‘Good, bad and ugly’: Love them or not, the new PWHL names give teams — and fans — identities

The Fleet, the Frost, the Victoire, the Sirens, the Charge and the Sceptres.

In a process nearly a year in the making, the Professional Women’s Hockey League on Monday unveiled the nicknames and logos for each of its six franchises entering its second season.

The public, inevitably, is already expressing their opinions for and against the new branding on social media, where some people say the Toronto Sceptres is “giving Swedish royalty,” the Ottawa Charge looks too similar to the Calgary Flames, while the Montreal Victoire is seen by some as “the best logo in the league.”

“Hmm I’m sceptrical,” one person wrote on X, riffing on Toronto’s name and logo, which the PWHL says “embody Toronto’s regal history and commanding presence.”

But women’s sports and marketing experts say not only do they like the logos, but what’s important is that the teams now have proper identities — and that more jerseys and other merch will follow. The PWHL, a first-of-its-kind women’s league with deep-pocketed investors, shattered women’s hockey attendance records in a short-notice first year.

“To me, the important step for strategic sport marketing, and really the health of women’s sport in the country, is that it gives us an identity,” said Cheri Bradish, an associate professor in sports marketing at Toronto Metropolitan University.

“They can build more branding campaigns. Fans and consumers can not only be active online socially, but it really just allows the property to come to life and speak to consumers in inevitably what will be a richer way,” Bradish, director of the Future of Sport Lab, told CBC News.

Fans already rallied around the teams when they were just known by their city names last season, Jayna Hefford, senior vice-president of hockey operations for the PWHL, told CBC News Network on Monday.

“Now they have a brand and identity that they can really be creative with and have fun with,” Hefford said.

“Our fans are the most creative of anyone, so they’re going to come to the arenas and they’re going to make sure that becomes who we are and what we represent.”

‘Less feminized’

Women’s sports merchandise represents a $4-billion US marketing opportunity, according to a recent report by the Sports Innovation Lab and Klarna. But the report notes that the overall pace at which league, team and athlete merchandise has become readily available to fans has not kept up with the demand.

“The PWHL is a growing, global brand with deep, local connections. Having beautifully designed jerseys and merch gives us the ability to reach fans in-market and around the world,” Amy Scheer, the PWHL’s senior vice-president of business operations, said in the report.

The long-anticipated names and logos arrive after time constraints — the league was founded in late June 2023 and began play on Jan. 1 — led to the PWHL spending its inaugural season referring to each team with a PWHL prefix, such as PWHL Minnesota, which won the first Walter Cup championship in May.

Michele Donnelly, a sport management associate professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., says she thinks the new names and logos are “less feminized than we have seen in some other women’s professional leagues.”

After all, we’ve come a long way from the Peaches, Daisies and Belles of the original All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. But she also found more explanation on the PWHL logos was needed than she anticipated with respect to how they relate to the teams’ cities.

Scheer told The Associated Press that choosing the names was a labour of love. 

“Everybody’s going to sit behind their computers and they’re going to type good, bad and ugly. And that’s OK,” Scheer said. “I feel the process we went through was very thorough. We feel very confident that we’ve got six great names that are bold, they’re confident, they’re strong, competitive and, I think, they resonate with the markets that they’re in.”

“I think anybody who has worked in sports or is a marketer or brand person would look at this as an opportunity of a lifetime,” she said.

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