The Stranger

Conservatives Zeroed In on Tumwater in Washington State’s Fight Over Trans Athletes

Nathalie Graham — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 11:00:00 -0800

“When a school board tells students they don’t deserve inclusion, it’s heartbreaking.” by Nathalie Graham

It’s been a long year for Tumwater, a politically purple town with 24,852 people and three craft breweries that’s become a pawn in a political chess match over transgender rights.

And the whole year, it’s never gotten far from the paint. It began with a high school basketball game. It was February, and the girls’ JV Tumwater High School Thunderbirds basketball team was playing the Shelton High School Highclimbers.

Fifteen-year-old Thunderbird Frances Staudt was warming up when she noticed a girl on the other team was trans. She later told KOMO that she feared the girl would injure her during the game, and complained. But in Washington, trans girls and boys have played with, and against, cis girls and boys for nearly two decades. The trans girl could play, no matter how much Frances complained. She sat out in protest. So did one of her teammates. They still won, 33-16.

Frances said the situation “put her on the spot in the whole gym.” She said she looked over at the trans girl and said, “You are a man.” That was her First Amendment right, she later told KOMO.

The President and Republican Party were behind her. The day before, Trump had signed an executive order banning trans girls and women from playing sports against cis girls and women. Not that there are very many, or that there’s credible scientific evidence proving athletic advantage. But Washington State and the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA), the state’s governing body for high school sports, were not on Staudt’s side. The Washington Law Against Discrimination protects transgender people in places of public accommodation, which include school athletic programs, and the WIAA was the first state athletic association in the nation to adopt a trans-inclusive policy.

The WIAA slapped Frances with an ethics violation for calling her opponent a man. This was a catalyst.

First came a civil rights complaint filed on Staudt’s behalf by a right-wing nonprofit called the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, or FAIR. Cofounded by Bari Weiss, the “anti-woke” opinion columnist now running CBS news, FAIR’s purpose is to dismantle diversity efforts, like when it sued the Washington State Housing Finance Commission over a homebuyer assistance program for nonwhite people, or when it sued Arkansas for reserving one board seat on a medical board for someone “of a minority race.” The complaint led the Department of Education to investigate the Tumwater School District over alleged Title IX violations. Last April, the Biden Administration expanded Title IX, a 1972 law against sex discrimination in education, to cover anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination. The legal rationale is simple: Discrimination against a gay or trans person is a perception that someone is not performing their sex or gender the right way. Trump promised to do away with the change during the campaign, and a federal judge struck it down in early 2025.

Three weeks later, on February 27, the Tumwater School Board held a vote. The WIAA was considering rolling back its trans athlete policy. Back in December, 14 out of 294 Washington school districts had voted to amend these WIAA rules, but not in Tumwater, where the board had not taken up the vote. But then the executive order and the basketball game happened. A resolution to support those amendments passed three to one.

School board member Melissa Beard cast the lone vote against the measure. Nationwide, conservatives have created panic over trans people to mobilize their base, get elected to public office, and warp curriculum. Republican lawmakers in 28 states have effectively banned trans kids from playing sports, even in places where there had never been issues, or even evidence that trans kids were competing.

Conservatives are attempting to use trans kids as a political wedge here, too. The Let’s Go Washington’s ballot initiative campaign targets queer and trans kids under the banners of protecting “parents’ rights” and “fairness” in girls’ sports. Extremist Moms for Liberty candidates have won several school board elections statewide. Beard’s lonely vote was evidence that not all elected officials would speak out against bigoted policy.

Months later, she had a new political challenger. It was Aimee Staudt, Frances’s mother.

Tumwater is situated in one of the only legislative districts in Thurston County with Democratic representatives—Rep. Beth Doglio and Rep. Lisa Parshley—but like its blue neighbors Lacey and Olympia, the conservative politics of nearby rural towns often encroach on the small city.

Those conservative politics prompted the vote to change WIAA’s trans athlete policy. When the vote came, Melissa Beard sat on the dais and reread what she was going to say. “I was like, ‘Yeah, this is it. Tumwater may not be ready for this. You may lose the election,’” Beard told herself. “And I was okay with that, because I was willing to go down on this issue. It was that important that people knew where I stood.”

Every seat in the room was taken, a few by people wearing “Protect Trans Kids” shirts. Standing in the back, teens with dyed hair held a trans flag.

Even though the room was packed with people who agreed with her, Beard knew her vote could cost her the election this November.

But she knew she was right.

Beard says that when board members are sworn in, they take an oath to “uphold the constitution and the laws of the United States and the state of Washington.” Trans people are a protected class in Washington. Supporting the measure would go against state antidiscrimination law and violate her oath, she says.

She said exactly that from the dais to the crowded room. “I’m concerned that this resolution communicates that we do not see these students as an equal part of our community,” Beard said. The crowd cheered.

After she said her piece, only one of the four other school board members spoke. Jill Adams, who abstained, worried out loud about Trump’s executive order. “Federal laws have supremacy over state and local items,” Adams said, saying she was caught “between a boulder and a hard surface” with this vote.

A woman in the crowd shouted, “Executive orders are not law!”

“We’re not going to do this,” Beard said. “No.”

She moved on to hear comments from the rest of the board.

Casey Taylor, Ty Kuehl, and Darby Kaikkonen said nothing. Then they voted yes.

“They were all very upset. They were all very frustrated with me,” Beard says. “I don’t know what they thought. I don’t know why they were frustrated.” She paused. “I mean, I lost the vote.”

Beard likes finding common ground. She cut her teeth as an analyst in the Washington State House of Representatives during a deadlock between Republicans and Democrats 25 years ago. She even found compromises during COVID on this board, when other members bristled at the state mask mandates and school closures she supported.

“For whatever reason, they did not want to have that conversation about this particular resolution,” Beard says.

When asked for comment, Kaikkonen sent links to comments she made at a different school board meeting two weeks after the initial vote. Kaikkonen started off by criticising the February 27 meeting for not following the board’s rules of order—criticism of Beard and how she ran the meeting. Having a crowd present that did not support the policy “created a situation” where Kaikkonen felt she could not “express my point of view… [and] be listened to in an open, fair, and impartial manner.”

“This issue is impossible,” Kaikkonen said about trans kids playing sports. “[It’s] a stalemate, a game of tic-tac-toe in which there’s no winner.” She supports the transgender community, Kaikkonen says, but she also supports women. By way of explanation, Kaikkon told a story.

“I started swimming competitively when I was 8 years old,” she said. She detailed her whole swimming career, at one point holding up her collegiate All-American award for breast stroke.

A week later, Kaikkonen was fired from her job at the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. Superintendent of Public Education and Kaikkonen’s boss at OSPI Chris Reykdal has been vocally supportive of trans kids competing in school sports. In a lawsuit, Kaikkonen alleged her firing was retaliation for her vote. The Office says it filed a motion to dismiss the case because Kaikkonen’s “legal claims all lacked legal merit.” The US District Court in Tacoma dismissed the case in early November.

The other board members did not respond to The Stranger’s request for comment.

Two months after the vote, the rest of the board asked Beard to resign as board president, and she did. Beard explained she’d planned to rotate the presidency throughout the year, so this was a good opportunity to do so. But it seems as if she just wanted the issue to go away so she could keep working with her fellow board members.

“I will always put organization over self,” Beard says. “So rather than make them extend any of this pain, they asked me to resign, and I said, ‘Fine, I’ll just resign.’ Can we just get past this?”

Aimee Staudt saw an opportunity. Four days after Beard filed to run for a third term, Staudt filed to run against her. Beard didn’t think it was personal. They lived in the same district. She assumed Staudt would have run anyway.

As an experienced campaigner, Beard normally reaches out to her opponents before the race heats up. But she didn’t do that with Staudt. (“I just didn’t get the sense that she was in it for what’s best for the district,” Beard says.)

Staudt did not respond to our request for an interview.

She also didn’t run much of a campaign. She raised just $1,063. Staudt didn’t spend any money on mailers herself, but was included on a $5,100 mailer campaign from Sarah Overbay, a candidate for the District 1 school board position. Those mailers praised Overbay, Staudt, and other more conservative candidates. On the back, the mailers went negative on their opponents, claiming Beard and the other progressive school board candidates running only cared about “gender politics,” which ironically seemed to be Staudt’s sole issue.

That became clear during a candidate forum hosted by the League of Women Voters, the only forum she attended. Staudt—who didn’t even have a campaign website—said she was running to “use common sense and put education first again.” Schools were wasting too much time on political and social agendas and not enough time on teaching students how to read, she said. She called for transparency, to give families a choice and to make sure schools partnered with parents instead of trying to replace them. Her talking points emphasizing a need for parental power and control are textbook for right-wing candidates.

Beard worried about her chances of beating Staudt. She stressed over the possibility of her campaign becoming a national talking point. And for good reason.

In the last month before the November election, anti-trans politics flared up in Tumwater once more.

A sore loser, hedge fund manager Brian Heywood is again funding a signature-gathering campaign for his anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-public-education ballot measures.

Heywood’s campaign, Let’s Go Washington (LGW), is gunning for two initiatives on next year’s November ballot.

The first would reinstate the parents’ bill of rights that already passed as an initiative last year. But, much to Heywood & co.’s chagrin, the Legislature mostly nullified it during this year’s session. So, LGW is trying to volley it back.

“We don’t co-parent with the government,” Heywood said in a statement first reported by the Washington State Standard. “No government employee can care about or love your child like you do.”

What Heywood really wants is to do away with student privacy and control public education. The Parents Bill of Rights initiative allows parents to “examine” curriculum decisions and school policies, something they already had the right to do, while granting access to their child’s mental health and counseling records. The rule could force teachers and guidance counselors to out LGBTQ kids to their parents, which could be dangerous for those living in unaccepting homes. In an emailed statement, LGW wrote that the initiative would strengthen “communications between parents and school.”

Heywood’s second initiative would ban transgender athletes from playing girls’ sports. The initiative would require athletes to have a doctor certify their sex before they can participate in girls sports. This could require a genital examination.

As Seattle Police Department detective Beth Wareing said at a WA Families for Freedom press conference in November—a campaign to kill Heywood’s initiatives—genital examinations “would increase the risk of sexual abuse for girls participating in sports.”

The LGW campaign seems unbothered by the criticism. Campaign spokesperson Hallie Herzberg called the risk of sexual abuse a lie. “The opposition is proving again how little they care about females in sports,” she said. And the campaign is asking people to literally rally around them inside schools. It’s held five so far, with eight more planned between now and January 2, when LGW plans to turn in its signatures to the Secretary of State’s Office.

In late September, days before she jetted off to Washington, DC, for Trump’s antifa roundtable, right-wing commentator Brandi Kruse promoted LGW’s signature-gathering event at Tumwater Middle School. Kruse has no official or financial association with LGW, but volunteered to speak at the event, a “Super Signer Kick-Off” for its anti-trans initiatives.

Board member Beard thought holding the event in Tumwater was bizarre and opportunistic. Liza Rankin, Seattle Public Schools board director and member of the Washington State School Directors Association, also thought it intentional and “a little bit weird.”

Holding the rallies at schools can show voters that the initiatives are “about children,” so they can say, “If you love children, you’ll come to this thing,” Rankin explains. But it could also be setting up a confrontation.

The Tumwater rally was planned for October 4, a month ahead of the Beard vs. Staudt race. Kruse spent the days leading up to the event drumming up attention for the rally. When The Stranger asked why, she told us “radical gender ideology belongs in the dustbin of American politics.”

The week before the planned rally, her tweets turned angry. Tumwater School District had denied the event permit.

“In Washington state, schools will grant facility use permits for grown men in panties to dance for little children. But want to hold an event to support parental rights? Sorry, no can do!” Kruse tweeted, citing a drag event at a school.

Kruse tweeted that the school district “caved to left-wing activists.” Kruse said it was the only LGW event denied a permit.

Schools are sensitive places for politicking. State law doesn’t allow any campaigning involving public resources. Public schools count as a public resource. However, because the LGW initiatives aren’t yet on the ballot, it creates a gray area.

“If they aren’t allowed to do it, they can throw a tantrum,” Rankin says. “What they want is to say they’re being politically persecuted. They want the narrative that ‘We’re just standing up for parents… and it’s the liberal lawmakers who are being mean to us.’”

LGW denies that. “We aren’t looking for a freedom of speech fight,” Herzberg said. The public schools offer a space for people to “turn in their petitions without being harassed, attacked, or stolen from,” Herzberg said.

The reasons were more mundane, according to records obtained by The Stranger. LGW’s campaign submitted a permit application three days before the planned event. Tumwater School District requires that applications for permitted events be submitted seven days prior to the event.

“Due to the short timeline, the request wasn’t approved,” a spokesperson with the district said. “It’s our understanding that they met outside of the fencing at Tumwater Middle School on the date they requested use of the building.”

At the event, Staudt’s daughter, Frances, spoke about her experience and about the lack of fairness in girl’s sports. Kruse amplified it online. From the internet attention, the issue seemed big, but only a few dozen people had shown up to the rally.

That could explain the election results in Tumwater.

Beard defeated Staudt with 61 percent of the vote. Beard thinks voters valued her experience, and her record, more than this one issue.

They also valued progressive Julie Watts over Sarah Overbay, the conservative who sent out those negative mailers, in a race for an open seat. On her campaign website, Watts wrote, “Our district is caught in unnecessary political fights—like banning transgender athletes—instead of focusing on what matters. These aren’t abstract debates; they’re about real kids who just want to belong.

“When a school board tells students they don’t deserve inclusion, it’s heartbreaking,” the website read.

But Tumwater is still purple. Incumbent Kuehl, who voted to change WIAA’s policy, and newcomer Rob Warner, who said at a forum that he would not rescind the policy, made it through.

That split feels apt for Tumwater, Beard says.

How to Make a Hockey Team in 205 Days

Megan Seling — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 15:15:00 -0800

People were brought to tears at the sight of professional women’s hockey players finally getting their due in a sold-out 15,000-capacity arena on the West Coast of North America. And it was about damn time. by Megan Seling

Photos by Billie Winter

“BOOOO!”

“GO HOME, SEATTLE!”

The attempts to establish a rivalry between the Vancouver Goldeneyes and the Seattle Torrent, the two newest additions to the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL), had clearly worked. The playful jeering started the moment the Torrent took the ice on Friday, November 21, for the teams’ inaugural game at Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, BC.

After the showy staff and player introductions, the flashy hype videos, and the national anthems, a man yelled out one more “Fuck Seattle!” for good measure, and the puck dropped. Cheers filled the rafters of the sold-out, 57-year-old arena, where the Vancouver Canucks established their NHL career in 1970, and 14,958 hockey fans witnessed history.

Their game wasn’t perfect. Training camp started just 10 days prior, giving all these players (most of whom have never skated together before) barely a week to find their rhythm, but the crowd didn’t care. A Disney movie couldn’t have written it better.

Seattle scored first, with Julia Gosling collecting the first goal in Torrent history. Three minutes later, after the Goldeneyes had been edging fans by racking up nearly a dozen shots, alternate captain Sarah Nurse tied it up. With less than a minute to go, Gosling struck again. Hilary Knight laid a beautiful body check on Vancouver’s Ashton Bell to grab control of the puck before passing it off to her linemate, who ripped it past Emerance Maschmeyer. And that was just the first period.

Forward Julia Gosling scores the Torrent’s first goal at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, BC.

The Torrent lost 4-3 in overtime, and though a fair number of Seattle fans had made the trip up north—by the busload, in some cases—no one left disappointed. Everyone was thrilled.

The history of professional women’s hockey in the US and Canada is a dense web, and sorting it all into manageable, bite-sized nuggets of information can make you feel a little bit like Charlie Kelly trying to find Pepe Silvia in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But here’s the gist: Before the PWHL was founded in 2023, there was the Premier Hockey Federation (PHF), which ran from 2015 to 2023. It was the first professional women’s hockey league to pay players a (meager, very meager) salary. The PHF was renamed from the National Women’s Hockey League (1999–2007), which absorbed some teams from the Western Women’s Hockey League (2004–2011) and was renamed from the Central Ontario Women’s Hockey League (1992–1998). There was also the Canadian Women’s Hockey League, founded by former players of the NWHL in 2007. That folded in 2019 after 12 seasons. Do you see what I mean? Carol! Carol! Carol!

The leagues were always small, and budgets were even smaller. Most didn’t have enough money to pay players, though some did offer stipends when possible. The women often had jobs on the side, and there were few to no resources for the players off-ice. In a story the Victory Press published in 2020, former NWHL players recalled abysmal working conditions, including having to pee in a trash can during practice because they didn’t have access to locker rooms. (A boys’ junior varsity team had dibs.)

The Seattle Torrent’s inaugural game in Vancouver, BC, on Friday, November 21.

It’s no wonder some people were brought to tears at the sight of professional women’s hockey players finally getting their due, breaking merchandise and season ticket records, being supported by thousands of fervent, passionate fans in a sold-out 15,000-capacity arena on the West Coast of North America, and having access to their own bathrooms. It was about damn time.

***

No one was surprised when Amy Scheer, Executive Vice President of Business Operations for the PWHL, held a press conference at Climate Pledge Arena on April 30 to confirm that Seattle and Vancouver, BC, would be home to the league’s next two expansion teams. Rumors had been swirling that women’s hockey was on the way for months. In January, the PWHL’s Takeover Tour had stops in both Seattle and Vancouver. More than 12,000 hockey fans filled Climate Pledge to see the Boston Fleet beat the Montréal Victoire 3-2 in a shootout, and a whopping 19,000 people filled Vancouver’s Rogers Arena to see the Montréal Victoire take on the Toronto Sceptres. The Pacific Northwest was clearly ready for PWHL action.

What was surprising, however, was the time that both cities had to pull it off. Puck drop was in November. They had 205 days to build an entire professional hockey team, from the ground up.

Seattle Torrent assistant coach Christine Bumstead goes over plays during a preseason practice.

The PWHL’s first big move in Seattle was hiring general manager Meghan Turner. She had helped launch one of the original PWHL teams, the Boston Fleet, in 2024. A May 21 start date meant her first shot at signing players for the 2025–26 season, during the exclusive signing window and expansion draft, was just two weeks away. She didn’t even have a permanent office space in Seattle. (And still doesn’t, by the way—the Torrent facilities in Northgate are still under construction.)

Still, Turner was able to make a move no one saw coming.

The PWHL 2025 expansion process worked like this: Seattle and Vancouver each got to kickstart their rosters by picking 12 seasoned PWHL players from the six existing teams—Boston Fleet, Minnesota Frost, Montréal Victoire, New York Sirens, Ottawa Charge, and Toronto Sceptres. Each team could protect just three players from being snatched up. The exclusive signing window was first. Starting on June 4, Seattle and Vancouver had four days to sign up to five players each from the pool of players who were left unprotected. Then came the expansion draft on June 8, with the remaining unprotected players. If any of the original six teams had already forfeited two players, they were allowed to protect one more player before Seattle and Vancouver could pick at least seven more players from the pool to bring their roster to 12.

It’s like a game of chess. Because all the teams have different goals and are considering a variety of factors—some known to the public, some not—it’s nearly impossible to predict whose names will end up on the final lists. Drama can ensue. And this year, that drama came on June 3, when the Boston Fleet announced they would not be protecting their team captain (and Team USA captain, Olympic gold medalist, IIHF gold medalist several times over, and literally one of the most decorated hockey players in the world, male or female), Hilary Knight.

The Athletic called it “shocking.” Days later, Fleet GM Danielle Marmer said it “was the hardest decision I’ve ever made in my professional career to date.” Turner, wisely, signed her immediately. On June 4, Knight became the first player in Seattle’s PWHL history.

Knight was as surprised as anyone that Boston left her dangling. At the team’s jersey launch in October, she told me, “When they announced Seattle being an expansion location, I immediately was envious. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, how cool to have a team out there, I wish I could be out there.’ So, subtle foreshadowing. Then the unprotected thing happens, and the opportunity to get out here presented itself. It was like, ‘Yeah, why wouldn’t I do that? That’s kind of everything that I wanted.’

“But on a human level, we had a great room in Boston. We did such a tremendous job building that foundation there, and you know, [there’s] unfinished business, too. I think you get a little remorseful, in that way, leaving friends.”

Turner, for her part, says she didn’t know Knight would be left unprotected either.

“I respect the process, so [I] made sure to remove myself from those conversations as they got going, when I knew that I was in the pipeline for this role,” she said during a preseason media scrum. “I found out when everyone else found out, and we went from there.”

That week, Turner also signed defensive player (and 5-foot-2-inch firecracker) Cayla Barnes, forwards Danielle Serdachny and Alex Carpenter, and goalie Corinne Schroeder. And on June 20, with a few more players in her pocket, Turner hired the franchise’s first head coach, Steve O’Rourke (who’s from British Columbia, but started his hockey career here in Washington with the Tri-City Americans in Kennewick).

Turner has, over and over again (as much as one can do in a few months, anyway), praised O’Rourke for looking to coach a “direct, fast, physical” game. “That’s how we constructed this roster, and what we wanted going into it,” says Turner. “It’s gonna be a physical game, and I expect our opponents to feel it.” To make good on that, they signed Emily Brown, Aneta Tejralová, and Lexie Adzija, three players who all racked up enough hits last season to make it into the league’s top 20.

Now, before anyone can start to regurgitate some brand of “ThEy DoN’t GeT pHySiCaL iN wOmEn’S hOcKeY” nonsense you read on a message board in 2017, let me say this: Yes, they fucking do. PWHL players crunch one another into the boards at full speed to force a turnover, they get scrappy in the crease if someone gets too close to their goalie, and they can deliver a hip check that would make Dan Hamhuis blush.

The Torrent are no different. Less than seven minutes into the inaugural game in Vancouver, rookie Jenna Buglioni performed a picture-perfect shoulder check on Vancouver’s Michelle Karvinen. Karvinen fell to the ice, and Buglioni was visibly annoyed when she was called for an illegal body check.

Seattle’s Megan Carter left a mark, too. In the third period, when Vancouver’s alternate captain Sarah Nurse got the puck and tried to skate through Carter while charging the net, Carter stood her ground, and they both went flying through the air. During a replay of the move, commentator (and Olympic gold medalist hockey player) Becky Kellar remarked, “Woof, that’s a big, strong girl, taking Sarah Nurse out.”

Minutes later, Carter, who was clearly displeased that Vancouver’s Gabby Rosenthal fell into Seattle goalie Corinne Schroeder while attempting to score off a rebound, tugged at Rosenthal’s sweater hard enough that she started pulling it up and over her head. Rosenthal rose to her feet, and Carter shoved her a bit more to ensure she got the message: Stay away from the fucking goalie.

Carter delivered six hits that night, the most on either team.

“This is such a physical league, and a lot of girls on this team have been around the league enough to know that you’ve got to use the body, you’ve got to play physical,” said the Torrent’s alternate captain, Emily Brown, at Sunday morning practice after the season opener. “I think a lot of us embrace that, too, and really enjoy it.

“Even before the formal checking rules were put in place, we’ve always been teetering—‘Where’s the line? How hard can we push it?’ I mean, you look back five to 10 years to look at the US-Canada rivalry, that’s not a gentle game, ever. But I love it, I love a little physical spice.”

O’Rouke liked what he saw Friday night, too. Though the Torrent lost in overtime, he still praised the team for roughing their opponents up a bit. “That’s gonna be our trademark,” he said during the postgame press conference. “We want to have an identity that’s hard to play against, and I thought we established that tonight. Bugs [Buglioni] took a nice big penalty, showed what her physicality is, and her style of play. That’s where we’re gonna go, that’s how we’re gonna play the game.”

These players are just as physical as NHL players. They may only have 30 games a season (for now), but they put their bodies on the line night after night, all the same. On Friday, Torrent forward Aneta Tejralová had to be helped off the ice after taking a hard hit against the boards, and her leg appeared to twist in a direction a leg should not twist. She attempted to play another shift or two after assessing her injury, but the Torrent eventually announced she’d be out the rest of the game. At press time, she was still out with a lower-body injury.

There is one glaring difference between the PWHL and the NHL, but it’s off the ice. For the 2025–26 season, the PWHL’s salary cap is $1.3 million per team. In the NHL, it’s $95.5 million. The PWHL’s cap will increase by 3 percent every season as part of the PWHL’s collective bargaining agreement, and there are restrictions on how a team can distribute it. The minimum annual salary this season is $37,131.50 (up from $35,000 last year), and at least five players have to make at least $80,000. Players do get some money if they need to relocate, a $1,600 per month housing stipend, and meal per diems for road games. Teams also get bonuses when they make the playoffs. But no one is in women’s hockey to get rich. In November, KOMO reported that “a single adult needs to earn $135,265 annually to maintain a comfortable lifestyle in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area.”

That $1.3 million season salary cap means that the $29,400,000 contract Seattle Kraken defenseman Vince Dunn signed in 2023 could fund the entire PWHL’s eight-team roster for two years and still have several million left over to add a few expansion teams.

Still, the fan base—and therefore the amount of money coming in—is growing. PWHL merch sales doubled from season one to season two, according to league statistics, and “Seattle set the record for highest first-day jersey sales of any team at launch.” Seattle and Vancouver brought in more than 5,000 season ticket member deposits each, and, as of September, the league has sold more season tickets in every city than ever before. During a business conference in September, Dodgers CEO Stan Kasten, who’s also a member of the four-person governing board of the PWHL, said, “We are going to be adding more teams much sooner than other people thought because the demand is there, the players are there.”

***

Professional women’s hockey in Seattle may have felt like a long time coming, but this is just the start of what will hopefully be a very long, exhilarating journey. Management and marketing meetings only take a team so far; who the Seattle Torrent become now is largely up to us, the city, the fans. And the PWHL didn’t choose Seattle as their next expansion city by shooting a puck at a map and seeing where it hit. They knew exactly what they were doing, said Amy Scheer during a media scrum ahead of the team’s first game.

“Seattle’s interesting. Having worked in the WNBA for so many years and running the New York Liberty business, as a league, you always look to other teams and [ask yourself], who do you want to be, who do you not want to be, and everybody always wanted to be Seattle. Because you go to Seattle, and the Storm games were always full, and they had so much support from the get-go. Seattle just does such a wonderful job supporting their women’s teams. It was almost like, ‘Hey, Captain Obvious, you must come here.’”

Seattle Torrent forward Julia Gosling (#88) and captain Hilary Knight (#21) make a play for the puck in the team's first game on Friday, November 21.

Now, we get to see where Seattle takes it. What taunts will fans yell after the Torrent score on the opposing goalie? What rallying cry will echo through Climate Pledge’s rafters when the team is down by one with a minute left in the third period? What song will play after the Torrent score, and what kind of cheer will fans weave into it? Will the crowd emphasize a word from the National Anthem, like when Kraken fans bellow “RED GLARE!” as a nod to the team’s crimson-eyed logo? Will anyone make a tradition of throwing some kind of seafood—why is it always seafood—onto the ice?

The culture of this team will grow in the fan base, game by game. They’ll decide if that rivalry with Vancouver pans out, or if we’ll take a longer, harder look at Boston and decide that Bean Town, former home of the Torrent’s GM and two of the team’s three leadership players, is Enemy #1. They’ll decide which players will earn endearing nicknames that end up on merchandise, in commercials, or even in mayoral campaigns. Who will be Seattle’s next Sir P, Big Dumper, or DB?

Only after hockey fans from across the region crowd into Climate Pledge, after the puck drops and the songs play, can a fandom’s identity come to fruition organically, in a way even the best marketing teams could never predict.

And it’s clear the fans are ready. They’re hungry for it. Jen Barnes, owner of sports bar Rough & Tumble in Ballard, said sales of their Knight’s Cheese Curds, named after Hilary Knight when the pub opened in 2022, increased 26 percent when Knight signed with the Torrent. Now Barnes has to order about 60 pounds of curds a week to keep them in stock.

A fan shows off the jersey she made to celebrate team captain Hilary Knight at the Seattle Torrent’s inaugural game in Vancouver, BC, on Friday, November 21.

And all those cheers for the Goldeneyes after they won Friday’s game? They were for Seattle, too. They were for women’s hockey, period. That was clear by all the little girls waving their “Hockey is for everyone” and “Everybody watches women’s sports” signs in the air.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t die-hard team loyalty when the puck is in play. At one point, in Friday’s game, Seattle’s Hannah Bilka ricocheted the puck into the net off Vancouver goalie Emerance Maschmeyer, and the Torrent players on the ice cheered. There was commotion. From one angle, it looked like it hit the post but didn’t cross the line. Referee Kyle Bauman waved it off. Torrent players pleaded for a review, and the crowd joined in the debate. Pockets of Seattle fans screamed “Good goal!” as the moment replayed on the Jumobotron. Swaths of Goldeneyes supporters replicated the ref’s “no goal” hand signals.

After several minutes of review—and several minutes of 15,000 fans pleading their case—referee Bauman walked back his initial call. It was a good goal. Goldeneyes fans booed and jeered. The Torrent had taken the lead. I heard another “Fuck you, Seattle!” ring out and chuckled. God, I love hockey.