The Alpha Edge: September 2026
The September edition of The Alpha Edge explores the growth and future of girls’ and women’s hockey, the power of…
There has never been a more exciting time to be a girl in hockey.
And for the first time, we have numbers on both sides of the border that make it difficult to describe what is happening as simply a trend.
According to Hockey Canada, more than 121,000 women and girls registered during the 2025–26 season, which set another national participation record and represented 5% year-over-year growth. South of the border, USA Hockey reached its own historic milestone, welcoming its 100,000th female player during that same season. It’s safe to say a lot has happened since women’s hockey made its debut in the1998 Olympics, and female participation in the U.S. has since grown by a whopping 257%.
So what does that mean? Girls’ hockey isn’t waiting to grow; it is growing! And that changes the conversation. The question can no longer simply be, “How do we get more girls into hockey?”
We also have to start asking: What kind of hockey experience are we building for them once they arrive?
Hockey Canada is asking many of the same questions. Its new Rise as One blueprint lays out a vision of 170,000 women and girls playing hockey in Canada by 2030, but what’s particularly interesting is that participation is only one piece of that plan. Its recommendations address development models, access to ice, coaching and leadership opportunities for women (representation), consistency in programming, visibility, and pathways that allow girls to choose recreational, competitive or high-performance hockey.
USA Hockey is taking a similar approach. Alongside record participation, it has built female player development pathways from the ground up, offering grassroots participation all the way through national ID camps. Female-specific coaching education has also been offered to keep women involved in the sport as players, coaches, officials and leaders.
That is where I think the next chapter of girls’ hockey begins. We spent decades fighting for girls to have a place in the game. Now we need to make sure we’re building the right game around them.
The next phase in finding out where women’s and girls’ hockey is headed should include asking these 5 important questions:
As opportunities for girls expand, so does the pressure to identify earlier. Imagine being in U7, having only been on skates a handful of times, and already being evaluated for signs of high-performance potential, with your future seemingly predetermined by your abilities before you’ve even had the chance to fully develop a love for the game. Identification has an important place in the high-performance pathway… but it should never become a substitute for development and a love for the game.
Every girl who wants to compete should have the opportunity to continue developing toward the highest level she wants to pursue. When we identify a select group of athletes early and unintentionally place everyone else into a “playing for fun” category, we risk closing doors long before we know what those athletes may become. Girls are smart, and they are aware of the pressure. Their development is not linear. Girls grow, mature, gain confidence and develop physically at different rates. A player who is not identified at 11 or 12 should not feel as though the competitive pathway has already passed her by. I didn’t join my first girls’ team until I was 11. It’s clear my opportunities did not pass me by.
USA Hockey offers perspective on this within its own girls program. It includes ID and evaluation at high-performance camps, but also describes its purpose as providing athletes with tools and strategies to use to improve on their own. That distinction matters.
Identification should be a component of development, not a replacement for it.
If we want more girls to stay in hockey, we need pathways that continue to challenge and develop athletes at different stages, not simply identify the earliest standouts and assume everyone else has already found their ceiling.
This is where Hockey Canada’s Rise as One is extremely useful because it talks about providing girls with choice: recreational, competitive or high-performance hockey. This choice is meaningful. Growing girls’ hockey shouldn’t mean creating 170,000 elite hockey players. It should mean creating 170,000 meaningful places for girls in hockey.
Player development has to mean more than skating faster, shooting harder, or understanding systems. If we are going to talk seriously about developing girls in hockey, we also have to talk about the young women under the gear.
Confidence, resilience, leadership, independence and a sense of belonging are not separate from athletic development. They directly influence how a player responds to adversity, accepts feedback, competes under pressure, supports her teammates and ultimately whether she chooses to stay in the game.
As coaches, it can be easy to measure what we can see: goals, assists, speed, strength, wins and losses. The harder things to measure are often the things that will matter long after a player’s final game. Did she learn to trust herself? Can she respond to failure without being defeated by it? Did she learn how to lead and how to be led? Does she feel confident taking up space, using her voice and competing without apologizing for it?
For me, this is an especially important part of developing female athletes. Hockey provides an incredible environment for girls to discover what they are capable of, but only if we intentionally create spaces that allow that growth to happen.
That doesn’t mean removing adversity or making everything comfortable. In fact, it’s often the opposite. Girls need to be challenged. They need to experience failure, disappointment, competition and pressure. But they also need coaches who teach them how to navigate those moments rather than allowing those moments to define them.
The goal shouldn’t simply be to produce better hockey players. It should be to use hockey to help develop strong, confident and resilient young women.
Because eventually every athlete takes off her skates for the last time.
Girls need representation and there are no two ways about it.
USA Hockey reported in 2025 that only about 7% of its coaching staff were female, even as girls’ participation had grown 36.5% in the past 15 seasons.
Both Hockey Canada and USA Hockey are actively building female coaching and leadership pathways, but are a long way off where they need to be. USA Hockey now has mentorship programming specifically for fostering confidence, leadership and belonging. Hockey Canada has women- only coaching initiatives in an effort to close the gender gap. If we’re going to dramatically increase the number of girls playing hockey, we also need to dramatically increase the number of women they see leading it.
It’s tempting to measure our success by the biggest numbers. More registrations. More teams. More programs. More scholarships. More professional opportunities.
Those numbers matter but they certainly don’t tell the whole story.
Success should also be measured by how many girls stay.
Did the girl who started hockey at 7 still love the game at 14? Did the player who wasn’t identified early continue to have opportunities to develop and compete? Did the house leaguer feel that her experience mattered just as much as the athlete pursuing high performance? Did we create an environment where girls felt challenged, supported and like they belonged?
And when their playing careers eventually end, do they stay connected to hockey?
Do they return as coaches, leaders, volunteers, and advocates? Do they bring their own daughters to the rink someday because hockey was something that positively shaped their lives?
For too long, growing the girls’ game meant fighting to create opportunities that simply didn’t exist. Now those opportunities are expanding at an incredible rate. While that’s something worth celebrating, it’s just the start.
The next measure of success can’t simply be how many girls we get through the door. It has to be what happens to them once they’re inside.
If we can build a game where a girl can enter at any level, find a pathway that challenges her, develop at her own pace, pursue excellence if she chooses, feel like she belongs, and eventually leave hockey stronger because of her experience in it, that is the growth truly worth celebrating.
And we women who are already here, have stayed connected and continuously show up, have to decide what kind of game we’re growing.
Hockey Canada
USA Hockey
