The earliest recorded games of women's hockey in British Columbia date back to 1900. Situated more than 3,000 feet above sea level in the Monashee Mountains, the Rossland Winter Carnival saw the Rossland Ladies beat the Nelson Ladies 4-0 wearing ankle-length dresses to win the first ever Carnival, earning them the moniker of champions of British Columbia.
By 1911, organizers of the Rossland tournament claimed the event was the “Ladies Championship of the World.”
The tournament ran for 17 years, with the Rossland Ladies going undefeated for 15 of those years. While Rossland was the dominant team, it was a family of players competing for their southwest rivals from Nelson that would play a role in the next stage of women's hockey evolution in British Columbia.
The Nelson Ladies' team includes a trio of sisters - Dora, Cynda, and Myrtle Patrick. The hockey loving sisters were coached by their brother Lester Patrick, who alongside his brother in 1911, formed a men's league known as the Pacific Coast Hockey Association with Stanley Cup dreams in their heads. A decade later, the Patrick family would launch another hockey venture, with Frank Patrick launching a women's hockey team known as the Vancouver Amazons, to play alongside the Victoria Kewpies and Seattle Vamps.
Women's Hockey In Vancouver Before The Amazons
While some tout the Vancouver Amazons as Vancouver's first women's hockey team, they certainly were not. It's very likely women played ice hockey in Vancouver from 1900 onward, but formal leagues weren't on record until later. In 1914, a three team league including Vanvouver, Victoria, and New Westminster. New Westminster won the 1914 series that saw each team play a two-game total goals series against each other.
Vancouver's team that year features standouts Miss Hynes and Mrs. French, although no first names were listed. The only names listed for these teams were the men involved in the games, including Hockey Hall of Famer Cyclone Taylor and Vancouver Millionaires teammate Sibby Nicholls who officiated games in Vancouver.
On February 19, 1914, the Vancouver Sun wrote about an upcoming game between Vancouver and Victoria.
"A ladies' hockey match is something out of the ordinary and plenty of amusement is promised," the Sun wrote. "It won't be any burlesque affair, either, as far as the local players are concerned, for the writer has witness them in several hard workouts and calls them to win tomorrow night."
Vancouver's team that year was coached by Pete Muldoon, a Stanley Cup champion with the Seattle Metropolitans. More than a decade later, Muldoon would become the first ever head coach of the NHL's Chicago Black Hawks.
The Vancouver Ladies would continue to find competition outside the city limits including regularly facing the famed Fernie Swastikas and other teams over the coming seasons.
University of British Columbia Next
Following the launch of club teams throughout British Columbia, the University of British Columbia, located in Vancouver, was next to the ice. Formed in 1916
In their opening season, the University of British Columbia women's ice hockey club turned skeptics into believers. As the 1916 UBC yearbook read, "the girls managed to turn out quite a satisfactory team, and those who came to scoff remained to cheer."
That season the UBC women's team played a pair of games against the Vancouver Ladies, losing 7-0 and 3-1 with Elsie Hawe scoring their lone goal, assisted by Nellie Ballentyne.
In 1917, then UBC women's hockey team defeated the Fernie Swastikas 2-0 and 2-1. The team however, was short lived and women's hockey would later disappear from campus for decades.
That all changed when Laura Bennion arrived at the Unviersit of British Columbia in the early 1990s to play basketball. She'd been a star hockey player, but saw no future without college options for women in BC.
Bennion eventually injured her shoulder in basketball, and decided, after watching the 1990 World Championships, that she would like to give hockey another go. She found a spot on Northeastern's team playing three seasons of NCAA hockey before returning to UBC in 1994 to complete her medical degree. There, she petitioned the athletic director for money to start a new women's hockey program with Bennion at the helm.
"I told our athletic director I’d coach the team and volunteer, so the school gave us $10,000, which was enough for ice time and jerseys," Bennion said in Ice In Their Veins: Women's Relentless Pursuit of the Puck. "And they gave us a little closet, like a custodial closet, to hang our gear in. We got our players by hanging posters around campus.”
The UBC team started in the lowest division of the Vancouver women's city league winning their way up each division until in 1998, they reached the top tier. At that point, Bennion stepped off the bench and back onto the ice. She also successfully lobbied the Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union to make women's ice hockey an official varsity sport.
The Famed Vancouver Amazons
While women's hockey existed both at the club and university levels in Vancouver prior to the 1920s, it was in this decade that the sport hit front pages with the launch of the Vancouver Amazons in a three team league. The Amazons went undefeated against the Victoria Kewpies and Seattle Vamps to become the first women's hockey champions of an international league. The team was led by star Kathleen Carson that season.
In 1922, the Vancouver Amazons won another heralded title. They won the Alpine Cup, women's hockey's most prestigious trophy in Western Canada at the time at the Banff Winter Carnival. Contested since 1917, the Amazons beat the reigning champions, the Calgary Regents for their first Alpine Cup in 1922. It was again Carson who dominated scoring the game winning goal when she "secured the puck, went straight down the ice, broke through the defense, and by a neatly placed shot scored the tying goal amidst great cheering from the spectators.”
The following season in 1923, the Amazons lost in the Alpine Cup final to the Fernie Swastikas, who were the last British Columbia based team to win the title at the Banff Carnival, which "was an important space for women’s teams from Western Canada to gather and compete," and "offered some legitimacy for women’s skillful and physical on-ice performance."
Fast Forward
With past teams like the Vancouver Griffins of the NWHL keeping women's hockey dreams alive in British Columbia, the game finally arrived back in Vancouver in a big way in April 2025. That's when the Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL) announced that Vancouver would officially become the seventh franchise in the league beginning in 2025-26.