Canada's women's pro sports landscape transformed in 2024 with arrival of PWHL, NSL, WNBA
CBC
The Professional Women's Hockey League played a first season and started a second, the Northern Super League fired its engines for an all-Canadian women's soccer launch, and the WNBA announced its arrival in Canada.
Women's professional sports in Canada reached a critical mass in 2024.
"It was hard to believe in 2023 that we didn't have professional women's sports here," said PWHL senior vice-president of hockey operations and Hockey Hall of Famer Jayna Hefford.
The PWHL, with three Canadian and three U.S. teams, is a single entity and geographically centralized in central and eastern North America and backed by billionaire American sports magnate Mark Walter.
The Toronto Tempo joining the WNBA in 2026 — that league's 30th year — is backed by deep-pocketed Canadian sports mogul Larry Tanenbaum.
The six-team NSL starting in April, 2025, is a Canadian coast-to-coast venture of club owners buying into a league that is building its business from the ground up. Teams signed players and introduced club ownership and management in 2024.
It has sports heavyweights in its corner, including international soccer star Christine Sinclair and former CFL commissioner Mark Cohon.
"There's been probably a confluence of timing, and where we're at culturally is huge," said NSL co-founder Diana Matheson, a former Canadian women's soccer team player.
LISTEN l Looking back on a transformative year for women's sports:
Women's pro sports finally being appreciated as a valuable brand and a growth market was at the core of its 2024 emergence.
Social justice influences post-pandemic, social media and streaming upending the traditional ways sport connects with fans, and data refuting the notion people don't watch women's games contributed to a new sports ecosystem in Canada.
"It's gone from concept and theory to reality," said Cheri Bradish, director of Future of Sport Lab and Sport Initiatives at Toronto Metropolitan University's School of Business Management.
Canadian Women and Sport conducted a poll and stated in a 2023 report that two out of three Canadians were fans of women's sport and, just as important for business, that fan base was diverse, educated, and affluent.
"It's been a popular sport to dunk on women's sports," said CWS chief executive officer Allison Sandmeyer-Graves.
When a teenaged Chloe Primerano made her debut on the Canadian women’s hockey team last season, Jocelyne Larocque was often the steady force beside her on the blue line.
The Vancouver Canucks announced Friday that they have traded captain Quinn Hughes to the Minnesota Wild.
Canada's Kevin Drury battled his way to a gold medal that left him in tears at a World Cup ski cross event on Friday in Val Thorens, France.
Soccer fans have accused FIFA of a "monumental betrayal" after latest prices for World Cup tickets began to circulate on Thursday.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is “disappointed” that the main arena slated to host ice hockey at February’s Olympics isn’t yet completed with less than two months to go before the Games are scheduled to be played.
A two-year suspension from competitive swimming has forced Penny Oleksiak to answer questions about drug use, train by herself in public pools and defend her legacy as Canada’s most decorated female Olympian.
Hockey, one of the premier events at the Winter Olympics and one that is welcoming NHL players back for the first time in more than a decade, will take place on ice shorter than NHL-regulation size.
Summer McIntosh capped swimming’s U.S. Open with the event record in the women’s 200-metre butterfly on Saturday in Austin, Texas.
Some bronze medals are worth their weight in gold. Valerie Grenier's third-place finish in women's giant slalom at the Mont-Tremblant World Cup certainly fits that category.
The men’s World Cup draw in Washington D.C. was going well for Canada until Pot 4.
The draw for the 2026 World Cup takes place Friday at 12 p.m. ET at the Kennedy Center in Washington, for the purpose of dividing the 48-team field into 12 groups of four. Once the tournament starts, 32 teams will advance from those preliminary groups to the single-elimination knockout rounds.
The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., buzzed with activity and speculation on Thursday in advance of Friday’s all-important draw for the 2026 men’s World Cup.
By the time the management group for the Canadian men’s national hockey team emerges from marathon meetings on Tuesday, as much as 80 per cent of the roster going to Italy next February should be written in pen.