Next year, instead of spreading the top division of the women's IIHF World Championships, and Division IA and IB tournaments over a month, the three tournaments will synchronize into a single international break window.

This season, the IIHF women's World Championships started on March 11 at the Division IIIA level, and will culminate April 27 at the Division IA level. 

It's a span of games that features World Championship tournaments at seven levels. The issue is, however, with more players from more countries sending players to the top leagues in Europe, and now the world's best league the PWHL, there is no way to synchronize international breaks for tournaments and leagues that will not impact one or the other.

Well, at least there wasn't, until now.

Beginning next season, the IIHF will synchronize the World Championship tournaments for the top three divisions within one international break.

This year the Division IB tournament ran from March 31 to April 6, with the top division tournament running from April 3 to April 14, followed by the Division IA tournament from April 21-27. Next year, all three tournaments will fall within a single international break, without overlap among the tournaments. That break will span roughly the length of the current top division World Championship, which is the longest of the three tournaments since the Division IA and IB tournaments are both round robin only events.

"This is the easiest question to solve," said Zsuzsanna Kolbenheyer, chairperson of the IIHF's Women's Committee. "This year we couldn't solve it because our congress is in May, so we already allocated the World Championships before the PWHL announced they're going to be a league, so we couldn't solve it for this year, but we're going to do it for next year."

According to Kolbenheyer, players from these tournaments, should not have to choose between national team participation and club or professional team events. This year, the asyncrhonous events kept players like Slovakia's Nela Lopusanova away from her national team, and will keep players like France's Chloe Aurard, and potentially Austria's Theresa Schafzahl away from their PWHL teams. It's an issues says Kolbenheyer that should not exist.

"So that shouldn't be an issue, not only 1A, but also 1B because there can be exceptional players playing on those teams as well," said Kolbenheyer. "So we have to make sure that they also have the possibility when they come (to North America) to play that they have the opportunity so that they can go back and represent their national teams."

While it hasn't happened in the past, 2025 will see the IIHF's top World Championship, as well as the Division IA and Division IB tournaments in the same international break window.

This development was one of many from early talks between the PWHL and IIHF.