Canada’s women’s pro sports landscape transformed with arrival of PWHL, NSL and WNBA

“It’s been a popular sport to dunk on women’s sports,” said CWS chief executive officer Allison Sandmeyer-Graves

“The data and research we’ve done started to bust those myths. It takes people willing to look again, to look past the myths and seize the opportunities that are there.”

Powerful people with money became interested.

“Whether it’s one individual investing or a team of individuals investing, at the end of the day, there’s an investment being made,” said sports agent Brian Levine, whose agency handles sponsorship sales for the NSL’s AFC Toronto.

Canadian Tire was ready. The home, auto and sports retailer had pledged in 2023 to spend half its sponsorship money on women’s pro sports by 2026.

“As a sponsor, you can sort of only put your dollars where there’s something to sponsor,” said Kim Saunders, who among her company titles is vice-president of sponsorship.

“All these moments started to emerge as opportunities.”

The company was a founding sponsor of both the PWHL and NSL with multi-year, multi-million dollar deals. Canadian Tire has a sponsorship relationship with NBA Canada — and by extension, the WNBA — and was involved in bringing an exhibition game to Toronto in 2023. Saunders said the company is in “active conversations” with the Toronto Tempo.

“It’s not charity,” Saunders said. “I have to report up to my leadership for every sponsorship dollar we spend, and I have to justify the (return on investment) on it.

“So what’s in it for us is absolutely brand exposure and awareness and brand storytelling and differentiation. We are able to show how we are making life in Canada better. We’re making sport in Canada better by putting our dollars and our brand aside these new entities and helping them grow.”

A sponsor’s need to advertise feeds a key pillar in the pro sports ecosystem — how people watch it on a screen and the rights revenue that generates.

“It’s sort of the chicken and the egg,” Levine said. “You need to know the advertisers will be there before you can put it on air because there’s a cost of putting it on air.

“Companies that are all signing on to these pledges and committing to diversity and inclusion, there’s a pressure there to do something. But then also if you want to diversify your advertising base, if you’re Sportsnet or TSN, the argument would go that you’re going to have more women watching if there’s women’s sport. So it’s diversifying and expanding the volume of people watching, which makes perfect sense.”

After a first season of providing every game on YouTube to grow its fan base, the PWHL entered into exclusivity agreements with Canadian broadcasters in its second season.

“What we’ve seen in one year with the PWHL sort of blew all of our minds,” Saunders said. “It’s going to continue to be an explosion as the NSL comes online and the Toronto Tempo as well.”

What the PWHL, NSL and Toronto Tempo have in common is women in decision-making roles. Hefford and Amy Scheer are the PWHL’s operational leaders, Christina Litz is the NSL’s president and Therese Resch is the Tempo’s president.

“Having women at the front of a lot of these things has definitely moved the needle,” Matheson said.

“All of us, Jayna, Therese, everyone behind all these leagues, believe Canada’s world-class at women’s sport and we’re just getting started.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 25, 2024.

Donna Spencer, The Canadian Press