PWHL Las Vegas enters a market where hockey has already found a home. The challenge now is building a culture, and a fan base, that belongs to the PWHL.
Dominique DiDia has been around Las Vegas hockey for years.
Long before she became the first general manager of PWHL Las Vegas, DiDia was making the trip from Southern California to Nevada as a youth hockey coach. She saw the growth of the sport, including the girls' game, firsthand.
DiDia spent almost a decade working for the Los Angeles Kings and grew up in Los Angeles. Vegas was already part of the hockey landscape she knew. Now she is helping bring professional women's hockey there.
“Vegas is a hockey town, there’s no doubt about that,” DiDia told The Hockey News. “They’ve built such an amazing community of hockey beyond just the Golden Knights.”
The Golden Knights are obviously a big part of that community. But DiDia has seen what exists underneath the NHL level, too.
“You go there, and girls hockey is alive and well in Vegas,” she said.
As a youth coach in Los Angeles, DiDia traveled to Las Vegas for tournaments against programs including the Las Vegas Storm and Junior Golden Knights. She watched girls hockey become more established in a city that, not that long ago, wasn't known as a hockey market at all.
Now those young players will have a professional team of their own to watch.
“We want our games and our team to be a safe and exciting space for all fans,” DiDia said. “We want to grow the game but we also want to grow the love for women’s hockey itself which is a new thing in Vegas for sure.”
That part of the job means something to DiDia personally.
“As someone born in Southern California, having women’s hockey be professional in a city like Las Vegas that’s only a five-hour drive from where I grew up is such a gift to women’s hockey.”
DiDia isn't building the franchise alone. Head coach Kim Weiss will have a major say in what it becomes, too.
The two go back to their playing days in college, but DiDia's familiarity with Weiss wasn't the deciding factor in hiring her. She had followed Weiss' coaching career, including her work in the AHL and men's hockey at Trinity.
What she saw convinced her Weiss was the right person to help start a team from scratch.
“I love the way she coaches,” DiDia said. “You could see her love of the game and her drive to make every single player on the ice better just by the way she coaches.”
Player development is going to be a major part of that.
“We want to make this team not only the best in the PWHL, but we want to make our individual athletes the best they can be,” DiDia said.
That philosophy also gets at what DiDia sees as the difference between building a team in Las Vegas and simply adding another professional hockey franchise to the city.
The Golden Knights already have a very clear identity. PWHL Las Vegas doesn't need to borrow it.
Instead, DiDia wants to build something that belongs to her organization.
“We’re just excited to have such a great hockey town be part of who we are but also make sure that our core values are ours, our mission statement is ours,” she said.
Those values are excellence, integrity and growth. DiDia said they'll be part of the decision-making process from the beginning, whether it comes to hiring staff, selecting players or establishing the team's philosophy.
“We’re really excited to have those both as a guiding light for every decision we make from the get go, from staffing to players to philosophy,” she said.
There is a certain freedom that comes with being an expansion team.
PWHL Las Vegas doesn't have decades of history to lean on. It doesn't have a built-in fan base that has been following the team for generations.
But it also doesn't have to undo anything which means DiDia and Weiss get to decide what the team becomes.
And in a city where the Golden Knights have already shown that hockey can work, PWHL Vegas has a chance to build on that success without trying to recreate it.
For DiDia, the hope is that the next generation of girls playing hockey in Las Vegas won't just have a local team to watch.
They'll have a professional team they can see themselves in.
