The PWHL has arrived in Vancouver, bringing hockey back to the Pacific Coliseum

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When 12-year-old Lauren Fraser walks out the front door in the morning on the way to school in east Vancouver, she gets a clear view of the Pacific Coliseum.

Until Wednesday, seeing the old hockey barn that once served as home to the Vancouver Canucks and Giants was nothing special.

But now, after news that Vancouver is getting a Professional Women’s Hockey League team, the Coliseum is now a dream.

Lauren is an avid hockey player. She plays for the Vancouver Angels U13 A1 team. And she’s thrilled that professional women’s hockey is coming full-time to Vancouver.

“It opens up space for girls’ hockey,” she said Tuesday morning, after finishing up an early-morning practice in Burnaby. “I’m pretty excited for it.”

Starting next fall, she will be able to walk to the rink and cheer on a team of her very own. The yet-to-be-named Vancouver entry into the PWHL will play their games at an upgraded Pacific Coliseum — the PNE is footing the bill for renovations, including a brand-new scoreboard — and will also use the neighbouring Agrodome as a dedicated practice and training facility. Again, those renovations are being paid for by the city-owned PNE.

That is an extra-cool wrinkle to the story, Fraser figures. It’s where she and her teammates often play games. And now she is dreaming that one day maybe she can take the big step up and find her way into the PWHL and play at the Coliseum.

Fraser and her teammates are exactly who the PWHL is hoping to inspire, Hockey Hall of Famer Jayna Hefford said. Hefford is the executive vice-president of hockey operations for the PWHL. She was on the Canadian team that won gold at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and was elated by the massive turnout at January’s Takeover Tour game at Rogers Arena between the Toronto Sceptres and Montreal Victoire. It drew the largest crowd to watch women’s hockey in Vancouver during the 2024-25 season.

That’s a point that prompted Hefford to smile. It drew her back to 2010.

“The success we had at those Games, and now we’re starting to see players play at the international level, on both the women’s team and the men’s team, really high-level players coming out of the (Vancouver) area,” she said. “And you have to think they’re probably connected to the success that happened in 2010.”

Vancouver is the seventh team to join the PWHL, which just finished its second season. Already in the league are Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Boston, New York and Minnesota. It’s rumoured an eighth team will also join the circuit, likely in Seattle, but the PWHL isn’t commenting on that.

All teams in the league are owned centrally by American billionaire Mark Walter, who made his wealth in insurance and other investments. He owns the Los Angeles Dodgers and also has interests in motorsport, the Los Angeles Lakers and Sparks, as well as Chelsea, among others.

The Vancouver team will be launching a series of hosting camps, clinics and other events to build up connections with fans across the Lower Mainland.

Moving into the upgraded Coliseum presents a league first. It’s the first time a PWHL team will be able to call a dedicated arena solely their own. The Coliseum will still take bookings for concerts and ice shows and movie shoots, as it always has, but the primary tenant will be the PWHL team. This is their building, just as Rogers Arena is the Canucks’ or the Langley Events Centre is the Giants’.

“For us to be the primary tenant, I think was big and pretty cool,” explained Shefford’s colleague Amy Scheer, the PWHL’s executive vice-president of business operations. “When we start to think about game dates and playoffs, it’s a nice factor for us to be first in line.”

Scheer has a long track record of running professional sports teams, both men’s and women’s, in North America. She is thrilled about the setup that is coming together at the Coliseum and Agrodome.

“We are making significant upgrades to all of the player areas, the locker rooms, the coaches’ offices,” she explained. “Same for the Agrodome, building out a player area as well. So, significant upgrades are happening to both venues.”

A new scoreboard will be installed by the PNE at the Pacific Coliseum, and the broadcast technology in the building is being upgraded as well.

Shelley Frost, president and CEO of the PNE, said that they had been waiting for a new primary tenant before installing a new video board. The previous unit, installed in 2007 by VANOC, was removed in 2023 and sold to an arena in Gibsons.

“We weren’t going to go out and buy one and just hope for the best,” Frost explained. “We wanted to make sure that we talked with that (future) partner, knew what they wanted and what they needed, and we had the right solution for them.”

Knowing they were potentially going to be getting a new tenant in the PWHL, the board’s installation was included in their capital plan for the year, she said. And the upgrades to the Agrodome were previously approved in a separate capital plan.

The team has no name, but they have picked “pacific blue” as their primary colour and cream as the secondary colour. The Vancouver squad will have some sort of expansion draft, Hefford said, and they will be in the PWHL draft on June 24 as well. Hefford said last year 167 women put their names forward for the league draft, but just 42 were drafted.

There’s a lot of spare talent out there.

“We’re not looking for an expansion team that’s going to build and take five years to be competitive,” she declared. “The priority for us is that they’re competitive on Day 1.”

Lauren’s father, Mike, is a long-time hockey player himself. He got a little choked up explaining how thrilled he is about the PWHL launching.

“As a girl-dad, yeah, you know, you just want to see opportunities and role models for your kids,” he said. “This is giving the girls a dream that the boys already have — to play in the NHL. For girls, (the PWHL) just gives them this huge set of role models that they aspire to be like and cheer for and have their own team.”

pjohnston@postmedia.com