The history of women's ice hockey in the United States can be traced back to as early as the late nineteenth century, although more serious, structured teams were not formed until the late 1910s.
Dr. Andrew Holman, professor of history at Bridgewater State University, has described the period of women's hockey in the United States prior to 1916 as "the era of 'first starts'". Given the dates many hockey teams were established in the United States (see "Structured Hockey Begins" below), in this article, the time has been amended to pre-1915. There is evidence of women playing hockey as early as the 1890s, for instance:
Women's hockey became more structured and organized during and in the years after World War I. Cities with confirmed women's teams included Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle. There is also evidence that Cleveland, Syracuse, and Maine may have had women's teams. The table below shows a list of women's hockey teams between 1915 and 1922. This list is likely non-exhaustive, as many teams did not have formal names or were not written about in newspapers.
Consistent with other early 20th century hockey, teams generally had seven players on the ice: a goaltender, two on defense, three forwards, and one rover.
Tryouts for the Boston Girls' Hockey Team were held in late 1916, with try-out advertisements reaching as far as Cleveland. According to the Boston Globe, the first practice and first round of tryouts, were held at the Boston Arena on Friday, December 30, 1916, with fourteen women in attendance: Ruth Denesha, Gertrude Hawkes, Agnes Seamans, Lina Bowen, Agnes Seamans, Mary Campbell, Katherine McDougall, Mildred Copley, Helen Sheehan, Betty Hawkes, Marjorie Olsen, Esther Carr, Elsie Butler, Lena Doucette, and Frances Goldberg. The same article noted that Ruth Denesha and Gertrude Hawkes were responsible for forming the team. Denesha's brother, Harry, served as a volunteer coach, and a Miss. Mary HawkesâÂÂa relative of Gertrude HawkesâÂÂagreed to chaperone the women for out of town games and serve as manager. While the game schedule was not set at the time of tryouts, women's hockey clubs in New York, Syracuse, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Maine, and Canada were noted as potential competitors. Ruth Denesha captained the team, with her brother, HarryâÂÂa hockey player for the New York Athletic ClubâÂÂcoaching.
The Boston Girls' Hockey Team dissolved by the end of 1918, likely due to a fire that destroyed the original Boston Arena in December 1918.' When the arena re-opened in early 2021, the team reformed, now branded as the "Back Bay Hockey Club." In a December 1920 article, the Boston Daily Globe stated the team was to be led by Dorothea M. O'Donoghue, a goaltender who "weighs only 115 pounds and is only 5 feel 2 inches tall. She has grit, however, and the muscle, for she says she is as strong as many men who weighs twice as much as she." The article additionally stated that many of the original Boston Girls' Hockey Team players would return, including Gertrude Hawkes (now as player and manager), Agnes Seamens, Mary Campbell, Helen Sheehan, and Dorothea O'Donoghue. The new coach was to be a "Coach Myers, now with Boston University." Concurrently, an attempt was also being made in Boston to form women hockey teams at Boston University, the Posse Normal School of Gymnastics in Boston, and the Sargent Gymnasium in Cambridge. Later in 1921, a second women's team in Boston, Girls A. A., was formed.
Notable players of this era in Boston included:
The St. Nicholas Blues were initially organized by Kathleen Howard in 1916. Howard initially moved to New York City from Winnipeg with her husband, Tom Howard, after he accepted a job coaching Yale and Columbia's hockey teams and playing for the New York Athletic Club. Tom Howard had previously won a Stanley Cub wit the Winnipeg Victorias.
The earliest record of a structured game in New York City was in 1916, when the New York Times reported that the St. Nicholas Blues played the Manhattan Reds at St. Nicholas Rink on November 16. The game tied 1:1, with Hallie Twombly scoring for the Blues, and scoring for the Reds.
Notable players of this era in New York City included:
Hockey and other women's sports declined in the 1920s and for the next several decades for a multitude of reasons, including the belief that sports made women "competitive, masculine, and unbecoming" and the belief that women's sports would never be profitable. These reasons may have been further compounded by the Great Depression and World War II, which led to rink closures and reduced programming.
In 1923, the National Amateur Athletic Federation (NAAF) was created to coordinate and regulate amateur sports in the United States. While the federation's Women's Division did promote women playing sports, it urged that they must "play for play's sake," meaning women should not play competitively. Consequently, there was a decrease in women's collegiate and club sports, including hockey.
In 1964, Nancy SchieffelinâÂÂwho grew up playing hockey in her home state of New JerseyâÂÂbegan her freshman year at Pembroke College, the women's college in Brown University. After the Brown Bears men's coach, Jim Fullerton, saw her skating at the school's new rink, he arranged for Schieffelin to attend a team practiced disguised as a man. In an interview with Mary Byrne of The Belmont Voice in 2025, Schieffelin recalled:<blockquote>The coach of the men's team saw me fooling around by myself with a stick and a puck...and he asked if I would come to practice for the men's team...The men's team was doing really poorly, and he wanted to get something fired up in them.</blockquote>After the practice, Schieffelin approached Arlene Gorton, Pembroke's Director of Physical Education who was tasked with running all women's club-varsity teams, about starting a women's hockey team. Gorton agreed to support the creation of the team and became the driving force for its establishment.
The team, originally named the Pembroke Pandas, is recognized as the first varsity women's college hockey program in America (although non-varsity collegiate teams briefly existed at the University of Washington, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Minnesota, and Carleton College in the 1920s). The team had a scant budgetâÂÂplayers initially wore hand-me-down Peewee jerseys and helmets and field hockey shin pads over field hockey pants or blue jeans. As there were no other collegiate programs, the Pandas played pick-up games against faculty and spouses and a Rhode Island men's club in their first season. In the next few years, they played against the Walpole Brooms, a women's community team in Massachusetts. In the late 1960s, the team travelled to Canada to play Canadian collegiate women's teams, selling chocolate bars to charter buses to these away games.
In 1971, Cornell freshman Reggie Baker recruited 23 women for an ice hockey team. Baker, who grew up close to campus and whose father was a professor at the school, had been planning to start the team for years prior to matriculation. In eighth grade, Baker approached her science teacher, Gail Murphy, about coaching the team. Baker also distributed fliers around campus about the team during her senior year of high school.
While the club team was officially formed in 1971, the athletics office denied them ice time as they were not an official varsity sport. Consequently, the first season was spent doing off-ice conditioning at Schoellkopf Field. Baker continued to push the athletics department for ice time, and with the help of her father got the team recognized as a varsity sport for the 1972âÂÂ1973 season.
Only a two years after admitting in women in 1971, a women's intramural ice hockey program formed at Providence College for the 1973âÂÂ1974 season. As the school was preparing to move more women's sports to varsity status to comply with Title IX, a survey was distributed to female students to determine which sports women were most interested in; ice hockey ranked in the top five most popular sports for women at Providence. Accordingly, women's hockey officially became a varsity sport at Providence for the 1974âÂÂ1975 season, making the Friars the third varsity collegiate team in the country.
Women's hockey started as a club sport at Colby in the 1973âÂÂ1974 season. In February 1973, Colby held the first intercollegiate women's ice hockey game in the United States. The women's team made varsity status in 1975.
In the 1974âÂÂ1975 season, Yale women's ice hockey started as a club sport. Russ McCurdy, who was coaching the men's freshmen team at the time, helped coach the new women's team. The team became an official varsity sport in the 1977âÂÂ1978 season.
The University of New Hampshire's women's ice hockey team started as a club around the same time as Yale's team, also gaining varsity status for the 1977âÂÂ1978 season. Russ McCurdy left Yale to serve as the team's first head coach, and remained there for the next fifteen seasons. The UNH Wildcats went undefeated for their first four seasons, with an unbeaten streak of 74 games and a 57-game winning streak. As of 2026, McCurdy has the highest winning percentage of any women's collegiate ice hockey coach.
Women's ice hockey began in the 1977âÂÂ1978 season, largely due to the efforts of students Lauren Norton, Tania Huber, and Nelia Worsley. Huber and Norton had started a women's team while high schoolers at Concord Academy, and with the help of Worsley, approached then men's coach Bill Cleary for advice on starting a women's team at Harvard. Cleary suggested that Joe Bertagna, former Harvard goalie, coach.
The team gained varsity status for the 1978âÂÂ1979 season.
Dartmouth Big Green (inaugural varsity season 1978âÂÂ1979, club team prior), Princeton Tigers (inaugural varsity season 1979âÂÂ1980), Wesleyan Cardinals (inaugural varsity season 1977âÂÂ1978), and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Tigers (inaugural varsity season 1975âÂÂ1976) also gained varsity status in the 70s. Both schools had club teams prior to varsity.
Other schools with club teams in the 1970s included: Middlebury College Panthers (club team 1975, varsity 1981), Northeastern University Huskies (played in first women's Beanpot in 1979, varsity 1980), Boston College Eagles (played in first women's Beanpot in 1979), Boston University Terriers (played in first women's Beanpot in 1979), Williams College Ephs (club 1973, varsity 1990s), Colgate Raiders (club team 1973), and the RPI Engineers (club team 1977).
In 1997âÂÂ98, the American Women's College Hockey Alliance debuted. It was a program funded through the USOC/NCAA Conference Grant Program. The AWCHA organized and developed activities with collegiate women's varsity ice hockey teams, and helped to promote women's ice hockey at all NCAA levels. The first AWCHA Division I National Ice Hockey Championship was held in March 1998. The New Hampshire Wildcats defeated the Brown Bears by a 4âÂÂ1 score, to become the first recognized national champion in women's college ice hockey. In the 1999âÂÂ2000 season, the Western Collegiate Hockey Association (WCHA) joined the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) as the second league in the nation to offer women's Division I competition.
There were two more AWCHA National Championships and then the NCAA became involved. In August 2000, the NCAA announced it would hold its first Division I Women's Ice Hockey National Championship. The Minnesota Duluth Bulldogs captured the first NCAA Division I Women's Ice Hockey Championship, defeating the St. Lawrence Skating Saints by a 4âÂÂ2 tally on March 25, 2001.
The National Women's Hockey League was formed in 2015 with four teams. Formed by Dani Rylan in March 2015 with an estimated $2.5 million operating budget, it was the first women's professional hockey league to pay its players. Prior to the league's formation, the only choice for top level women's hockey in North America was the Canadian Women's Hockey League (CWHL), which at the time paid bonuses and incentives but not salaries. The league's inaugural season ran on a salary cap of US $270,000 maximum per team and a $10,000 minimum per player. The players also earned 15% of profits from any NWHL jersey sold with their name on it. The league placed its four original teams in large hockey markets: the New York City area, Boston, Buffalo, and New England. In 2018 the league expanded to five teams, absorbing the Minnesota Whitecaps. In April 2020, a Toronto NWHL franchise was officially announced as the league's sixth team and first original expansion team, becoming the first expansion team to join the league since the collapse of the CWHL in 2019. Teams competed for the Isobel Cup, named after Lady Isobel Gathorne-Hardy, the daughter of Frederick Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby, donor of the Stanley Cup.
The Professional Women's Hockey Players Association (PWHPA) was founded in May 2019 following the dissolution of the CWHL and player's dissatisfaction in the operations of the NWHL. Although the NWHL was the first women's ice hockey league to pay its players (the CWHL only paid players stipends), it was still not considered a livable wage. The goal of the PWHPA was to create a sustainable professional league for women's ice hockey in North America that provided financial and infrastructure resources to players, health insurance, and support to training programs for young female players. With a large number of North American players boycotting the NWHL in support of the PWHPA, more than half of the signed players on opening rosters for the 2019âÂÂ20 NWHL season were new to the league.
Due to their boycott, the members of the PWHPA decided to compete against one another on a tour to various North American cities, creating a series of exhibitions called the Dream Gap Tour, named after the gap between professional men's and women's hockey opportunities. Eventually, the COVID-19 pandemic caused public events to be cancelled, effectively ending the season. They continued the tour the following season, resulting in the 2020âÂÂ21 PWHPA season.
In 2019 and 2020, select NWHL and PWHPA players were invited to participate in the 2019 NHL All-Star Skills Competition and the 2020 NHL All-Star Weekend. They participated in skill competitions and had a USA vs Canada women's three-on-three game in 2020. NWHL star Kendall Coyne Schofield competed in the fastest skater event in 2019 alongside big names in the NHL such as Connor McDavid, Mat Barzal, and Nathan MacKinnon. She finished 7th out of 8 skaters, only a second behind the top skater Connor McDavid. Also in 2019, Brianna Decker completed a demonstration for the "premier passer" event included in the All-Star games. Although she was not part of the competition, fans complained that she deserved the $25,000 prize because she had finished three seconds ahead of the first-place winner. 2019 was the first time women's ice hockey players had competed in the events, but no one received any prizes. Instead, they were given appearance fees and a donation of $1 million towards girls hockey. Their appearances in the games raised awareness for women in a male dominated sport and garnered recognition of the NWHL and PWHPA.
In September 2021, the NWHL officially rebranded as the Premier Hockey Federation (PHF) alongside several structural changes including prioritizing private ownership of teams. Team salary caps were also doubled prior to the season, going from $150,000 per team to $300,000. The 2021âÂÂ22 season, the league's first season under the PHF title, began in November 2021. PHF players were required to follow testing and quarantine protocols due the outbreak of the COVID-19 Omicron variant.
On January 18, 2022, the league announced that the 2022âÂÂ23 salary cap would more than double to $750,000 per team, and players would receive full healthcare benefits and an equity stake in the teams. Additionally, the league confirmed plans to add an expansion team in Montreal, which resulted in the creation of a seventh team, the Montreal Force, in 2022. In December 2022, the salary cap for the 2023âÂÂ24 PHF season was set at $1.5 million per team, double the 2022âÂÂ23 cap of $750,000. The increase aligned with the Board of Governors' pledge, made in 2021, to invest $25 million directly in pay and benefits to PHF players over the ensuing three seasons. This signified a 900 percent growth over the 2021 salary cap.
On June 30, 2023, the Premier Hockey Federation announced that the league had been sold to the Mark Walter Group. This buyout voided all PHF player contracts for the upcoming season and PHF players were not allowed to be parties to negotiations toward a collective bargaining agreement between the PWHPA and the new league before its ratification. PHF players were then required to renegotiate their contracts with the new league or participate in the new league's draft if they wanted to continue their professional hockey careers in North America.
On August 29, 2023, it was announced that the new league would be known as the PWHL and that the six charter franchises would be based in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Boston, New York, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. All six teams were allowed to sign three players during an initial 10-day free agency period. Following the free agency period, the 2023 PWHL Draft was held in Toronto on September 18. The 15-round draft saw 90 players selected from a pool of 286 eligible players. Since the new league would have one fewer team than the PHF and five fewer than the PHF and PWHPA combined, many players from both organizations were not drafted or signed during the PWHL's free-agency period. The PWHL's inaugural game was held on January 1, 2024, between New York and Toronto.
The Connecticut Polar Bears are an ice hockey league for girls under the age of 19 in Connecticut. Numerous players from the Polar Bears have gone on to careers in college hockey at the NCAA Division I and Division III levels. In 1985, Maurice FitzMaurice's daughter Marnie wanted the opportunity to play ice hockey among girls. FitzMaurice and a few other fathers decided to organize a Pee Wee Girls program. The result was the Connecticut Polar Bears. It is the only all-girls ice hockey program in Connecticut, which consists of eleven teams.
Since its beginnings, FitzMaurice has been the President of the Polar Bears. He was also one of the organizers of one of the largest Christmas tournaments in North America. In 2007, the tournament hosted about 275 teams. Games were played across Connecticut. The program has produced numerous Olympians, including Julie Chu, Jamie Hagerman, Hilary Knight, Sue Merz, A. J. Mleczko, Kim Insalaco, Angela Ruggiero, Sarah Vaillancourt, and Gretchen Ulion.
Minnesota first competed for the Clarkson Cup in 2009 in Kingston, Ontario. The team lost to the Montreal Stars in a one-game final, 3 goals to 1. In 2010, the Minnesota Whitecaps became the first United States based team to win the Clarkson Cup, doing so by defeating the Brampton Thunder, 4 goals to none. In 2019, after moving to the National Women's Hockey League, the Whitecaps became the only team to win both the Clarkson Cup and the Isobel Cup after beating the Buffalo Beauts by a score of 2 goals to one.
Minnesota has long been synonymous with ice hockey. Beyond its famous boy's high school, menâÂÂs programs and professional teams, the state has evolved into a powerhouse for womenâÂÂs hockey as well. From the earliest days in 1918âÂÂwhen the first womenâÂÂs club team took to the ice at the University of MinnesotaâÂÂto todayâÂÂs record-breaking professional leagues, Minnesota has remained at the forefront US women's ice hockey.
In 1994, more than 500 member schools were sent letters by the Minnesota State high school league. The intent was to determine how many schools were interested in starting girls' ice hockey teams. Twenty-four expressed interest as the league was looking for a new sport for Title IX purposes. On March 21, 1994, the Minnesota State High School League sanctioned girls' ice hockey. Minnesota became the first state in the U.S. to sanction girls' ice hockey as a high school varsity sport. On March 25, 1995, Apple Valley High School defeated the South St. Paul Packers, 2âÂÂ0, to become the first Minnesota girls' state high school champion.
From 1994 to 2002, the number of varsity girls' teams in Minnesota expanded from 24 to 125 (in two classifications, AA and A). In 2001, a three-day girls' state tournament attracted 15,551 spectators. In 1994 there were 1,863 girls in the state participating in organized hockey outside of a varsity high school program. In 2002, the number increased to 6,856.
MinnesotaâÂÂs high school traditions have been linked into collegiate hockey, where Division I programs are held.
As of the 2024âÂÂ2025 season, there were 681 US-born NCAA Division I women hockey players. Minnesota led all states with 202 players followed by Massachusetts with 114 players and New York state in a distant third with 52 players. This number only represents the number of players who were born in the state. It does not include players who moved to Minnesota to play high school or prep hockey.
The primary NCAA Division I womenâÂÂs hockey programs in Minnesota include:
Minnesota has played a major role in producing Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL) talent. Currently the league has 75 U.S.-born players with nearly half (37) having played either high school or prep / academy hockey in Minnesota. Twenty-three (23) players were born, raised, and played high school hockey in the MinneapolisâÂÂSt. Paul metropolitan area, 3 players moved to the Twin Cities area and played high school hockey, and 11 current players moved to the state to play for Shattuck-Saint Mary's in Faribault, Minnesota.
Established in 1996, the Sarah Devens Award is awarded jointly by the ECAC and Hockey East. The award is named in honor of former Dartmouth Big Green ice hockey player, Sarah Devens, who died in 1995 prior to her senior year. Kathryn Waldo, a forward from Northeastern University Huskies, was the first recipient. Waldo had cystic fibrosis, and despite health challenges, was a stand-out player for the Huskies during her four years. She finished her career with 106 points in 52 goals and 54 assists.
The Joe Burke Award was established in 1994. It is presented annually to the person who has given outstanding contribution, support, and dedication to women's ice hockey. Joe Burke was a Dedham resident but never actually played the game himself. The first game he attended was the University of New Hampshire and Boston College in 1978 at McHugh Forum. Since that game, Burke has been at every major girls'/women's hockey event in the New England area.
The Laura Hurd Award is given to the NCAA Division III Women's Ice Hockey Player of the Year. It is named for Elmira College star Laura Hurd, a four-time All-American who lead her team to the first Division III championship.
The following women's ice hockey tournaments (featuring teams from other nations) were contested in the United States.