Why Emily Clark is the face of 'Canada's Team' — the PWHL's Ottawa Charge

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Emily Clark should be considered the true face of the Ottawa Charge.

Not only is she the best and hardest-working player on the team, but she seems to always be smiling, always accommodating and, these days, always on the podium as one of the game’s stars.

On Tuesday, after she scored the overtime winner in the opening game of the PWHL’s Walter Cup championship series — just as she had counted the winner in the third period to close out the Montreal Victoire in the semifinals — the 29-year-old Saskatoon native was asked about being serenaded by chants of “Clarkie” from the TD Place crowd.

Over a long and strong career, the veteran of Canada’s national team admitted it was a first.

“That was incredibly special,” Clark said while wearing a black ball cap with the word “Ottawa” upside down and backwards on the bill and, of course, a big grin. “We can’t say enough good things about being able to play in front of this community. Any time we have the chance to play at home, it’s just such a boost. They just make us feel so special, so loved, and it’s extra motivation for us to want to do well for them.”

That extra boost seems to be paying dividends when it matters most.

Of the 35 games the Charge has played this season, 21 have been decided by one goal, including the regular-season finale and all five in the playoffs.

Ottawa, which had one of the worst home records in the league during the 30-game campaign, is now 3-0 at TD Place in the post-season.

“It’s the playoffs, it’s going to come down to the wire and that’s how you want it to be,” Clark said. “You’ve got two teams playing at their best, probably at their most confident. It’s hard to score goals in this league, but, with how many games are one-goal games, you know just how important it is to put the puck in the net when you get the opportunity.”

On a night of limited opportunities that you thought might replicate the four-overtime marathon in the Montreal series, Clark made good with her chance just 2:47 into the extra period.

Asked what she was thinking when she flew down the wing and noticed she had a clear shot at beating goalie Nicole Hensley, Clark interrupted herself when it seemed like she was going to talk about a weakness that was detected on the pre-scout videos.

“I had an opportunity the shift before with some speed and the shot kind of rolled off my stick,” she said. “I was just trying to shake that off and I just had in my mind that I have another opportunity. I was going to get it to the net.

“Maybe there were some jokes about trying to get it done in less than four,” Clark added of the talk in the Ottawa dressing room heading into the sudden death. “We were just trying to stick to our game plan, but obviously it’s a relief that we get to go to bed a lot earlier than last time.”

Speaking of time, a win at TD Place in Game 2 on Thursday would leave the Charge one shy of capturing the second Walter Cup and first for a franchise located above the 49th parallel.

Not to make it an us versus the U.S. thing, but the most recent time Ottawa won a professional title in a series against an American squad was 1995, when the now-defunct Lynx won the International League baseball championship against the Norfolk Tides.

Before that, it was 1927, when the Ottawa Senators won the Stanley Cup in a showdown with the Boston Bruins.

A full 98 years later, people are calling a pro franchise in the capital “Canada’s Team.”

About time.

“There’s no talk of it internally,” Charge coach Carla MacLeod said when asked about that label. “Every team in this league is trying to get into the Walter Cup finals, and the fact that we are the first Canadian team, it’s a fun trivia, but, at the end of the day, it doesn’t change anything about who we are and what we’ve been doing.”

That they were doing it on Tuesday in front of just 6,184 fans raised eyebrows.

It’s not a low crowd total by PWHL standards — the defending champion Frost had just 3,000 witness its opening-round clincher at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul last week — but, for a game of this magnitude, should TD Place not have been full?

Never mind that the arena has a roving number when capacity is announced, but this is even more bewildering:

Just 31 hours before game time, the Ticketmaster website showed there were only 651 tickets available for Game 1, and yet attendance was announced on Tuesday was 1,827 fewer than the crowd at last Friday’s elimination of the Victoire.

With ticket prices of $130 between the blue lines and $150 for seats in two end sections, that should include one of those novel caps Clark wears, will Thursday’s game be the sellout it should be, or will the numbers drop even lower?

“If you look at any league in any of the two countries here in North America, playoff pricing increases,” Amy Scheer, the PWHL’s executive vice-president of business ops, said before Tuesday’s opening faceoff. “It’s the normal course of business. The games have more value. In Ottawa, three of the five ticket prices were under $100, so I don’t think we’re asking for unreasonable prices.

“If we didn’t have some affordability, like a $65 ticket or something like that, I would sit here and agree with you (that prices are too expensive). But I think we’re affordable and do have prices that would meet anybody wanting to come to a game. I would take our ticket prices and put them up against any other league in North America, both men’s and women’s.”

As for the low crowd number at a playoff clincher in the home of the defending champs, Scheer said:

“We have a lot of work to do in all of our markets. Playoffs is always a funny thing. The majority of the ticket holders are women and maybe not your traditional season-ticket base, so there’s an education thing that has to happen on our part.

“When you’re a fan of a team, sometimes the playoffs come up fast, you don’t always know the dates, and we’re asking you sometimes to commit to those dates before we know them and you know them. I think that’s a little bit of the hesitation of people signing on and committing to come to the games.

“We have work to do, for sure, but we’re certainly not getting ahead of ourselves. The demand is there.”

None of this should take away attention from the surging Charge — which almost missed the playoffs for the second season in a row and is now two wins from getting its hands on the Walter Cup — or from Clark, the face of Canada’s Team.

“She just plays her heart out every single game, every single shift,” MacLeod said. “She absolutely loves playing here in Ottawa. I think you back it up with her final two shifts in the third period, and you could just see she found another gear. So it was pretty special that she was able to corral that puck and carry up the ice and get the game winner.

“Clarkie, you see her smile in warmups, and she just captures the hearts of her teammates and the fans in Ottawa. It’s nice to see her be rewarded.”