Seattle is indeed getting a professional women’s hockey team, based out of Climate Pledge Arena and set to begin play this fall.
The first wave of Professional Women’s Hockey League expansion benefited the Pacific Northwest. Seattle’s team is due to debut in time for the PWHL’s third season. It will play home games at CPA and train at Kraken Community Iceplex alongside the NHL’s Seattle Kraken.
“Seattle as a market has such a wonderful history of supporting women’s sports with the Storm and the Reign,” PWHL vice president of business operations Amy Scheer said. “We get to come in and be part of that women’s sports community … a huge fan base here that we think will become our fan base as well.”
They will channel the Storm with their emerald green color and add cream.
PWHL selects Vancouver as expansion franchise; Seattle could be next
The team will operate as PWHL Seattle until a name is announced. The selection process is underway, Scheer said. There’s a chance it won’t be finalized before the start of the 2025-26 season. The original six teams only got names and logos before their ongoing second season, which launched Nov. 30. The first year, 2023-24, they went by city names only.
“We have no problem being PWHL Seattle and PWHL Vancouver for the foreseeable future, until we’re comfortable with where we are with brand identity,” Scheer said.
Boston, Minnesota, Montreal, New York, Ottawa, and Toronto make up the charter teams, or “inaugural six.” The league expressed a desire to expand with two teams added by fall of 2025. The addition of PWHL Vancouver, the PWHL’s first expansion team, was announced last week and Seattle’s inclusion was heavily referenced.
Detroit and Denver were rumored possibilities, but Seattle and its burgeoning hockey fandom won out.
“Women’s teams from Seattle and Vancouver played against each other as early as 1921 and, given the proximity of our two newest cities — Vancouver is barely 140 miles away — I can’t wait for the first game in what I’m sure will be one of our fiercest rivalries,” Jayna Hefford, PWHL executive VP of hockey operations, said in a league statement.
Geography wasn’t at the top of the list of reasons, Scheer said.
“We built a list of criteria that we were looking for when we were considering expansion markets, and Seattle really hit a good chunk of those,” Scheer said.
Those criteria included state-of-the-art facilities — Climate Pledge Arena’s $1.15 billion renovation was completed in 2021, and Kraken Community Iceplex opened the same year — a supportive corporate community and economic growth.
Scheer said Seattle talks had been ongoing for quite a while, and “the devil was in the details.” But also the announcement was delayed because the league wanted to give Seattle its moment in the sun instead of bundling it together with Vancouver.
With a hockey capacity of 17,151, Climate Pledge Arena will be the second-largest PWHL home building. It is only slightly larger than the Vancouver team’s arena, Pacific Coliseum, which accommodates 16,281. The Minnesota Frost (Wild) and New York Sirens (New Jersey Devils) also share home ice with NHL teams, and Minnesota’s Xcel Energy Center seats around 18,000.
Hefford and her staff are working on an expansion draft, plus deciding how Seattle and Vancouver will be integrated into the 2025 PWHL draft on June 24. Those details could come after the PWHL playoffs, which begin in early May.
Seattle’s selection follows an “extensive” Request for Proposal (RFP) process. The city’s bid was led by Oak View Group, the developers and operators of Climate Pledge Arena, alongside the Kraken.
Similarly Vancouver’s bid eventual landlords led the charge. The Pacific National Exhibition (PNE), a nonprofit organization that operates events at Hastings Park, oversaw Vancouver’s bid.
Scheer said the Kraken have been “wonderfully supportive” and offer the PWHL a unique perspective, just launching an NHL franchise in 2021.
“They feel that we are additive to what they’re doing,” Scheer said. “[We’ll] be side-by-side with them and help to build the hockey community.”
The new team will join the league’s single-entity ownership structure under the Walter Group, and will operate that way until further notice. Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter and his family are the PWHL’s primary financial backers. The championship trophy is named the Walter Cup after them.
As PWHL takes over CPA, crowd makes it clear ‘Seattle wants its own team’
A PWHL Takeover Tour stop drew a crowd of 12,608 at Climate Pledge Arena on Jan. 5. The PWHL hosted clinics featuring its own players in each city it visited for the Takeover Tour. The league promised to extend grassroots efforts across the Seattle area through more clinics, camps and community events.
“There’s a wonderful hockey youth movement here, and we feel that we could help create some more momentum and add to that and help build the sport here,” Scheer said.
