NWHL season to begin Oct. 11, All-Star Game set for Jan. 24

The NWHL released the official league schedule for its inaugural season on Tuesday, and action will begin on Sunday, Oct. 11, as the New York Riveters visit the Connecticut Whale. Each team will play 18 games – nine home, nine away – and an All-Star Game is slated for Jan. 24.

The NWHL’s first promotional video ended with the tagline, “History Begins.” With the release of the NWHL’s schedule, we now know what day we can expect the upstart league to make it’s first piece of history.

Tuesday evening, the NWHL officially released the schedule for the inaugural campaign, with Sunday, Oct. 11, marking the official start date of North America’s first paid women’s professional league.

On Oct. 11, all four of the league’s teams will be in action with the New York Riveters and Connecticut Whale kicking off the NWHL season at Chelsea Piers Connecticut at 1:30 p.m. ET. Two hours later, the league’s second game will begin, with the Buffalo Beauts and Boston Pride facing off at Buffalo’s HarborCenter.

Over the course of the season, each team will play nine home games and nine road games, with the regular season concluding on Feb. 28, 2016. Throughout the season, all games will take place on Sundays, with two exceptions. The Dec. 5 contest between Buffalo and Boston and Jan. 2 tilt between New York and Connecticut will take place on Saturdays. The complete schedule can be viewed here.

Pride fans will have to wait until Nov. 22 to see their first NWHL action at Boston’s home rink, the Harvard Bright-Landry Center. The three other teams will have played both a home and away game by the second week of the campaign.

The NWHL will also host its first All-Star Game at Buffalo’s HarborCenter on Jan. 24. The format for the game has yet to be announced and, as the league doesn’t currently have divisions or conferences, it’s entirely possible the All-Star Game teams could be determined by a draft or sticks-in-the-middle set up.

In a release, the league stated that individual game tickets will go on sale near the end of July. Of note, though, is that every single game of the NWHL season will be streamed online, live, via a service called NWHL’s Cross Ice Pass. More information about the system is yet to come.