Canadian builder of deluxe dressing rooms provides PWHL teams their inner sanctum

Ottawa entrepreneur turned solution for stinky hockey gear in his own home into thriving business supplying clubs in NHL, OHL, NCAA and other leagues with dishy, wood-panelled locker rooms

Special to The Hockey News - Women's - By: Randy Boswell

They haven’t yet adopted team names, unveiled logos or learned what championship trophy they’ll be playing for this spring.

But the 150-plus pioneering players in North America’s new Professional Women’s Hockey League — which launched its inaugural season on Jan. 1 with a historic game between Toronto and New York at the sold-out Mattamy Athletic Centre in the former Maple Leaf Gardens — will be enjoying one of the perks shared by most elite hockey teams across the continent: deluxe, wood-panelled dressing rooms featuring individual changing stations, aerated equipment lockers and other high-end amenities.

PROlocker, an Ottawa-based company that specializes in creating custom-designed dressing rooms for teams in high-level hockey leagues — the NHL, AHL, OHL, QMJHL, NCAA, U Sports and others — has staked out fresh territory with the launch of the PWHL.

PROlocker founder and president Serge Guillemette recently landed contracts with four of the PWHL’s six franchises — Ottawa, Montreal, New York and Toronto — to construct premier-grade

changerooms in their home arenas. He and his small team of a half-dozen employees were still busy over the Christmas holidays completing work at the downtown Toronto rink where the PWHL debuted on New Year’s Day.

The PWHL jobs have added another 80-plus stalls to PROlocker’s running total of more than 7,000 individual changing stations built for well over 100 professional and junior hockey clubs and other elite sports teams in Canada and the U.S. Guillemette said the jobs can involve work on multiple rooms in both game and practice facilities, including visiting teams’ spaces, with a fully equipped dressing room costing $20,000 Cdn or more depending on the features included.

Guillemette said it was Danièle Sauvageau — former head coach of Canada’s national women’s team and now general manager of the PWHL franchise in Montreal — who first contacted PROlocker a few months ago about building a specially equipped dressing room at the newly formed Quebec club’s home arena, the Verdun Auditorium. Then word got around to other executives in the PWHL, and soon Guillemette was juggling jobs for all three of the league’s Canadian teams as well as New York.

“That’s how everything got all gelled together,” said Guillemette, describing how league officials “came and visited the (Verdun) locker room to make sure the facility was up to date, and they saw the lockers and said, ‘OK, this is great’ — and I got the contacts from there.”

As the company’s website states, these aren’t just extra-comfortable spots to lace up skates and don the rest of a hockey player’s equipment. The customized carpentry — in changerooms typically emblazoned with club logos and inspirational messaging — helps “build team morale, improve culture and create team chemistry.”

Every once in a while, beer-league hockey buddies with frayed gear and some extra cushion around the waist get a fleeting sense of what it’s like to be an elite player near the top of the sport’s pecking order.

It happens when one or two of the regular dressing rooms at the local multi-pad are off-limits for annual maintenance. Or, sometimes, there’s a tournament or a scheduling problem that forces an arena manager to open the rink’s resident varsity or junior team’s digs to a less-skilled species of skater.

Instead of squeezing onto a bare bench below a row of simple coat hooks mounted on a cinder-block wall, each member of the Rusty Blades, the Wing Knights or the Brew Bellies gets an individual changing stall with a padded seat, overhead shelving, equipment storage locker, personal phone-charging station and more.

These are the amenities of the Inner Sanctum — the luxury changeroom exclusively available to serious hockey clubs that vie for national championships and those exceptionally talented players who might still have a serious shot at The Show, winning the Memorial Cup, playing at the Olympics or performing at some other rarified level of competition.

Guillemette’s 14-year-old company has outfitted the Seattle Kraken dressing room, the visitor’s changeroom at the Canadian Tire Centre — home of the Ottawa Senators — and done work for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, the Ontario Hockey League’s Ottawa 67’s and the Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League’s Gatineau Olympiques.

Until his crew upgraded the CTC’s visiting team’s dressing room in west-end Ottawa last year, Guillemette said the digs offered to Senators’ opponents “was considered the worst locker room in the NHL.” Now it’s on par with accommodations offered in other NHL cities, with all the trappings of a changeroom worthy of the best hockey players in the world.

PROlocker has also fashioned scores of other behind-the-scenes spaces for professional, junior and varsity hockey teams in Canada and the U.S. These include the Ontario Jr. B Listowel Cyclones, the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees, Missouri’s Maryville University Saints, and Florida’s Jacksonville Icemen of the East Coast Hockey League.

The firm builds locker room facilities for elite football and basketball teams, as well, but Guillemette began his business creating basement equipment-drying stations for minor hockey players in Canada’s capital before expanding into full dressing-room build-outs.

The hobby that evolved into Guillemette’s company got started in 2010 when his wife complained there was too much stinky equipment in the house with beer-leaguer Dad and three boys in minor hockey airing out their gear after practices and games.

Guillemette, 52, used his woodworking skills to build four gear-drying stations in the family’s garage, complete with pegs for hanging sweaty gloves, skates, helmets and the rest. Then he set up the four stalls in the basement, which became a kind of showroom for his handiwork before PROlocker was even born.

“I showed it around,” he recalls, “and people got interested.”

When friends saw what he’d created and news spread by word-of-mouth through the Ottawa hockey community, Guillemette — a mechanical engineer by profession – began to get requests for similar setups in other families’ garages and basements.

Feedback was glowing, so he started advertising his customized wooden gear-hanging stalls to the broader marketplace. Business continued to boom, he began displaying his creations at hockey-themed trade shows, and he eventually left his engineering day job to incorporate as PROlocker.

For a time during the early years of the business, the Guillemette home was a chaotic scene with parts of finished lockers stacked in siderooms and hallways and behind the living room couch. In 2017, Guillemette moved out of his garage and into a dedicated woodworking shop with computer-assisted sawing machines and other equipment befitting a small manufacturing facility.

Guillemette said his big breakthrough came when former NHLer Derek Turcotte, head coach of the women’s hockey program at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario, commissioned him to supply personal changing stalls in the U Sports Nipissing Lakers dressing rooms for all players on each of the university’s men’s and women’s varsity teams.

“I was still working in my garage,” said Guillemette as he recalled scrambling to complete the commission for Nipissing while still working his day job as an engineer. “And then I go like, ‘Hey, man. It’s easier to make money this way.”