Honest Thoughts About the PWHPA

It’s time to really talk about the PWHPA.

I’ve been supportive of the PWHPA since day one. It takes a lot of guts to breakaway from the norm and try to forge your own path. I could completely see their reasoning at the start. After watching the CWHL, which was a dominant and steady league for a decade, fold out-of-the-blue, it makes sense to worry about that happening to the NWHL. A lot of these players probably were sitting there like “if we go to the NWHL, (where some players have had bad experiences before), is this just going to happen again? In a year, are we just going to be out of a league again?” It made sense that some of the players, who have a lot of experience and talent, would want to go and try to create stability.

My problem with the PWHPA is they’re talking a big game with almost nothing to back themselves up. They took a shot at the NWHL this morning and it shows nothing but how petty they are. I want to back them up but they’re just agitating a one-sided fight that doesn’t need to happen. Since the beginning, the PWHPA has gone after the NWHL for where their league had started.

When PWHPA dropped an article detailing some of their player’s times in the NWHL, sure it caused a stir but it just gave the NWHL a chance to show how far they’ve come in 6 seasons. When the PWHPA tweeted some passive aggressive shit the other day, it just showed how petty and needless this fight is. The PWHPA has no big dog in this fight. They have a Chihuahua and the NWHL has a boxer – to speak in dog terms.

The PWHPA has:

Big name superstars
The $1 Million Dollar Pledge

That’s it. Sure, they have the top names in the game (Knight, Coyne, Pankowski, Stecklein, etc) but they don’t have the social media backing, the merch, or the loyalty that the NWHL has. I feel like when the pandemic hit, the NWHL thrived and upped their game using social media. The PWHPA fell incredibly short. I have both leagues’ Twitter notifications on and the NWHL was making more engaging content both with teams and their players while the PWHPA only tweeted to update on themselves once in a blue moon.

They’ve been the lackluster and bitter little sibling to this whole disagreement of their own creating. When they first came about, I loved how they traveled to cities without women’s hockey and exposed the greatness of it. Chicago doesn’t have a major women’s hockey team and to see it with my own eyes is something I’ll never forget. Now that they’re pretty much stationary, they’ve lost the sparkle.

I’ve tried time and time again to rally for the PWHPA and don’t get me wrong, I’ll still watch their season, but the constant unnecessary catty bullshit is getting old. If you want a league where people will take you seriously, then stop acting like this. The settling of old scores has never settled anything.

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