Scheer tells FOS both markets have exceeded the league’s expectations based on attendance numbers throughout the first half of the season.
Right now, the league’s biggest focus is riding the momentum it’s found this season. Now at the 2026 Winter Olympics break, the PWHL is already counting a 17% jump in attendance from last year. Notably, the league set the U.S. record for attendance in an arena women’s hockey game—and then broke it shortly afterward.
The Torrent first set the high mark at their home opener on Nov. 28 at Climate Pledge Arena, which drew a crowd of 16,014. Then, on Jan. 18, the New York Sirens and Montréal Victoire shattered the record with 17,228 fans in attendance for the Takeover Tour stop at Capital One Arena.
Growing the tour is a priority, in part for the PWHL’s visibility and attendance, but also because the data from each stop will inform where their next teams will land. Scheer says her wish list for locations to hit comprises more than 50 venues across the U.S. and Canada.
But there is a lot of due diligence required to get games from a wish list to the ice. Arena availability, travel schedule, fan interest, the youth-hockey footprint, and partnerships in the market are all data points being used to determine Takeover Tour stops—and, subsequently, potential expansion locations. Scheer said the PWHL has spoken with every NHL team about the possibility of bringing a game to their market.
Not every stop it has made thus far has borne the same fruit, both in terms of local-market partnerships as well as results.
In Washington, Scheer says Monumental Sports—which owns the Capitals (NHL), Wizards (NBA), Mystics (WNBA), and the Capital City Go-Go (G League)—was a “dream” partner and worked with the league across all of its platforms. The Jan. 18 game drew that record-setting crowd. (Scheer declined to share which markets are front-runners for expansion.)
“All markets are not equal in how we work with them,” Scheer says. “For Washington, Monumental Sports were about as great a partner as you could ever wish and dream for. They were delighted from ownership down to have us there. It showed and was reflected in the way they worked with us.”
The PWHL worked more independently in Chicago. The game between the Ottawa Charge and Minnesota Frost was played at Allstate Arena—home of the AHL’s Chicago Wolves—in Rosemont, and drew a crowd of 7,238. The league had some support from the Wolves, but Scheer says it couldn’t compare to Monumental Sports’s efforts.
Scheer says the PWHL has been in contact with the Chicago Blackhawks a “fair amount,” but it hasn’t been able to formalize any kind of partnership, in part due to the crowded schedule at the United Center—which is home to the Blackhawks and the Bulls. If the league were to enter the Chicago market, it would likely have to self-support: “We know if we went to Chicago and we had our own staff there to sell, we feel we could do well there,” Scheer says.
The league understands not every market it looks to expand in will come with equal circumstances. The lack of partnership with a market’s NHL franchise, for instance, won’t dissuade the league from pursuing a location if there are other data points that make it viable.
“We understand there are markets where we have to put the work in,” Scheer says. “There are markets where we have the partnerships and we work together.”
When the PWHL’s third season play resumes after the Olympic break on Feb. 26, more Takeover Tour games are on the docket, including returns to the Chicago area, Detroit, and Denver. Scheer will be watching the results of these markets closely as expansion conversations advance.
The stops so far have provided valuable insight, Scheer tells FOS. And if the PWHL mirrors last year’s expansion announcement, news could be released before the end of the regular season on April 25. Still, Scheer says, “we’re still weeks away from making any type of decision.”
