Rylan confident as NWHL begins
National Women’s Hockey League founder and commissioner Dani Rylan has a blunt message for her detractors in preparing to open her fifth season.
“We’re not going anywhere. We’re just growing,” she told The Associated Press in a wideranging interview last month.
There are questions about the league’s stability after several franchises lost their local NHL teams’ backing and some 200 of the world’s top players opted to sit out this year. Rylan is nonetheless defiant and insists there will be a sixth season next October, a seventh one after that and so on.
If that means moving forward without Olympians and with the NHL questioning whether the privately backed league’s business model is financially sustainable, then so be it.
“I would ask what about it is not sustainable, what don’t they like,” Rylan said.
“I think the message right now is the NHL needs to save professional women’s hockey,” she added. “And I just believe that a pro women’s league should be able to prove that it’s viable without the NHL, without NHL teams. And that’s what we’re proving.”
Rylan noted that North America’s first pro women’s league has paid out over $3 million in salaries. Last season, she said, it enjoyed 16 sellouts while setting league highs in apparel sales and online viewership. And it enters this season having added new sponsors, including a new livestreaming partner, Twitch, to broadcast every game.
The fiveteam league kicks off its 60game regularseason schedule — up from 40 last year — on Saturday.
It has been a tumultuous offseason for the NWHL, which even Rylan acknowledged involving “some ups and downs” for its teams in Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
The biggest downer came shortly after the rival Canadian Women’s Hockey League announced it was folding last spring and the NWHL was unable to fill the vacuum. The league eventually backed off on its bid to expand into Toronto and Montreal. Then more than 200 of the top female players balked at signing with the NWHL by pledging they would not play professionally in North America this season.
The disaffected players instead formed the Professional Women’s Hockey Players’ Association to demand a league with a sustainable economic model that can one day pay them a living wage.
Rylan called the players’ decision a lost opportunity, considering there is currently only one league in operation.