PWHL expanding to Seattle. Here’s what we know.

Seattle is indeed getting a professional women’s hockey team, based out of Climate Pledge Arena and set to begin play this fall.

The first wave of Professional Women’s Hockey League expansion benefited the Pacific Northwest. Seattle’s team is due to debut in time for the PWHL’s third season. It will play home games at CPA and train at Kraken Community Iceplex alongside the NHL’s Seattle Kraken.

“Seattle as a market has such a wonderful history of supporting women’s sports with the Storm and the Reign,” PWHL vice president of business operations Amy Scheer said. “We get to come in and be part of that women’s sports community … a huge fan base here that we think will become our fan base as well.”

They will channel the Storm with their emerald green primary color and add cream as a secondary color.

“Welcome to the family, PWHL Seattle,” Storm guard Skylar Diggins said at Wednesday’s introductory news conference. “Let’s get it.”

The team will operate as PWHL Seattle until a name is announced. The selection process is underway, Scheer said. There’s a chance it won’t be finalized before the start of the 2025-26 season.

The original six teams only got names and logos before their ongoing second season, which launched Nov. 30. The first year, 2023-24, they went by city names only.

“We have no problem being PWHL Seattle and PWHL Vancouver for the foreseeable future, until we’re comfortable with where we are with brand identity,” Scheer said.

Boston, Minnesota, Montreal, New York, Ottawa, and Toronto make up the charter teams, or “inaugural six.” The league expressed a desire to expand with two teams added by fall of 2025. The addition of PWHL Vancouver, the PWHL’s first expansion team, was announced last week and Seattle’s inclusion was heavily referenced.

Detroit and Denver were rumored possibilities, but Seattle and its burgeoning hockey fandom won out.

“Women’s teams from Seattle and Vancouver played against each other as early as 1921 and, given the proximity of our two newest cities — Vancouver is barely 140 miles away — I can’t wait for the first game in what I’m sure will be one of our fiercest rivalries,” Jayna Hefford, PWHL executive VP of hockey operations, said in a league statement. Geography wasn’t at the top of the list of reasons, Scheer said.

“We built a list of criteria that we were looking for when we were considering expansion markets, and Seattle really hit a good chunk of those,” Scheer said.

Those criteria included state-of-the-art facilities — Climate Pledge Arena’s $1.15 billion renovation was completed in 2021, and Kraken Community Iceplex opened the same year — a supportive corporate community and economic growth.

Scheer said Seattle talks had been ongoing for quite a while, and “the devil was in the details.” But also the announcement was delayed because the league wanted to give Seattle its moment in the sun instead of bundling it together with Vancouver.

Hefford and her staff are working on an expansion draft, tentatively scheduled for mid-June. They’re also deciding how Seattle and Vancouver will be integrated into the 2025 PWHL draft on June 24. Those details could come after the PWHL playoffs, which begin in early May.

“We have a task — to ensure that these teams are competitive from Day 1,” Hefford said Wednesday. “That’s been guiding our process in designing this.”

Seattle’s selection follows an “extensive” Request for Proposal (RFP) process. The city’s bid was led by Oak View Group, the developers and operators of Climate Pledge Arena, alongside the Kraken.

Similarly Vancouver’s eventual landlords led the charge. The Pacific National Exhibition (PNE), a nonprofit organization that operates events at Hastings Park, oversaw Vancouver’s bid.

Scheer said the Kraken have been “wonderfully supportive” and offer the PWHL a unique perspective, just launching an NHL franchise in 2021.

“The Kraken find us additive, not competitive,” Scheer said.

“[We’ll] be side-by-side with them and help to build the hockey community.”

The new team will join the league’s single-entity ownership structure under the Walter Group, and will operate that way until further notice. Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter and his family are the PWHL’s primary financial backers. The championship trophy is named the Walter Cup after them.

A PWHL Takeover Tour stop drew a crowd of 12,608 at Climate Pledge Arena on Jan. 5. The PWHL hosted clinics featuring its own players in the cities it visited. The league promised to extend grassroots efforts across the Seattle area through more clinics, camps and community events.

“There’s a wonderful hockey youth movement here, and we feel that we could help create some more momentum, and help build the sport here,” Scheer said.