This time last January, Nicole Hensley stood on the cusp of something historic as she took the ice for the Minnesota entry in the inaugural season of the Professional Women’s Hockey League — an idea so hastily constructed that the teams didn’t even have nicknames.
On Sunday, she’ll observe another milestone in the league’s second season, when her team, eventually christened the Minnesota Frost, faces off against the Montreal Victoire at 1 p.m. in Denver’s Ball Arena. The 30-year-old Lakewood product, who developed as a goaltender with local youth hockey clubs and then a girls’ select team before starring in college and international play, will skate as a pro at the same hometown venue where she once took inspiration from Hall of Fame Colorado Avalanche goaltender Patrick Roy.
The game is part of the PWHL’s Takeover Tour, a slate of nine games played in markets around North America with an eye toward growing the women’s game but also eventual league expansion. As Hensley knows well, top-level women’s games in Colorado have been few and far between.
“I watched a lot of games growing up in that arena,” Hensley said on Thursday by phone from Minnesota. “But the last time there was a women’s game, it was in 2001 leading up to the ’02 Olympics. So that’s obviously far too long for all the girls in Colorado who would love to see this.”
Hensley had just started to play hockey when she saw that game, an exhibition against the Chinese national team. She recalls getting virtually the entire U.S. team’s autographs, on a miniature USA Hockey flag, at a post-game event. She still has that piece of memorabilia at her parents’ house.
The chance to see top women players in the area wouldn’t come along again until the lead-up to the 2010 Olympics, when the U.S. women played Canada at Magness Arena on the University of Denver campus. Hensley made sure she was in the stands for that one as well.
By then, she was in high school, excited to see emerging legends such as Hillary Knight and the Lamoureux twins, Monique and Jocelyne. She never dreamed that one day in the not-so-distant future she would find herself playing with and against them at the highest levels of competition.
Now, with its inaugural season in the books, the PWHL continues to build on the story of its rapid creation of a viable women’s pro hockey league, a concept that for many years was a succession of false hopes and underfunded ventures. Under deliberate, well-funded benefactor Mark Walter, the Los Angeles Dodgers owner who currently owns all six of the PWHL franchises (and considerable holdings in Colorado), the league announced it has started looking into expanding by two teams as early as the 2025-26 season.
Amy Scheer, the PWHL’s senior vice president for business operations, has said that the PWHL is evaluating markets on factors such as size, media reach, facilities and infrastructure, economic conditions and corporate sponsorship possibilities as well as fan base and youth hockey presence.
On Thursday, having just returned from tour stops in Vancouver and Seattle to her home in New Jersey, she described the Takeover Tour in broader terms.
“Every game we play, we learn something,” she said, “whether that’s how to put on a better show, whether that’s an idea for a partnership, whether it’s a market that may work for expansion, whether it’s a market that impacts maybe a broadcast deal.
“Every game helps inform future decisions, whether it’s expansion or just being better. Every game is important for us.”
Hensley, who now also has the first PWHL championship on her résumé after a series-clinching shutout last May against Boston, considers hockey a game that so many more people can fall in love with — if they have access to it. There have never been more role models for young girls in hockey, she said, particularly with games available on streaming platforms.
“And obviously it’s awesome when we can bring the game to people directly,” she added. “It’s huge to provide more access to what a potential future could look like, something to dream of and hope for, for young girls across the country.”
Hensley figures to have plenty of supporters at the game after hearing from old teammates, high school friends and former coaches. Borrowing from the tradition of the NHL’s Stanley Cup, which allows each player on the championship team to spend a day with the trophy at a location of their choice, Hensley brought the PWHL’s Walter Cup to Denver in October and shared the moment with locals at The Edge Ice Arena in Littleton, where she played so many of her youth hockey games.
She also photographed it at landmarks like the state Capitol, Red Rocks Amphitheater and Little Man Ice Cream, where she scooped the dessert straight from the Cup.
“I had so many people come up to me and say Denver really needs a team, and Denver would love to have a game,” Hensley said. “And I knew at the time that we were coming, but it wasn’t public knowledge yet. So I kept trying to tell people, ‘Keep your calendar open in January and we’ll see what happens,’ without getting myself in trouble.”
A game and much more
The Takeover Tour involves more than just the centerpiece matchup between Minnesota and Montreal. Both teams practice on Saturday (Montreal at 10:50 a.m., Minnesota at 5:15 p.m.) at Family Sports Center in Centennial, with autograph sessions following the workouts.
Also on Saturday, PWHL players and local coaches will run an Avalanche Girls Try Hockey For Free session, also at Family Sports. Registrations quickly filled the clinic to capacity.
All of that, in addition to the critical league game featuring its top two teams, gives fans a close-up view of a women’s league that pays attention to detail when it comes to how it treats its players.
“It’s pretty much night and day from anything I experienced before this,” Hensley said of the initial PWHL season. “Obviously being the first year, there’s going to be some ups and downs and some kinks to work out. But overall, the professionalism is unmatched to anything else in the women’s game.”
Amenities that the highest level men’s pro leagues might take for granted finally have become standard for the women: video resources, weight rooms, strength coaches, medical staff, physical recovery modalities that players used to have to pay for themselves. Hensley said the Frost even had a sauna installed at their practice facility this season.
“To have all those things at your fingertips helps the game in ways that people just don’t understand,” she said. “To be able to do all of these things and focus on it as a full time job allows the game itself to get better. You’re not worried about getting up at 5 a.m. to skate and then go in to a part-time or full-time job.”
She noted that while several of her teammates with Minnesota ties coach local high school hockey due to strong attachments to their alma maters, for the most part players are able to focus entirely on their roles with the team. Fans noticed.
“I’ve never been someone that gets recognized in public before for anything hockey related, and I’ve had that happen now up here with our fans and with our young hockey players that are watching,” Hensley said. “I just think that that goes to show that people are interested in it and want it.”
Fans have definitely shown up in increasing numbers. The average attendance last year hovered around 5,500, while this year it’s over 6,500. The league has repeatedly broken its own record for attendance at a women’s pro game. It currently stands at 21,105 for a game in Montreal.
Scheer noted that the league’s goal was to deliver the highest professional level in all aspects of operations, from the quality of play on the ice to the fan experience in the arenas to the type of merchandise offered to its fans. And she considers the mission accomplished — so far.
“We feel like in year one, we did that,” she said. “We think that every fan that engaged with us — whether it’s through content, whether it was a live experience — feels that we are on par with any other professional league that’s out there.”
Why is Denver on the Takeover Tour?
Five of the PWHL’s original six teams — Toronto, Boston, New York, Ottawa and Montreal — are situated in the East, with Minnesota representing the westernmost franchise. Neutral-site women’s games in both Detroit and Pittsburgh have drawn particularly strong attendance, and some observers consider those cities expansion frontrunners.
The league has said it’s looking into about 20 markets, some of those in the West. Scheer framed that exploration with a wider lens geared toward — yes, expansion — but also growing its audience beyond the current six.
“And the live experience is the best way to do it,” she said. “Then these fans engage with us via social (media). You hope that they travel to games. It’s a great way to engage the market and understand how the fans feel about us. But it’s certainly not the only way we would measure a market that we would be interested in expanding in.”
How did Denver get on the list for the Takeover Tour?
The PWHL looked at cities with a history of girls’ youth ice hockey, in areas that embrace the sport, have a first class hockey organization and first class building, Scheer said. The Denver area checked all those boxes.
“We want to put ourselves in a position to play and work with organizations that find that we’re additive and feel that we will bring a great event to their building and their market,” she explained. “We looked at a ton of markets — I don’t even know how many when we started this process — and we decided on the nine based on how we thought we would do there.”
She added that ticket sales are just one yardstick. Community engagement events also loom large.
Hensley pointed to Colorado’s success in bringing a new women’s professional soccer team to town — and even the addition of a sports bar dedicated to women’s sports. She said she has always felt that “if we built it, people would come,” and figures that the league’s early success has proven that.
She takes pride in the PWHL’s efforts to engage with its fans and looks forward to connecting with her hometown folks this weekend. There could even be a face in the crowd that, like a young Nicole, might look into the eyes of a hero and see possibility.
“I’ve definitely had a couple of those experiences myself,” she said. “And it’s been an honor to be a role model for these young girls.”