Making It to the Big League

It is early fall and balmy, still shorts and T-shirt weather. Few are thinking about hockey. 

But Zoe Boyd is. As she heads home to Caledon from an Etobicoke rink where she and other women players in the GTA enjoy regular, off-season scrimmages, she’s searching for an answer to a question I asked.

“The Isabella Cup?” the 24-year-old answers and questions simultaneously. She’s guessing the name of the championship trophy awarded to the winning team after last winter’s inaugural season of the PWHL, the Professional Women’s Hockey League.

She’s mistaken about the name of the trophy. It’s the Walter Cup. Her team, Ottawa (now renamed the Ottawa Charge), finished fifth in the standings and missed the playoffs. Minnesota won.

Zoe herself missed the end of the season, out with an injury. She may be remembering one of the other championship trophies and awards she has won in the past, the ones she says are “probably buried in the basement” of the family home in Caledon East. But now, as she suits up for her second season in the PWHL, the name of the ultimate prize is burned into her brain.

A professional career – nay, stardom – in the NHL is the dream of every red-blooded Canadian boy with a helmet and a hockey stick. But not any girl. Until recently, there was no professional league to inspire a young woman’s on-ice ambitions. With the advent of the PWHL, all that changed.

The PWHL, a professional hockey league based in Canada and the United States, will open its 2024–25 season of regular play at the end of November. Along with Ottawa, the league’s six teams include Montreal, Toronto, New York, Boston and Minnesota.

For the inaugural 2023–24 season, the best women hockey players, both in North America and internationally, were signed up. Nearly all the women who played on Team Canada and took home gold at the 2022 Olympics and the 2024 World Championships are in the league. Brianne Jenner, Emily Clark, Ashton Bell and Emerance Maschmeyer are Zoe’s teammates in Ottawa.

The first 24-game season was played to enthusiastic crowds of unprecedented size for women’s hockey. On April 20, 2023, a sold-out crowd of 21,105 watched a game between Toronto and Montreal at the Bell Centre in Montreal, the largest attendance ever recorded for a women’s game, anywhere. The number of regular season games per team has increased to 30 this year and all the games will be broadcast live on television or streamed. 

“The PWHL is really special. It feels much bigger than a game,” Zoe says. “At the home opener in Ottawa last season … I don’t have words for what it felt like. I step on the ice for warmup. The crowd is roaring. You look up and there is not an empty seat to be had. Everyone is on their feet. That was probably the highlight of my career. It wasn’t a fancy goal or a win. Just that. It took my breath away, brought tears to my eyes. I felt an overwhelming sense of pride. It is something I never thought I’d see in my game.” 

No hockey player, no elite-level player of any age or gender can make it to the top unaided. Could Zoe, on talent alone, have made it to the pros? “Certainly not,” she says. “If you don’t have the resources and support, it is next to impossible.”

Moms and dads sipping endless hot coffees in a numbing succession of cold arenas may eventually find themselves watching their offspring play high-level youth hockey. But it doesn’t come cheap. Once equipment, registration fees, paid coaching, ice time, travel, and accommodation at out-of-town tournaments are factored in, costs can climb into many thousands of dollars a year.

Parents should also plan on attending a minimum of two games and two practices a week, eight months of the year, or more. Yelling encouragement from the stands is free.

Zoe remembers her own parental support and is reminded that her mother, Tammy Thomson, was an enthusiastically vocal presence in the stands while they watched her brother play. Was. Her mother was involved in a catastrophic auto accident when Zoe was five. Now in a wheelchair, she lives in a Brampton long-term care facility.

“She has severe brain damage. I don’t think she knows I’m playing professionally. You can tell her, but she can’t really grasp or retain that information. Still, I know from everything people have told me she would have been extremely, extremely proud.”

In the coming season, Zoe’s mother will be taken to the Coca-Cola Coliseum on the CNE grounds to watch a PWHL game between the hometown Toronto Sceptres and her daughter’s Ottawa Charge. 

“My dad will be sitting with her and reminding her that I’m out there. I think it will click for her. If not, I’ll see her afterwards, all sweaty, and she will definitely know then. It will be special.” 

Zoe’s journey toward a professional hockey career began at age three, when she was enrolled by her parents, without much enthusiasm on her part, in a hockey school alongside her elder brother, Spencer. 

Playing road hockey, pond hockey and on hockey teams based in the Caledon East Community Complex followed. All competitions at that time were with, and against, boys. Girls – Zoe was often the only girl – changed in the referee’s dressing room. Zoe persevered. She became enthusiastic. She got good.

“When I switched over to girls’ hockey (at age 12 or 13), I didn’t play in Caledon. I played in Brampton. There wasn’t any high-level girls’ hockey in Caledon then. It was often just me and Kristin.

“Kristin” is Kristin Della Rovere, another Caledon hockey success story. Kristin lived just doors away from Zoe. They met at about age four, two energetic girls who bonded immediately.

“My dad played hockey,” Kristin recalls. “He loves the game. He tried to get me into hockey with little success. Then Zoe, my best friend, was playing hockey, and I wanted to play with her. I asked my dad to sign me up. He was ecstatic.

“Zoe is more than just a friend, she is like a sister to me. We have respect and love. We’ve experienced trauma together.” After Zoe’s mother’s life-altering accident, Kristin’s mother, Elizabeth Dimovski, stepped up both at the rinks and off-ice, becoming something of a second mother to Zoe.

Kristin and Zoe played together on the same boys’ hockey teams, then on all-girl teams, excelling and sharing the same dreams of making it to the top.

During many an aspiring young woman’s late teens, the “top” meant four years as a college athlete on a hockey scholarship in the U.S. For most, opportunity in hockey beyond that would be beer league or nil.

Kristin, pursuing medicine, went on to Harvard, playing hockey there with the Crimson.

Zoe went to Quinnipiac University (“Near Yale,” she says. “No one has ever heard of it.”) in Connecticut on a full scholarship, majoring in sociology with minors in sports and gender studies. She played four years for the Quinnipiac Bobcats, rising to become team captain.

Then what? “The future? Let’s just say I was very lucky to be drafted (into the PWHL). It was always hockey. If I wasn’t drafted, I’d have probably gone overseas to play.”

“I had graduated and was in New York at a friend’s parents’ house trying to figure out what my next moves were,” Zoe remembers. “I watched the PWHL draft (live-streamed on CBC Sports). It took place a nine-hour drive away in Toronto, and I honestly didn’t think I was going to be drafted, so I didn’t go.”

But she was drafted – 53rd by the Ottawa team. “When I heard my name called, I screamed! I jumped! I cried! It was pure happiness. It was one of the coolest moments of my life.” 

It got cooler. Kristin was drafted 56th. Also by Ottawa.

“I was hoping to be drafted, but it was not something I was expecting,” Kristin says. “I remember Zoe’s name being called. My whole family was excited and was texting and calling her, texting and calling me. I was calling her. When my name got called a few people later, we were still celebrating Zoe! I almost missed myself being drafted. We were both so shocked and grateful.”

In Ottawa, that first season, the parallels continued, unfortunately when each sustained an injury.

By halfway through the season, Kristin was out with torn ligaments in her left wrist. Within a couple of weeks, pal Zoe broke her left wrist, also requiring surgery. “The odds of that seem impossible,” Kristin muses. Both sat out the remainder the season.

Zoe, repaired, has returned to Ottawa. Kristin signed a one-year contract with the Bolzano Eagles, a professional team based in northern Italy. “Exploring pro hockey in another country is something I could not pass up,” she says.

She has hopes of representing her family and Italy in the 2026 Olympics. “I’ll miss Zoe. She still spends quite a bit of time with my family. In Ottawa, on ice or out with surgeries, we saw each other every day. Now she is halfway around the world…”

Playing professional women’s hockey involves home and away games, travel, practices, off-season conditioning, and unceasing, competitive pressure to perform at the highest level – ideally at a higher level than the opposing team – every game. 

The remuneration, though a fraction of that paid to NHL stars – or even NHL bench-warmers – is a decent living wage with benefits such as performance bonuses, stipends for accommodation and food at home, and on the road, all meals and hotel expenses covered.

All of which makes it seem like a fine job. 

Is it a job?

Says Zoe: “It never feels like a job. A better word to describe it would be a privilege. It is something all of us who do it have been doing our whole lives because we love it. Bad game, bad loss, hard workout, it never feels like a job. I’m lucky to be able to say that.”

Thirty to 45 seconds. That’s the length of a typical over-the-boards, go-full-out, then-get-off-the-ice shift in professional hockey. As a defender, Zoe’s main role isn’t putting the puck in the net. In fact, she has yet to score her first goal as a professional. Her job is making sure the other team doesn’t put pucks in her team’s net.

Asked to describe her ideal shift, she envisions no highlight reel of dazzling dekes, blistering shots, or lifting a crowd to their feet with a spectacular score. “I see a calm, cool, composed shift where I’m in control of the play, creating lots of movement. Making a difference. Being a presence.”

In hockey, even in women’s hockey where body checking is prohibited, or limited (as in the PWHL, though the rules include some grey areas, says Zoe), being a physical presence is required, almost demanded. That is not in Zoe’s nature. Yet.

“Yes, it’s very physical,” she says. “There are some big hits. You have to keep your head up. We’re not used to that. In college, there is no body contact. It’s a big adjustment. I’m okay with the physical stuff. I’m getting stronger and getting used to it. It’s a lot of fun.”

Fun and familiar is fine, but is more required in the pros? Does competitiveness demand a dollop of mean?

“Yes, definitely.” Zoe responds, “You need an edge. I wasn’t born with an edge. I’m naturally chill. I don’t get angry. But it’s hockey. It is rough and tough out there. I need to do some self-talk to get into that mindset. You can get a little mean but still be respectful.”

Zoe is young in a young, burgeoning professional league. Will she still be patrolling blue lines, controlling the play, creating movement, honing her edge 10 years from now?

“I hope so. Hockey has been a big part of my life. My whole life. If I’m still involved in the game in one way or another at 34, or beyond, it would not surprise me.”

Wearing Ottawa jersey number 3, Zoe is eager to give her all for a career in hockey and maybe to hoist the PWHL trophy, the name of which she now knows.