The Professional Women’s Hockey League’s team names and logos have finally arrived.
After a season of canvassing fans, players and general managers, the PWHL unveiled long-awaited branding for all six franchises on Monday.
The Boston Fleet, Minnesota Frost, Montréal Victoire, New York Sirens, Ottawa Charge and Toronto Sceptres will take the ice next season as the league enters its second campaign.
“We heard loud and clear from the get that fans wanted traditional kind of nicknames and logos,” said PWHL vice president of brand and marketing Kanan Bhatt-Shah, who led the naming process. “We wanted to move mountains and do whatever it took to give them that and names and logos that felt like they were evocative of their communities.”
The PWHL, a first-of-its-kind women’s league with deep-pocketed investors, shattered women’s hockey attendance records in a short-notice first year after the league was founded in June 2023 and formed into the PWHL in August 2023.
Teams filled arenas without nicknames during the inaugural season from last January to late May, with only city names stitched across each team’s jerseys.
Now they’ll enter Year 2 with a whole new look.
The Boston Fleet’s name is intended to reflect the city’s maritime history, with a logo featuring a green “B” shaped like an anchor.
The Minnesota Frost logo showcases a sharp-edged “F” resembling icicles, highlighting the state’s famously cold winters.
The Montréal Victoire’s crest features “Victoire” in capital letters above a winged figure the league says alludes to the Goddess of Victory. The logo also has a hidden “M” and the fleur-de-lis, Quebec’s national symbol, at the centre.
In New York, the Sirens represent the sounds of the city and a hockey goal horn. The logo has the word “Sirens” in teal running through the big white “NY” letters meant to symbolize the city’s skyscrapers.
The Ottawa Charge reference the city’s motto — “Advance — Ottawa — En Avant.” The emblem is a red “O” with spikes trailing along its side to suggest momentum. A slight gap in the “O” also allows it to be interpreted as a “C.”
The Sceptres is a nod to Toronto’s nickname as the Queen City and “Toronto’s regal history.” The logo combines the initials “T” and “S” in golden letters to form a sceptre — a symbolic staff often held by monarchs.
The league partnered with creative agency Flower Shop to develop the names and logos.
Jerseys will be released in late October or early November, and all teams will retain their primary colours from last season while introducing additional secondary colours.
The months-long process of searching for names and identities started the day the league was founded, said Bhatt-Shah and PWHL senior vice president of business operations Amy Scheer.
League marketers set up criteria to ensure that the names represented each city, resonated with fans and were marketable.
From there, they gathered opinions from around the league — including players — and sought input from fans.
Bhatt-Shah said she followed PWHL games while they streamed on YouTube and saw “a lot of awesome stuff there to mine from.”
And with the league already underway, they also had the benefit of visiting arenas across the league to chat with fans face-to-face.
”We had such a tremendous amount of input and insights and that we were also constantly mining like at games, right?” Bhatt-Shah said. “We had the luxury and the privilege of actually being in market as this process was happening on a parallel path.”
Fans eagerly awaited the names. Last October, the PWHL filed applications to trademark six names: Toronto Torch, Montreal Echo, Ottawa Alert, Minnesota Superior, Boston Wicked, and New York Sound.
Some fans on social media speculated as recently as last week that those would be the names revealed on Monday. But Scheer said they were one of many.
“There’s been hundreds upon hundreds of names that have been under consideration and have been trademarked for various purposes along our path,” Scheer said. “Those were just six that happened to have gotten out.”
Scheer said a small PWHL committee met daily to review names they were able to secure the rights to. They submitted names to the PWHL Advisory Board for approval ahead of a jersey artwork deadline in May.
Since then, they’ve been designing merchandise, websites and branding for all six markets with Monday’s announcement in sight.
A schedule for the upcoming season has yet to be released, though play will begin earlier than last season’s Jan. 1 start date. The regular season will increase from 24 games to 30.
