Tag: NWHL

The NWHL COVID shutdown is another reminder of how risky sports are right now

The NWHL still has so many questions to answer about what happened inside the “bubble.”

For a brief moment, it looked like the NWHL was on the cusp of a historic achievement. After a rocky start to their season, the NWHL was slated to showcase the finals of the Isobel Cup on NBCSN on Thursday. Instead, on Wednesday afternoon, the league declared that the remainder of the season had been suspended due to positive COVID-19 tests.

The full shutdown of the two-week “bubble” tournament came just days after two teams, the Metropolitan Riveters and the Connecticut Whale, left Lake Placid due to coronavirus concerns.

In a statement, the NWHL said the decision was made after consulting with the Olympic Regional Development Authority.

“The NWHL and the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA) have agreed, due to new positive COVID-19 tests and the resulting safety concerns for the players, their respective staff & the community that the remainder of the 2021 NWHL Season in Lake Placid have been suspended,” the NWHL said.

“We didn’t raise the cup. I also will say it doesn’t mean we’re not going to raise the cup for Season 6. In this moment today we will not be raising the cup tomorrow. The fact that we didn’t get these athletes on their deserved platform on NBC that’s the most heartbreaking part,” NWHL commissioner Ty Tumminia said.

While the NWHL’s 2021 season has been beset by controversy and mismanagement, the start still felt like something of a big success. The league entered Lake Placid with big sponsorships, a TV deal and a growing audience via popular Twitch streams. Yet, COVID  threw all those victories into the wind. On January 28, just a few days after play began, the Metropolitan Riveters withdrew after multiple people in the organization tested positive for COVID-19. On February 1, the Connecticut Whale also pulled out due to safety concerns. The Boston Globe also reports that six members of the Boston Pride organization just tested positive for COVID.

Tumminia also told reporters that HIPAA and privacy concerns  prevented them from disclosing how many players have tested positive for COVID.

The canceling of the tournament is not just a giant bummer, but starting to look like a much more serious health disaster. With major outbreaks among three teams in less than two weeks, there are plenty of questions around what precautions the NWHL actually had in place and how they were enforced.

According to reporting by Melissa Burgess at The Victory Press, teams had loose requirements going into the bubble, with the only critical qualification being that players must have a negative test and present as asymptomatic.

Players were required to arrive in Lake Placid on January 21 or 22, with games starting on the 23rd. There was no quarantine period for staff or players once inside the bubble. As has been pointed out, Riveters forward Tatiana Shatalova skipped making the trip to Lake Placid due to an unconfirmed illness. Inside the bubble, players initially were not tested daily.

Per reports, there were rules that players were not allowed to spend time together outside of play, but there’s no word on whether those rules extended to all teams, or how they were enforced.

The NWHL bubble also quickly turned into a “modified bubble” as players were brought in and added to COVID depleted rosters.  As The Ice Garden points out in this very thorough breakdown of the NWHL season, there were many occasions were protocols seemed loose and information from the league was not forthcoming.

Some of this can be brushed aside to the inherent difficulties of trying to stage a tournament in the middle of the pandemic, but the NWHL already has a poor history of protecting and providing for its players. Again, via The Victory Press, the NWHL’s former players have repeatedly complained of a lack of “resources, infrastructure, support, and just overall treatment and transparency ― communication, everything.”

It was this kind of poor treatment, plus lack of equitable pay, that forced several high profile players to defect from the NWHL and form their own women’s hockey association, the PWHPA.

The current NWHLPA president Anya Packer says all players “followed protocol” while in the bubble, but again, details as to what those protocols actually were, are slim.

COVID outbreaks have become a normal part of playing sports, but no pro league, so far, has dealt with it on this level. As much as this is a blow to women’s hockey, it’s a reminder that sports are inherently risky right now, and every positive test, every game, puts player health and safety in jeopardy. Right now, that risk doesn’t seem like it should be worth taking.

The NHL uses women’s hockey players for a PR boost. It needs to fund a league instead.

Visibility means nothing without the financial support to sustain it.

For the past few years, the NHL has worked to integrate women’s hockey into one of its marquee events, NHL All-Star Weekend. In 2018, members of the U.S. Olympic women’s hockey team demonstrated drills for the All-Star skills competition. The following year, Team USA star Kendall Coyne-Schofield competed in the fastest skater competition and Brianna Decker aced the passing drill. Both events were met with wide support from the players and the public.

Emboldened by the success of the past two years, the NHL has gone a step further for the 2020 All-Star weekend and added a women’s 3-on-3 scrimmage to the slate. According to the NHL, the event will feature two teams of nine skaters and one goalie, and be made up of American All-Stars and Canadian All-Stars, going head-to-head in a 20 minute game.

For the past few years, the NHL has treated the inclusion of women’s hockey players into All-Star weekend as some kind of social good. It’s a nice, but ultimately meaningless, gesture. There’s one thing the NHL can do to show that it truly cares about the growth of women’s professional hockey, and that is to fully commit to supporting it financially. Everything else, no matter how well-meaning, is nothing but window dressing. Visibility, even on a national stage, means little without institutional support to sustain it.

Over the past two years, the state of professional women’s hockey has deteriorated exponentially and is in a state of crisis.  Due to financial concerns, the CWHL has fallen apart. The NWHL is limping along, with top talent boycotting the league over fair pay and better working conditions. That’s why many top players have instead affiliated with the PWHPA, which acts not as a league but instead sponsors events and games across the U.S. and Canada aimed at increasing opportunities for girls and women in hockey — with the ultimate goal of establishing one sustainable league in the near future.

Yet, in all this time, the NHL has offered limited financial support to both women’s hockey leagues. The NHL has also maintained that as long as the NWHL exists, it won’t step into the women’s hockey arena.

It’s a frustrating and ultimately defeating line in the sand from a league that not only makes billions in revenue, but preaches about wanting to grow the game across all underrepresented demographics.

The real issues with making women’s hockey sustainable will not be solved by intermittent promotion from the NHL.  If the NHL is really interested in making women’s hockey more than a sideshow at its marquee event, it will do more than pay lip service to the idea by investing actual money.  In 2019, the NHL donated a paltry $100K to the NWHL after the collapse of the CWHL.  Of the projected 4.5 billion in revenue the league made in 2018-2019, that’s less than a drop in the bucket.

Women’s hockey has long faced an uphill battle, but with broader financial commitments the NHL could ensure its success. The model for this has already been laid out by the NBA, which put its full financial weight behind establishing the WNBA.  The WNBA still struggles but has made incredible strides since being founded in 1996.  Just earlier this week, the WNBA announced a landmark CBA agreement that raised team salary caps by 30% and almost doubled max salaries (the WNBA remains 50 percent owned by the NBA’s team owners).

The key in all of this has been the NBA doubling down on women’s sports as an investment in the future, even in the face of financial losses. Per the Wall Street Journal, the NBA’s Adam Silver said the WNBA operates at a loss of $10 million a year.

The NHL could decide to invest financially in women’s professional hockey on a significant level, starting small and slowly helping grow the game.  Why it has refused to do so is the real question fans should be asking during the All-Star weekend. The NHL has been lauded for “opening doors” for women at the All-Star game, but what good is it if they’re ushered right back out?

During All-Star weekend, the NHL will tout equality and let some talented women shine on national television. Watching the women play will feel good for a few minutes, but what it won’t fix is institutional inequalities that have plagued women’s sport for decades.  The NHL is in a position to make real change happen, but all it has done so far is nothing more than some slick PR.