It was the summer of women and boy, did they roar. Serena Williams, Ronda Rousey and the U.S. women's national soccer team, led by Carli Lloyd, all turned heads and headlines.
Now 72 women are looking to continue the girl power into autumn as the National Women's Hockey League drops the puck on its inaugural season Sunday, Oct. 11.
THE TEAMS: Connecticut Whale | Buffalo Beauts | Boston Pride | New York Riveters
"It's been such a great thing for women in general and women in sports," NWHL founder and commissioner Dani Rylan said in an interview with Sporting News. "It's the right time and women have a stage and a platform to shine."
Women's hockey players get a league of their own. (Getty Images)
Rylan, 28, played college hockey at Northeastern from 2010 to 2012 but after her eligibility ran out there was no where to go. Her career was done when many men's are beginning to really take off.
So the Tampa, Fla., native, whose father worked for the Tampa Bay Lightning, took the steps to change that for others. The league consists of four teams based in northeast cities: Boston Pride, Buffalo Beauts, New York Riveters and Connecticut Whale. They'll play an 18-game schedule with one game a week stretching into late February. And, they will get paid for their work, putting their hockey league in the history books as the first to do so.
'The second-best time'
The NWHL is hitting at an opportune time with the summer success of women's sports even though it wasn't planned that way. Rylan said going through with the idea initially began between a year and a year and a half ago. She said her original idea was to put a New York expansion team in the Canadian Women's Hockey League (CWHL) but decided to "take a different path and explore a different philosophy in paying the women and growing the game in the United States."
She reached out to others in the hockey community and things "started snowballing" into a four-team league ready to drop the puck.
"I've been telling people after the 2014 Olympics would have been the best time to do it, so 2015 is the second best," Rylan said. "The women's game has evolved so much over the last even 10 years so that it's really elevated to the point where the women have deserved the opportunity to play on a professional stage."
Dani Rylan (Getty Images)
In February 2014, the women's national team lost a thrilling overtime gold medal game 3-2 against Canada in Sochi, Russia. The game drew 4.9 million viewers in primetime, according to Nielsen ratings, up 96 percent from the same matchup four years prior, though the 2014 game was broadcast on MSNBC instead of NBC.
As with any Olympic sport in an Olympic year, hockey membership increased because of the increased exposure. Girls' membership was up 2.33 percent from the 2012-13 season to '13-14 with 67,230 participants, according to USA Hockey's June report. It increased 3.74 percent from that report to the 2014-15 one.
"Having the game in the U.S. at a professional level every year we expect that number to continue to jump significantly," Rylan said.
The NWHL's choice of founding cities was also based primarily on those membership numbers. Per the 2015 report, 36.3 percent of female hockey players were on ice in the Northeast, especially in Massachusetts where there are 10,310 players. Only Minnesota has more.
"We realized it was a pretty obvious hockey hotbed here," she said.
She said she chose the most viable cities and one is already showing the ceiling for fandom is mighty high. The Connecticut Whale sold out their opener against the Riveters a week before play. The team is playing at Chelsea Piers Connecticut, a facility in Stamford.
All about awareness
The first and most important step in seeing those sellouts continue will be keeping eyes on the league past the initial "this is happening" impact.
The NWHL and teams have Facebook pages, Twitter handles and Instagram accounts as with any business to reach fans. The NWHL uses hashtags such as #FutureDraftPickFriday and #SisterhoodSunday to not only promote itself, but interact with a growing fan base and shine a light on young girls' love of the game. Posts are sometimes a mash-up of the past, with fans sharing their own photos of girls playing; and the future, with parents expressing gratitude for giving their daughters more reason to dream.
TWITTER! 🙋🏼 #tbt to when playing professional hockey was just a dream! #HistoryBegins October 11 @CTWhale_NWHL pic.twitter.com/cwrv1W7IIy
— Molly Engstrom (@engstrom09) October 8, 2015In many ways, Rylan and her employees have immediate opportunities the women's leagues before them would never have imagined.
"There's more ways to get awareness, there's more ways to be seen and there's more ways for these women to prove themselves on a stage," Rylan said. "I think there's been such a negative stigma with women in sports not being up to par. The quality of the game on the field or in the ring or on the ice hasn't been able to shine and the women haven't been able to prove how great the women really are at their sport. Until now of course."
The league does not have a TV contract but every game will be streamed on the NWHL Cross Ice Pass. Detailed information was to be released by the league. The program was mentioned in a press release and the NWHL has mentioned it a few times in Facebook comments when fans ask if they can watch games online.
Historic dough
The league's tagline is "History begins," but it might as well be "Forecheck, backcheck, paycheck," as dubbed by Alyssa Gagliardi. The Boston Pride defenseman tweeted the caption with a photo of her and teammates showing off their first paychecks, which is what sets the NWHL apart from the CWHL.
The NWHL teams have a salary cap of $270,000 with a minimum salary of $10,000 per player. It released "CapPro" on its website in September with a spreadsheet of every player's salary. On top of salaries, the players will receive 15 percent of their sweater's sales.
Rylan wouldn't go into detail about where that money is coming from, only saying part of it will stream in from the NWHL Foundation. The foundation is a "charitable and educational" 501-(c)(3) nonprofit that aims to provide long-range financial support while promoting the growth of the game.
"It was part of our business plan and philosophy at the beginning, paying women for being the best at what they do," Rylan said. "And believe it or not, we're not the only people that think that. We have people supporting us."
The first draft took place in June with each team picking five juniors from the college ranks. Free agency ran from mid-April to mid-August. The league will run partially on corporate sponsors, though none has been released yet. The NWHL has the "fundamental support" of the NHL, Rylan said. No money will be exchanged between the leagues, but the goal is to make the new league an entity everyone wants to jump on board with.
There's been such a negative stigma with women in sports not being up to par. The quality of the game on the field or in the ring or on the ice hasn't been able to shine and the women haven't been able to prove how great the women really are at their sport. Until now of course. — Dani Rylan
"The biggest thing our first year is for the awareness to grow and we want to be the best choice for sponsors to knock on our door and want to jump on the brand and the league that we develop this year," Rylan said.
"We're setting out to make year one as successful as possible so there aren't any barriers come year two."
What we play for
The Pride, Beauts, Whale and Riveters will be battling for the Isobel Cup. The championship trophy is named for Lord Stanley's daughter, Lady Isobel Stanley. Lady Isobel was one of the first women to play hockey and her "love and passion were instrumental in fueling her father's inspiration," the NWHL wrote in its media release.
Rylan's plan is for the Isobel Cup to fuel more girls' inspiration. Her plan is already unfolding as hoped for.
"At the end of the day, it's bigger than what any of us even picture it as right now. It's that next generation," Rylan said. "Someone asked me maybe a month or so ago, where do you see the league in 15 to 20 years from now? And I thought about it for a second and I was like, 'Oh wow, in 15 or 20 years some little girl may have started playing hockey because of the NWHL and she's going to be draft eligible in 15 to 20 years.' "
As Olympians signed with teams in the past month, the heart of the quotes they provided for media releases read the same: This is for the girls. Some of the players grew up playing with only boys. All of them grew up without many prominent female role models in their sport.
If this league grows and finds its place in the sports lexicon, that won't be the case for their future daughters.
"That's pretty special the impact that will have on" the next generation, Rylan said. "Obviously the immediate impact is giving these players the opportunity to get paid to be the best at what they do. That's what is the short term impact, but then the long term really does effect that next generation and give those girls the opportunity to dream bigger than ever before possible."
Cassandra Negley is a contributor at Sporting News. She is sports editor at the Thomasville Times-Enterprise in Georgia and writes for the Mets blog, Rising Apple . You can follow her on Twitter, @casnegley .