What the PWHL game in Detroit meant to my daughter and why representation matters

We went to a hockey game last night, it was a lot of fun and hopefully they'll be a PWHL team in Detroit sooner than later.

Full disclosure, this piece is going to be coming from a fandom perspective.

Not for a specific team or player, but fandom for what a sporting event meant to my 6-year-old daughter. And what it’s been like for me, as her dad, to see the impact of that sporting event.

See, my daughter Evangeline started playing hockey in late 2023, through a local learn-to-play program. She loves to ice skate — whether it’s in hockey or figure skates — and it’s one of the reasons we construct a rink in our backyard each winter, and she’s already a better skater than I’ll ever be¹.

kssh, kssh, kssh

In the past year, she’s shown increasing interest in becoming a goalie. Last week she did her first full skate in goalie pads, she was extremely tired at the end, but asked if she could do it again.

But over the past two years, her one complaint about hockey, the one that I didn’t really know how to properly answer as a dad, was “I feel like I have to dress like a boy when I play hockey.”

See, in her mind, hockey was a boys thing. At the learn-to-play program she was one of just a handful of girls. On our television, and hockey is on TV a lot in our house because of my job, it’s typically the NHL or NCAA or the CHL.

You can start to understand how at then 5-year-old girl can look at the sport and think, “hockey is for boys,” and no matter how much her mom and dad tell her “hockey is for girls, too,” when the overwhelming evidence is to the contrary.

But she stopped making that comment, roughly a year ago, after we took her and her brother, Dean, to the PWHL neutral site game in Detroit.

Some thoughts on a potential PWHL team in Detroit

That game was the first real introduction, and evidence that hockey wasn’t just a boy sport. It’s one thing to hear mom and dad tell you “hockey is for girls,” it’s another to watch a game, with more than 13,000 people in attendance, and see ponytails coming out of the back of helmets, just like hers.

It’s something I didn’t properly contextualize in my head at the time, how important that game was in 2024 to how she viewed the sport, how it’s something where the PWHL’s representation really mattered in her mind.

A year later, we took her and her brother to the PWHL game again last night in Detroit between the New York Sirens and Minnesota Frost. We were proudly part of an American-record crowd of 14,288 to watch a women’s professional hockey game.

We got there early this year, went down to the glass for warmups and she was able to snag a spot right behind the Minnesota net, asked other girls nearby about signs they’d made and tried to get fist bumps through the glass.

We grabbed an over-priced popcorn and a Sprite², found our seats and had a blast.

The kids watched intently, tired themselves out waving rally towels, and relished the ability to scream as loud as humanly possible when prompted to “get loud” by the video board.

There were chants of “We want a team,” from the Detroit crowd, which we happily joined in on, and an impromptu arena sing-a-long to Taylor Swift’s You Belong With Me that started during a stoppage in play and carried over the extent of a song.

While it’s not technically a song about hockey, the closing lyrics certainly felt like a bit of a love letter from a crowd filled with girls of all age wearing hockey jerseys. Girls, like my daughter, who have enjoyed skating and playing hockey, but could use a prime example that hockey was also for them.

You belong with me
Have you ever thought, just maybe
You belong with me?
You belong with me

I’m not going to pretend to be a PWHL expert, there are others you should read that have better closely covered the growth of the league. There are logistics, I’m sure, that I haven’t even considered that need to happen for Detroit’s potential expansion.

But, if Sunday was any indication, and it was in my house, there’s a market and fan base ready to embrace a team in Detroit.

1. I can get around and I help coach her hockey practices, but I never properly learned how to ice skate as a kid. I played roller hockey first, and then when I was in middle school I simply learned to skate in goalie skates. Technically speaking, my skating stride is not pretty.

2. The amount of money venues make on fountain soda, by the way, is absolutely crazy.