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At some point Wednesday night, the first best-on-best, truly professional hockey league for women will crown its first champion.
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On the ice for the presentation of the PWHL Walter Cup will be two members of a five-team collective bargaining agreement negotiating team that made it possible.
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The birth of the PWHL has been chronicled many times over in its first year of existence but the role of four players active in the league in its first season and one former player often gets glossed over in these historical lookbacks.
From somewhere around August 2022 to the beginning of July 2023, this five-member committee worked tirelessly to ensure that a CBA with an eight-year lifespan would be hammered out between the league and its players’ association, guaranteeing the new league the kind of long-term sustainability of which any of its predecessors could only dream.
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It’s not a stretch to suggest that in the midst of that, win or lose on Wednesday night, Kendall Coyne Schofield of Minnesota and Hilary Knight of Boston will at least reflect back on their significant roles in making the league a reality.
And the same can be said of Oakville native and PWHL Ottawa captain Brianne Jenner, or PWHL Toronto assistant captain Sarah Nurse, and certainly long-time CWHL goalie and current PHWPA secretary Liz Knox, who rounds out that group of five.
All five were player respresentatives within the PWHPA but none had previous experience collectively bargaining a CBA, let alone ever sat across the table from league owners to negotiate an agreement that would be amenable to both sides.
As it turned out, that was another yet-untapped skill for the five who stepped up to take women’s hockey to the next level.
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“Honestly, I think you could have put in any player in the PWHPA and they would have done an excellent job in those negotiations,” Jenner said when asked about the five who eventually shouldered that burden.
“But timing was kind of an important piece of it and just making sure we could keep the ball rolling,” she said. “We knew how important it was to the player group to get a league built as soon as possible. We were an association that had then become a union and had been going for four years at that point and we just knew how critical it was to get something done and we knew how great of an opportunity we had with this investor group as we’ve since seen play out.”
That investor group led by billionaire Mark Walter in conjunction with female sports advocates Billie Jean King and Ilanna Kloss were the kind of backers the likes of which women’s hockey had never had before and someone had to step up and make sure this opportunity was not wasted.
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On top of that, the group had to represent all the women who would be playing in the league, from national team players who basically played hockey for a living to those who played professionally but previously maintained full-time jobs in addition to their hockey.
‘AN ORGANIC TRANSITION’
“It was just an organic transition because we had been serving on the board of the PWHPA along with others, of course, but when it came time to negotiating it was kind of balance of Canadians and Americans and then I kind of fit in as the non-national team average folk,” PWHPA secretary Knox said. “Representing players that had full-time jobs and just to try to satisfy the interests of everybody we represented.”
That made Knight and Coyne Schofield the American reps. Jenner and Nurse represented the Canadian players. Knox, who had played in countless leagues over the years, all while holding down a full-time job, represented that group of players.
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Knox said the outcome of the negotiations, which resulted in an agreement in July 2023, pretty strongly suggests the five who wound up taking on this task were the right five from the beginning.
“I’ll sing their praises till the day I die because that group of women really took this bargaining in their hands,” Knox said. “We were fortunate to have an amazing lawyer in Susan Davis and have some great advisers behind the scenes, but when you’re sitting at that table across from Stan Kasten and their legal team, with Royce Cohen — it was those players who were speaking and honestly it was moving, inspiring to hear them talk about their experiences and what they envisioned.
“I think we impressed them,” Knox said of the league negotiators. “These are intelligent, well- educated women who put their thoughts out there and are articulate. I don’t know what their experiences were like dealing with players in MLB or any other league around the world, but I think we represented the players well.”
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Jenner admits initially it felt like an overwhelming task. Sure, they were some of the best female hockey players in the world, but what did they know about negotiating a collective bargaining agreement?
As it turned out, quite a bit.
‘WE KNEW OUR SPACE BETTER THAN ANYONE’
“The careers that we’ve trained in are not CBA negotiations,” Jenner pointed out. “We had all these experienced advisers around us but at the same time we learned pretty quickly that we actually brought a lot of expertise because we knew our space better than anyone.
“We had lived it for years and years,” Jenner added. “We had played in previous leagues. We had been training through COVID, trying to figure out what is needed for a professional environment. What our players needed. We had been having those conversations with our teammates and with the people that came before us and players for decades.
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“It was kind of neat to realize ‘OK, we do have a space at this table and in fact our voices are probably the most important,” Jenner said.
The job, though — ensuring that all PWHL players would have the kind of resources and advantages bargained previously by existing professional leagues and even better than that — remained a monumental task.
For Coyne Schofield, it wasn’t so much the actual negotiating as it was ensuring that no stone was left unturned and no area left unbargained that might make the PWHL experience less than it should be for the players.
“It was having a blank sheet of paper and trying to put all of those pieces in place to get to this season,” Coyne Schofield said. “The time commitment and the energy, learning from other leagues, learning from other leaders, learning from everyone and anyone that we could during the negotiation. I think that was what was hard.”
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Everything from how many meals teams would provide, how the players and their equipment would be transported from venue to venue, how many staff would be on hand to assist in making the players the best they could possibly be. And that was just the start of list that would eventually fill 62 pages.
Through it all, there was the common goal of making the league professional in every way.
‘WE HAVE THE SAME GOAL’
“You look at the leaders on our side of the table and their side of the table … it really didn’t feel like there was this side or that side,” Coyne Schofield said. “Yes, finances needed to be discussed and there needed to be a line drawn somewhere. It wasn’t Pandora’s box and let’s go anywhere and everywhere. You have to work within the means, but I think everyone had the understanding of we have the same goal. We want this league to be successful not just for eight years but forever. So, it was how do we get there and starting the conversation on that premise.”
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The talks came to a head in the late spring of 2023, through May and all of June, but had been ongoing since the previous August.
Nurse recalls being on a family vacation in the Carribean and taking out her laptop, phone and ear buds while sitting beachside to take part in one of countless calls between the league and the players committee.
Knox, a firefighter in Oakville, vividly remembers begging off calls as the alarm sounded at the firehall where she was working.
“The sirens would go off and I I would say, ‘Hey, I’ve got to jump now,” Knox said.
By May and June, the group was constantly flying to and from New York or Chicago to meet with league officals and hammer out the agreement.
“If I remember correctly, May and into June, it was just constant,” Jenner said of the workload. “But I think we all kind of knew if we could get this thing done it was maybe the biggest thing for our sport that has ever happened so the motivation was there.
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“We knew how much faith the players had put in us,” Jenner said. “I think it was so much harder on the players that weren’t us five because they trusted us and they weren’t getting the updates that we were. Just by the nature of those negotiations, not everything could be told (as it happened). We tried to keep the wider union as up to date as possible, but you just aren’t able to do that to the same extent as much as those that are intimately involved in the negotiations.”
By July 1, all the hard work had paid off and an agreement was signed off on, not a moment too soon as it turned out.
“Well, July 1 was a little bit more special for me,” Coyne Schofield said. “I gave birth to my child, but (yes, that date) was very satisfying. Maybe that’s why he decided to come on that day. ‘Mom I’m done listening to this. I’m done. I’m done going to New York. I’m done sitting across the table,’ but it was extremely satisfying.’”
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‘IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET BETTER’
Jenner will be watching the fifth and final game between Boston and Minnesota on Wednesday night. The player in her will be wishing she was there, but she admits that won’t be her only feeling.
“I think Brianne the hockey player will still wish she was playing in that game. I am too much of a competitor, not to feel that way.
“But I guess the player rep side of me, it’s bigger than just my season and Ottawa’s season,” she said. “It’s way bigger than that. I think it’s going to be the greatest legacy our generation of players has and it’s just so exciting. I couldn’t have imagined for the first year to go as well as it did and it’s only going to get better.”
mganter@postmedia.com
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