Kendall Coyne Schofield of Minnesota receives the Walter Cup from Mark Walter and Billie Jean King, along with Kimbra Walter and Jayna Hefford during Game Five of the PWHL Finals at Tsongas Center on May 29, in Lowell, Mass.Troy Parla/Getty Images
The Los Angeles Dodgers are the talk of the baseball world, signing Japanese sensation Shohei Ohtani, boosting the sport’s global audience and dominating a World Series full of homer-mashing heroics from Freddie Freeman.
Meanwhile, busy Dodgers executives are also devoting their time to a different project: the Professional Women’s Hockey League.
Dodgers owner Mark Walter is the financial backer of the six-team PWHL, which will drop the puck on its second season next month. Brass from the baseball team regularly roll up their sleeves as active board members of the women’s league, including Dodgers president Stan Kasten, senior vice-president of business strategy Royce Cohen and tennis greats Billie Jean King and Ilana Kloss, who are minority owners of the club.
Cohen, reached in New York this week as the Dodgers and Yankees played the World Series, pivoted to talk hockey. He said the PWHL will push the envelope in Season 2, listing some goals: a new broadcast deal, increasing average attendance to some 7,500 to 8,000 fans a game, boosting merchandise sales and partnerships and more games at NHL rinks and neutral sites.
The PWHL begins training camp on Nov. 12, with the second season opening Nov. 30 and featuring 90 regular-season games.
The Dodgers executives have joined forces with the PWHL front-office senior vice-presidents who run the show: Jayna Hefford (hockey operations) and Amy Scheer (business operations). After the PWHL’s debut season set attendance records, added 40 corporate partners and more than a million social-media followers, the group won Sports Business Journal’s 2024 Sports Breakthrough of the Year.
“There’s nothing like winning a World Series and being at the top of the sports world, but you know, there’s also nothing like starting a league from scratch,” Cohen said. “What we did in the PWHL’s Year 1 was amazing, but everyone truly believes that it was only the beginning, which means it was only the beginning of the work.”
Meanwhile, at ESPNW Summit Tuesday in Ojai, Calif., Scheer broke some league news. She said the PWHL has begun the expansion process, seeking proposals in the hopes of adding up to two new teams to the league as early as the 2025-26 season. She did not specify cities.
“Looking for the right market size, right fan base, right facilities, right economic opportunities,” Scheer said during a panel discussion. “So a lot of research to be done over the next couple months. But yeah, looking to continue to build the league and build the number of teams.”
Bringing the PWHL to life for its Jan. 1 debut was a sprint – they did it in just six months after Walter bought out the rival Premier Hockey Federation and his group negotiated a collective agreement with the Professional Women’s Hockey Players’ Association (PWHPA), clearing the deck for a sustainable women’s pro league. Now, even with the PWHL’s foundation built, and the Dodgers chasing the biggest prize in baseball, its execs remain engaged.
Cohen says he sometimes works on PWHL business starting at 5 a.m. PT, when his hockey colleagues in the eastern time zone are active, then flips to Dodgers duties around lunchtime as baseball ramps up for the day.
The Dodgers lend the PWHL any business insights it may need, from ticketing to merchandise and legal. Cohen is the business analytics expert for the Dodgers, and while there was little data for him to analyze about the business of women’s hockey last year, the PWHL collected a wealth of it from Season 1.
He keenly observed fan behaviours, too, like the rate of growth in subscribers to the PWHL’s YouTube channel or the budding trend among youth hockey teams of copying the league’s signature jersey style in the debut season – unembellished city names in horizontal print – before it added team names and logos.
He says everyone is prepared for big losses in the early years – while revenues were higher than projected, so were league expenses – but called the PWHL “a very viable business in the long term.”
He, among others working on the PWHL, was delightfully surprised to learn the league took the No. 1 spot in a new Harris poll that ranked the reputations of brands in the minds of Canadians. The PWHL’s reputation ranked well ahead of long-standing brands such as Tim Hortons, Canadian Tire and the NHL.
PWHL brass have occasionally travelled to Dodgers games to meet colleagues and root for the team. They visited Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles and Citi Field in New York as the Dodgers battled the Mets earlier this month in the National League Championship Series.
“We see the Dodgers, and everything they do is first class,” said Hefford, the Hockey Hall of Famer who has long been spearheading efforts for women’s pro hockey. “That was the promise that was made to us – when they got involved, it would be first class.”
Hefford says Dodgers president Kasten rarely sits at hockey or baseball events. He circulates and talks to everyone, always learning and building relationships.
“People want to work for him,” she said.
The PWHL’s execs will never forget Kasten at the women’s first training camp at a rink in Utica, N.Y., before Season 1, when he excused himself from a hockey meeting to take an urgent Dodgers call. The team’s talks with Ohtani were under way, and days later they inked him to a reported 10-year, US$700-million deal, the largest contract in the history of North American sports.
Cohen recalled how, on Jan. 1, at the PWHL’s inaugural game at Toronto’s Mattamy Arena, a sports fan yelled out to Kasten: “Hey, you’re the guy who stole Ohtani from us!” – apparently still crestfallen that the Blue Jays hadn’t signed the superstar.
Kasten was focused on women’s hockey that New Year’s Day in Toronto – even brought sunglasses, he told reporters, anticipating he’d shed tears when Toronto and New York locked in for the first faceoff.
In the following days, the Dodgers and PWHL leaders travelled together to watch the other teams debut at their rinks and talk to the players.
“They’re the best in the business, so to have them in women’s hockey has been a game changer,” said Chris Burkett, the PWHL’s VP of league operations and compliance. “They never wavered on a top-notch experience for the players and the league.”
While the Dodgers are the prime tenant in their stadium, with a long-standing popular brand, most of the PWHL teams are secondary in their venues and are still in the infancy of brand building, beginning their second campaign with new team names, logos and jerseys. The two businesses are so different. Negotiating with venues a year ago for a new, unproven women’s hockey league was tougher. The PWHL has more points of validation now.
“I think there’s a lot more belief and buy-in to what we’re doing going into Season 2,” Cohen said.