Whether it’s in this round of PWHL expansion or next, the PWHL’s footprint will someday include a team in California. It’s an inevitability for any major North American pro league, and it was an inevitability for the rapidly expanding PWHL.
Hell yeah! I’m so excited to have a home state team even if they are far away!
I was trying to keep interactions to a minimum because my instance was having some trouble at the time, but I found out the pwhl was expanding to san jose officially when I saw this notification, which was an absolute delight as a way to find out.
The thing it is easy to forget about California is that it is so incredibly huge that even things you wouldn’t associate with California happen there quite frequently:
Certainly you can trace women’s hockey history in Halifax, Quebec City, Edmonton, and Calgary to the earliest reaches of the sport. But San Francisco and Oakland weren’t far behind. Beginning in 1916 with the opening of San Francisco’s Techau Tavern Ice Palace, women stepped onto the ice to play hockey in the Bay Area. Roughly 110 years ago on May 26, 1916, the first recorded game of women’s ice hockey in the Bay Area was played.
“An ice-hockey match between two teams composed of of women proved a sensation,” the San Francisco Bulletin wrote. “All the players exhibited marked facility in handling the difficult plays of the game, and shot the puck around the rink with the skill of veterans.”
