Growing up in Louisiana, hockey was never part of the conversation. Friday nights meant college football. Spring meant baseball. Sometimes NASCAR filled the weekends. Ice rinks and slap shots felt worlds away. That changed after watching the U.S. women’s hockey team defeat Canada 2-1 in overtime to win gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics. It wasn’t just the victory that stood out, it was the intensity. The speed. The pressure of overtime in one of the biggest rivalries in international sports. But it sparked a different kind of question: how could a team that had medaled in every Winter Olympics since 1998 still feel invisible to someone like me?
A little research revealed just how established the U.S. women’s program truly is. Women’s ice hockey made its Olympic debut in 1998, and since then the United States has medaled in every Winter Games. The team won gold in 1998, 2018, and now 2026. They earned silver in 2002, 2010, 2014 and 2022, and bronze in 2006. That level of consistency reflects not just talent, but long-term success.
The professional side of the sport has grown significantly as well. The first professional women’s hockey league in North America, the National Women’s Hockey League, was founded in 2015. In 2023, the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) was established to unify elite talent across the United States and Canada, marking a major step forward in visibility, stability and investment in the women’s game.
Then there are the stats, and this is where perception begins to shift.
In the 2024-2025 PWHL regular season, Marie-Phillip Poulin led the league with 19 goals in a 30-game season. Tereza Vanisova and Hilary Knight followed with 15 goals each. In the NHL, the top scorer recorded 52 goals. At first glance, that number seems dramatically higher. But context matters. The NHL regular season consists of 82 games, compared to just 30 in the PWHL. When broken down by scoring rate, the gap nearly disappears. Poulin averaged about 0.63 goals per game. The NHL’s top scorer averaged about 0.64 goals per game. That difference, roughly one-thousandth of a goal per game, is statistically almost identical. The total goals differ because of season length, not scoring ability.
Even the Olympic gold medal games reflected that parallel. The women’s final ended in a 2-1 overtime victory against Canada. The men’s gold medal game, also against Canada, ended the same way: 2-1 in overtime. Two games. Same scores. Same pressure.
What began as a casual curiosity became a realization about perception and visibility. Women's hockey has long been competitive, disciplined and elite, it simply hasn’t always received the same attention. The statistics show near-identical scoring rates. The Olympic stage shows equal pressure and performance. The overtime finishes show equal intensity. The difference is not ability, but exposure. As professional leagues expand and Olympic moments draw new audiences, the narrative surrounding women’s hockey is shifting, not because the sport suddenly improved, but because more people are finally watching. And as the growing popularity of the “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports” movement (a movement coined by Togethxr, a media and commerce company founded by four of the world’s greatest athletes: Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Simone Manuel and Sue Bird) suggests, the audience has always been there, now the spotlight is finally catching up.
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