Ted Leonsis would like to bring a women’s hockey team to DC.
The Monumental Sports & Entertainment majority owner made the revelation in an interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin as the two chatted about the rise of women’s sports at the Global Sports Leadership Conference on Kiawah Island.
“What I’d like to do is make Washington, DC the capital of women’s professional sports,” Leonsis said on Squawk Box. “I could see one day us replicating what we’ve done at Monumental and we could have a women’s hockey team, we could have women’s baseball teams, we could have women’s volleyball teams. I think the whole platform [of women’s sports] is getting ready to explode.”
While DC has not landed a team yet, the Capitals have hosted multiple PWHPA (Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association) events. In 2022, MedStar Capitals Iceplex, the team’s practice facility, housed a stop on the PWHPA’s Dream Gap tour. A year later, they were hosts again as the PWHPA Showcase came to town, bringing big names like Amanda Kessel, Hilary Knight, Sarah Nurse, and Marie-Philip Poulin onto Capitals’ ice.
The lone operating North American women’s professional hockey league currently, the PWHL, is made up of just six teams after kicking off its inaugural season in January. The league has so far been a success and the notion of expansion has been talked about as “inevitable” as recently as last month.
A lot of that chatter came after the PWHL’s Toronto and Montreal franchises set a new women’s hockey attendance record of 19,285 when they played at the Maple Leafs’ Scotiabank Arena in February.
PWHL teams have played neutral site games in both Pittsburgh and Detroit this season as part of what has been dubbed “Takeover Weekend.” More games in other to-be-determined markets are expected to be announced for next season.
Leonsis’ comments aired just a day after Iowa and LSU went head-to-head in the women’s NCAA basketball tournament and averaged 12.3 million viewers for ESPN, the largest TV audience ever for a women’s basketball game in the US.
“It’s certainly the growth stock right now – women’s sports,” Leonsis said. “We’ve been an advocate, we’re one of the longest-tenured WNBA owners. We own a piece of the WNBA by owning an NBA team and then by owning the WNBA team itself. Then we participated in the investment at the league level, so we really believe.”
As several iterations of a professional women’s hockey league have evolved over the past decade, the nation’s capital has never hosted a team of its own. The city, transformed into a true hockey market by Alex Ovechkin, could be a fantastic landing spot for a franchise.
