Naming the PWHL's championship trophy "The Walter Cup" was a missed opportunity to recognize the history of women's hockey and the movement to grow the game.
Naming the PWHL's championship trophy "The Walter Cup" was a missed opportunity to recognize the history of women's hockey and the movement to grow the game.
The first photograph of a woman playing hockey was from 1891 when Isobel Stanley was captured playing outside Rideau Hall in Ottawa, Canada. Women however, have been skating and playing hockey since long before that date, and women continued in the more than 130 years since.
Since the 1998 Olympics, the NWHL, CWHL, WWHL, NWHL again, PWHPA, and PHF fought for a sustainable pro league. Two of those leagues, the CWHL and PHF had trophies named for women - the Clarkson Cup for the CWHL, and Isobel Cup for the PHF. The original NWHL titled their trophy the Millennium Cup.
Decades and more than a century later, the new PWHL, which all involved hope will be the final iteration of a professional women's league in North America, named their championship trophy for a billionaire businessman with no history in hockey.
"The Walter Cup" is a beautifully designed trophy. It's physically the type of trophy a league of this stature deserves and the team at Tiffany & Co who created the trophy deserve kudos for that. But the name continues to be an erasure of the thousands of women from national teams to club teams who committed their lives to the preservation and growth of women's hockey, re-writing a saviour narrative where money buys history, and a man is at the center. It focuses on the moment, not the movement, and it's not ice time, earned, it's bought.
The investment from the Mark Walter Group was monumental, and it was crucial to the success of where this league is, but by naming this trophy for a man who prior to the 2020's had no involvement in women's hockey, they shifted the movement entirely away from the player driven fight it has always been. The PWHL's marketing team has done this on multiple occasions this season, including through their participation in the NHL All-Star festivities by naming their showcase teams after Billie Jean King and Ivana Kloss.
King, Kloss, and Walter were certainly integral in the launch and success of this league, and their contributions as advocates for women's sport should in no way be overlooked, but their efforts pale in comparison to those of Fran Rider, Angela James, Jayna Hefford, Cindy Curly, Hilda Ranscombe, Eva Ault, Cammi Granato, Hayley Wickenheiser, and thousands of women before and after them.
As Billie Jean King said, The Walter Cup "recognizes the historic commitment by Mark and Kimbra Walter to make this dream come true for the PWHL players of today and tomorrow.”
What is does not do, is recognize the historic commitment of women, the PWHL players, the CWHL players, the COWHL players, women who played in the LOHA or Canada's first elite women's league, the Eastern Ladies Hockey League, which was founded in 1915.
The PWHL, much like they did with their near copy and pasted Collective Bargaining Agreement from the NWSL, also followed the soccer league's pathway to a trophy. The NWSL unveiled a new trophy of their own in October 2023, also designed by Tiffany & Co with a similar design.
As the NWSL stated at the time, “This new trophy is the physical manifestation of our commitment to raising the game and creating a league everybody, and most importantly our players, can be proud of."
And with that in mind, the trophy remained nameless.
The PWHL, with a single entity ownership model, which was a point that the PWHPA refused to accept in merger talks with the PHF, chose to recognize their owner, not the athletes, history, or game itself.
As Meredith Foster of The Ice Garden wrote, "Naming a women's sports trophy after family of white cisgender business owners who control vast amounts of wealth is, in short, exceedingly tone-deaf... Mark Walter is currently worth around $6 billion dollars. Billion, with a b. Hockey is a notoriously prohibitive sport in terms of cost and resources required for players at all ages; naming this trophy after the Walter family (Mark, lest we forget, is a #girldad as we learn from the press release) re-enforces the other glass ceiling: the one created by income disparity."
Someday, The Walter Cup will become just another name, as the true trailblazers of the game continue to burn a path forward. Behind them however, these women will not leave a scorched earth. While the PWHL is presently building a palatial home for women's hockey, it also came with a refusal to even use the word "unification" and a nuclear moment of blow up and rebuild.
Mark Walter is the money behind the league, but he's also not involved in the day to day operations. He's not in the rink attending games or building this league or the sport, he's bankrolling. Bankrolling is crucial, no doubt about that. Women's hockey is eternally grateful for that investment and the commitment to supporting a sustainable professional league, but it's not about Mark Walter, it's about the thousands of women who fought for this league, and the thousands of young girls who are dreaming to play in it. Seeing a trophy named for a man eliminates an opportunity to teach about the history of women's hockey, it eliminates an opportunity for women to dream. It re-asserts the power of businessmen who have upheld the glass ceiling the trophy's design showcases being smashed. Mark Walter and his family deserve recognition, but The Walter Cup was a missed opportunity to share the story of the history of women's hockey, instead sends the message that women's hockey history only exists because of the wealth of a businessman. As Billie Jean King stated, it's not a moment, it's a movement, but Team Kloss, Team King, and The Walter Cup have centered on the present moment, not the movement.