The National Women’s Hockey League is in the midst of its fifth season, and is the first professional women’s hockey league in the U.S. that has it’s players on a salary. The league has seen surprisingly quick growth both in its fan bases, and in it’s media production, but it’s not quite where it needs to be yet.
I sat down with Boston Pride defenseman Kaleigh Fratkin who’s played in the NWHL since it’s inception in 2015, is a two-time NWHL All-Star, and was recently named 2020 NWHL Defenseman of the Year. In her five seasons in the league, she has accumulated 11 goals and 49 assists, excluding the postseason.
What’s exceedingly obvious is Fratkin’s passion for the sport of hockey. Not only is her devotion and dedication evident, but her desire to see women’s professional hockey grow is indisputable.
After having an incredibly successful career playing at Boston University, an elite team in a very tough Hockey East Conference, there wasn’t much to look forward to aside from playing for your national team pending you were talented enough. Fortunately for Fratkin, she was. “It was kind of an interesting time when I was in college” Fratkin explained, “because the only thing to look forward to post college … was the national team program; an olympics, world championships, whatever it may be, that was kind of the only thing that was there.”
For men’s hockey, the options post college are much more obvious, and much more appealing. There are several leagues throughout the U.S. and Canada that offer livable pay, and the opportunity to continue playing at a high level. For Fratkin and every other woman coming out of college at the time, there was only the Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL), and that was a league which didn’t pay their players. “[The CWHL] wasn’t really top of mind for most players” exclaimed Fratkin, but it was still an opportunity to continue to play the sport she loved, while also continuing to pursue her masters degree.
Fratkin got that opportunity in 2015 as she was drafted by the Boston Blades of the CWHL, and was accepted into the masters program at Northeastern University. “It lined really perfectly that the Blades drafted me and that there was an opportunity to play, and so I could pursue further education and play for a team … there were some great hockey players playing in [the CWHL], the best players in North America were playing.” Before the NWHL, this was really the only option for women’s hockey players, to be able to continue to play, while furthering either their education or their professional lives, still while receiving no additional pay. It’s all for the passion and the love of the game.
In 2015, Fratkin and many other professional women’s hockey players received an email from Dani Rylan, the founder and current commissioner of the NWHL explaining that a league would be starting soon that would pay their players, and offered her a chance to try out for a team. Fratkin jumped at the opportunity, and she landed a spot on the roster with the Connecticut Whale, also being the first Canadian to sign in the NWHL. Fratkin would spend one season with the Whale before moving on to the Metropolitan Riveters where she would also only remain for one season, before ultimately landing in the city where it all started for her with the Boston Pride.
The NWHL has gone through exponential growth in its short five year span. It’s seen support from every city a team is located in, support from cities that also harbor an NHL franchise, along with various types of support from those franchises, and is appearing like it is destined for sustainability and even expansion. But more has to be done, and more is being done. “The 50/50 revenue split between the league and the players is huge” says Fratkin, “the WNBA and a lot of different professional leagues have now been looking at a similar business model … it empowers the players to get out there and use our own connections in the business world to seek out sponsors, or seek out people that want to have partnerships and monetary deals with the league. That’s the biggest thing, because any deal that comes in, 50% of it goes to the players and then gets cascaded down whatever percentage you make off of the salary cap.”
Viewership is also incredibly important for the growth of this league. “The broadcasting and streaming deal with Twitch has been huge” says Fratkin. The ability for thousands of fans to be able to watch these games is key for building a devoted fan base, but in order for viewership to increase even more, television broadcasts deals need to be established. Only in recent years has women’s hockey been televised, and it’s been for college games, and primarily in major tournaments.
Support from NHL teams is proving to be incredibly important and carries great influence, and Fratkin explained while the backing from these teams has helped, there’s a long way to go. “It’s a step in the right direction …You’d like to see a lot happen. They are recognizing and promoting [NWHL teams] in their markets,” with things like shoutouts or promotional material at intermissions, “the marketing and promoting side has been great, but it shouldn’t be these one-off things, it should be continual, every single day … where it’s second nature, where when people are thinking about the Boston Bruins they’re also thinking about the Boston Pride. It should get to a point where they’re doing so much help and support to promote us that it’s a mutually beneficial situation.”
If all of these aspects continue, the real thing that separates the NWHL from prolonged success is simply time. Fratkin explained, “it’s not going to happen overnight … time is huge, to a point where it’s individually owned. Boston has set the bar for having individual ownership and having our own franchise; the way we run our organization differently, and other teams strive to emulate that. Having teams that are individually owned would be huge with an affiliated partnership with their male counterpart team in the NHL, and over time that expansion of more teams … it’s in it’s fifth year and I think there’s a ton of growth to be had.”
The Pride themselves have undergone a season of incredible success, 23 wins and 1 loss, and see themselves awaiting an opponent for the Isobel Cup semifinals. Great hockey has been played in Boston for the past hundred years, and now there’s a new era of success arising in a whole new league: a league completely comprised of women. This is the start of something special, and they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

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