Jonathan Becher asked “why not us?” in 2019, long before the PWHL existed. Six years later, San Jose has a professional women's hockey team, and the Sharks are helping make room for it.
Jonathan Becher, President of Sharks Sport & Entertainment, remembers watching Kendall Coyne Schofield race in the fastest-skater competition at the 2019 NHL All-Star Game at SAP Center and thinking about more than her time on the clock.
Coyne Schofield had been added to the event after Nathan MacKinnon withdrew, putting the U.S. national team star on the ice with some of the NHL's fastest players. She didn't win, but the response from the crowd caught Becher's attention.
“She was clearly fast, she was basically as fast as McDavid,” Becher told The Hockey News. “The applause from the crowd was the loudest I had heard in that building in quite some time. It was Sharks loud, it was playoff hockey loud.”
From the owners' suite, Becher watched the building react to a women's hockey player in a way that felt familiar.
Then he started wondering why the Sharks didn't have a women's team of their own.
“Why aren’t we doing women’s hockey?”
There wasn't an easy way to answer that question in 2019. The PWHL didn't exist, and professional women's hockey was split between two leagues. There was no established league structure that made it obvious how a team could come to San Jose, but Becher started looking into the possibility anyway.
Part of that meant looking backward. He researched the history of women's hockey in the Bay Area and found that the sport had been around much longer than he had realized, including teams in Oakland and San Francisco. Minerva, for example, played its first hockey game in 1916.
That history, combined with San Jose's established hockey audience and the Sharks' experience in the market, made the idea feel less like a long shot and more like something worth pursuing if the right opportunity ever came along.
When the PWHL began expanding, the Sharks, through Sharks Sports & Entertainment, put San Jose forward. The first time, it didn't work.
“We tried in the previous expansion, but I get why they were still a Northeast focused franchise,” Becher said.
The Sharks didn't have to wait forever for another opportunity. When the PWHL announced plans to add four expansion teams, Becher felt confident San Jose would finally get one.
“When I heard there were going to be four teams this time, I was pretty sure we were going to get an expansion team.”
San Jose did.
The Sharks, however, weren't becoming the owners of a new PWHL franchise. PWHL San Jose would have its own ownership and operation. The Sharks' part in bringing the team to the Bay Area was going to look different: helping make San Jose work as a home for another professional hockey organization.
That turned out to be more complicated than simply finding dates on the SAP Center calendar.
The Sharks were already in the middle of a roughly half-billion-dollar renovation of the arena, and while the PWHL wanted to play at SAP Center, the Sharks couldn't immediately guarantee the dates the league needed. Tech CU Arena was considered as a potential temporary home, but the long-term plan was always to get PWHL San Jose into SAP Center.
The same conversation was happening at Sharks Ice.
The Sharks and San Jose Barracuda already had locker rooms and facilities there, so adding another professional team meant finding space for a third hockey operation without disrupting the two that were already in place. A potential locker-room location was identified on the second floor behind the Barracuda's area, but even after finding the space, the organizations had to work out how players and staff would move through the facility.
“The hardest part was trying to figure out where we were going to put them,” Becher said.
“There was a lot of time to sort out those paths and stuff.”
None of that is particularly glamorous compared to announcing an expansion team or making the first draft pick. But those details are what turn an expansion announcement into an actual hockey operation. A team needs a locker room, practice space, arena dates and a way to function alongside the organizations already using the building.
That work is now happening behind the scenes as construction continues ahead of the season.
PWHL San Jose will have its own ownership, identity and plans for what it wants to build in the Bay Area. The Sharks aren't running the team, and they don't need to. Their role is to help create the infrastructure and the opportunity for another professional hockey organization to establish itself in San Jose.
For Becher, that brings the story back to where it started.
“From meeting two I knew it was going to happen, it was just a matter of getting the details right.”
Six years after he first asked why San Jose didn't have a women's hockey team, PWHL San Jose is preparing to take the ice in the same building where the idea first took hold.
The question was asked in 2019.
The answer is finally here.
