The PWHL’s first visit to Denver went so well last winter, the women’s professional hockey league decided to make a return trip.
Make that two return trips, to be exact.
The league announced two visits to Ball Arena for its upcoming Takeover Tour, with the Vancouver Goldeneyes and Seattle Torrent facing off in downtown Denver on Jan. 25, and the New York Sirens and Minnesota Frost coming to town on March 15.
Colorado hockey fans set a then-American attendance record for women’s professional hockey during a visit last January, with 14,018 fans showing up at Ball Arena for a game between the Minnesota Frost and the Montreal Victoire.
Both games this winter are set to be played on Sundays, with puck drop set for 4 p.m. for the Jan. 25 visit between Vancouver and Seattle, and 2 p.m. for New York vs. Minnesota on March 15.
This season’s PWHL tour will visit 11 different locations between the U.S. and Canada, with games at seven new cities, including Calgary, Chicago, Dallas, Halifax, Hamilton, Washington, D.C., and Winnipeg. With the eight-team league already planning further expansion in Year 4, this tour could be considered another test run.
“Season Two’s PWHL Takeover Tour was the first of its kind, giving fans across North America the chance to experience the excitement of a regular-season game in their home venues,” Amy Scheer, PWHL Executive Vice President of Business Operations, said in a news release. “The passion and support from fans, and the enthusiasm from cities eager to engage with our league, have fueled our ambition to grow the Tour for Season Three.”
The scheduling is up from nine Takeover Tour games last year. Detroit is hosting a neutral-site game for the third year and the league returns for a second year to Denver, Quebec City and Edmonton.
Last year’s tour proved highly popular in drawing a combined attendance of 123,601 fans, with the league setting and breaking U.S. attendance records multiple times. The top mark in the U.S. ended up being 14,288 in Detroit. The game in Vancouver drew a sold-out crowd of 19,038, which ranks fourth on the league’s attendance list.
The PWHL uses the Takeover Tour to gauge potential expansion markets, which led to the league adding Seattle and Vancouver for this season. More expansion is already on the horizon, with plans already in the works to add between two and four franchises for next year.
The league is also considering the possibility of having to relocate the Ottawa Charge due to a planned reduction in seating capacity at their home rink. The city last week approved a plan to renovate TD Place in a move that would cut capacity from 8,500 to 6,600.
In an opinion piece published in the Ottawa Citizen last week, Scheer and senior vice president of hockey operations Jayna Hefford pushed back on the plan by noting how the reduction will cut into the team’s revenue.
“Itap not a matter of optimism or ambition. Itap math,” the two wrote. “Shrinking our future home by thousands of seats would make it harder for families to get in, harder for the team to grow, and harder for Ottawa to remain a flagship market for women’s hockey.”
A majority of this year’s Takeover Tour games will be played at NHL teams’ home venues, with the exception of Chicago, and markets without NHL franchises in Halifax, Hamilton and Quebec City.
Each of the PWHL’s teams will participate in at least three neutral-site games. Montreal plays Toronto to open the Takeover Tour series in Halifax on Dec. 17. And the tour closes with Boston playing Vancouver in Edmonton on April 7.
Presale tickets go on sale starting at 10 a.m. Thursday for the Denver games, and the general sale begins at 10 a.m. Friday. Tickets can be purchased at thepwhl.com/tickets.
The Denver Post contributed to this report.
