A Chance to Dream

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Mulling over whether she made the right takeout order, Kati Tabin chows down in her Transcona basement while she listens to the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) inaugural draft playing on YouTube on September 18^th, 2023. She hears the PWHL Montreal presenter switch to French, which Tabin cannot understand.  

She’s got half her attention on the draft and the other on her food. Going into it, Tabin knew “there was a lot of talented girls” who could be chosen for the draft.  

While Tabin doesn’t understand most of what the speaker is saying, she does hear something she recognizes — her name. The Montreal team drafts Kati Tabin as a defender for the inaugural season of the PWHL.

Her mother, Heather Tabin, upstairs in a Zoom meeting, is interrupted by screams from the basement. Frightened, she runs down to see her daughter jumping up and down. 

The two celebrate for a moment until her mom needs to get back to work, and Tabin finishes her meal.  

Just seven months later, on April 20^th, 2024, Tabin wore No. 9 to play at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Quebec in front of 21,105 fans — the largest crowd ever to watch a women’s hockey game.  

Before being drafted to the PWHL, the Manitoban defender had played high-pressure games, but never in front of a crowd larger than 5,000 people.  

“I was shaking,” said Tabin.  

After years of trying to pursue a professional hockey career, Tabin was finally where she wanted to be. As a child, she struggled to see where her talent could go. 

As a kid, she’d played on the same team as Brett Howden, who now plays for the Vegas Golden Knights. 

“I remember all the parents and friends and everyone just kind of looked to Brett like ‘you’re going places,’ and I always remembered being kind of like jealous of that…” says Tabin. 

 “…because I thought, you know, as a female, I’m just as good as Brett.” 

The PWHL made women’s professional hockey a reality. For players like Tabin, this is a dream come true. For younger girls it means a powerful new platform for female athletic representation, something Tabin didn’t have as a young player. 

This lack of female representation in hockey when Tabin was growing up has inspired her to be open to the media now.  

“I just think it’s hopefully reaching little girls and little boys and having someone to look up to. I just wish I had someone like that [who] I could look up to,” says Tabin.  

Before the PWHL, there was no future in hockey for elite players like Tabin. A lack of livable salaries available for women’s hockey meant many high-level players quit the game.  

Eighteen months after graduating from Quinnipiac University, where Tabin was on a hockey scholarship, she quit the game.  

“There was no way anyone could make a living off of the wages per season,” says Tabin of the opportunities that were available pre-PWHL.  

In earlier leagues, the minimum salary per season was $2,000. Now, in the PWHL, the minimum salary is $35,000.  

This new league has changed the landscape of women pursuing athletic careers and has inspired many girls and women to participate in sports.  

True to its slogan, the PWHL is “not a moment, it’s a movement.” Having a professional league that pays players a reasonable wage is a shift that players like Tabin could only have dreamt of when they were growing up. Now, it’s a reality. 

Girlhood in Hockey 

Back in Manitoba in fall 2024, the muffled sounds of a hockey team and Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” seep through the walls of a changing room in the St. Eustache Arena. It’s 20 minutes before the U11 St. Eustache Jets girls’ team is due to hit the ice for practice, and no one can find the new goalie pads. Coach Alyssa Houde, host of Winnipeg Sports Talk and PWHL fan advisor, shuts off the music, triggering a chorus of disappointed cries from the girls. 

“Girls, when did we see them last?” says Houde.  

The chorus of responses from the girls are no help, so the team trudges on without the new goalie pads for this practice. To warm up, they do a passing and shooting drill.  

Aubrey De Vries, age nine, zips past pylons and scores on her teammate in net. Her bright red ponytail swishes away as if she’s done it a thousand times before.  

The goalie for this practice, Brielle Lachance, isn’t enjoying her turn in net. 

“Everybody keeps shooting the puck at me,” says Brielle with tears in her eyes.

The team is in a huddle on the ice. Houde seems to be figuring out how to tell Brielle the duties of a goalie include just that.  

“Who thinks Brielle is doing a good job in net?” says Houde.  

All hands immediately shoot up. Brielle waddles back to her net. The practice continues, and Houde watches “her girls” prepare for Sunday’s game against the Winkler Flyers. 

Tabin said she remembered how much she loved the game at that age, when she played in Oakbank, a community 15 km west of Winnipeg.  

“It was like a family,” says Tabin. Tabin played on a co-ed team until Grade 6 and recalls a deep bond with her teammates. 

“If I got hit, they would be ready to back me up,” says Tabin.  

Once hockey became more serious for Tabin, her family decided to move to Transcona so she could play on the Balmoral Hall Blazers high school hockey team in the Winnipeg Women’s High School Hockey League. 

“It was terrifying trying out for a new team,” says Tabin. 

Soon after making the team, she settled in with the women’s hockey community. She quickly bonded with fellow players Jordy Zacharias, Allison Sexton, and Jordyn Reimer, who became lifelong friends.

Tabin and Reimer instantly clicked. The two met through summer hockey and realized they were essentially “the same person,” says Tabin.

“She was a goofball who could make anyone laugh.”

Tabin wore wear No. 8, and Reimer wore wear No. 9. 

“I think I chose eight, so I could be close to her in the line up,” says Tabin. 

Ashley Lachance said her daughter Brielle has had a similar experience with the St. Eustache Jets. 

“It’s beyond the physical skills they develop; it’s the social and problem-solving skills that impress me,” says Ashley Lachance. 

During the 2024/2025 season, Houde not only focused on the skills on the ice, but also the girls’ personal development. During one of the team bonding sessions, she asked them, “Who’s your favourite hockey player?” 

The point of the exercise was to create some goals and outline role models for the girls.  

“My favourite hockey player is Corinne Schroeder,” said Aubrey De Vries, a U11 St. Eustache Jets player.

Schroeder is the goaltender for the New York Sirens, who was raised in Elm Creek, Man. She visited the St. Eustache Jets in September 2024. 

Ashley Lachance remembers how excited the girls were when the PWHL goalie visited.  

“They all kept saying ‘she’s coming today, she’s going to be here’ and they couldn’t stop talking about it.” 

Afterward, the New York Sirens became “their team,” and “more of the girls began to watch PWHL games,” says Lachance.  

At the time, the PWHL had only existed for a year, and Houde realized she had never heard an answer like that before. 

“When I was younger, I never would have said that, and it’s not because professional women hockey players didn’t exist. It’s because you couldn’t see them,” says Houde. 

“I didn’t know about them because I couldn’t click the cable TV button and see them on TV. I couldn’t Google them on the internet because I didn’t have a computer.”  

In 2009, when Houde was nine, she looked for a girls’ hockey team to join; there was none in St. Eustache. So, she went over to the next town; no girls hockey team there, so she joined the ringette team. 

This was not uncommon in rural areas in Manitoba in the early 2000s and before.

“Manitoba in many ways was behind other provinces for girls’ hockey,” says Sami Jo Small, a three-time Olympian and five-time world champion with Canada’s national women’s hockey team who was raised in Winnipeg. 

“I had to play on a boys’ team because there was no other option,” says Small, who grew up in the late ’80s and mid ’90s.  

Small is grateful she was at least allowed to play because her parents supported her. There was a time in Manitoba and across Canada when girls weren’t allowed to play at all.  

In 1981, 11-year-old Heather Kramble was suspended by the Transcona Minor Hockey Association because she was a girl playing on a boys’ hockey team. This also caused her coach, Jerry Hartwell, to be suspended by the Greater Winnipeg Minor Hockey Association.  

At the time, Hartwell told the Winnipeg Sun, “They have no right to suspend her. We’ve done nothing wrong in the way of registration and she’s a paid-up member of the club.” 

The disagreement was brought to the Winnipeg city council, which then went to the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association. Kramble’s case led to the birth of the women’s hockey council. Still, rules didn’t change across Canada until Justine Blainey in 1986 proved leagues were violating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by discriminating on the basis of sex.  

“Because of her, I was able to play,” says Small.  

Blainey began the movement by first writing to local newspapers. 

“It’s try out time again and I’m going to hear the same words again: ‘Yes, you’re good enough. We wish we could use you, but you’re a girl,’” says Blainey to her local Brampton, Ont. newspaper. 

After she gained the right to play in 1986, she still faced challenges. 

“Being a feminist was the f-word. I’d go to games, coffee would be thrown on me. If I had to go back or send my daughter through the same thing, I’m not sure I’d want to,” says Blainey to CBC in 2012. 

Even though Small was allowed to play, she still faced barriers and criticism. 

“I’ve been called every name in the book,” and “I never saw any other girls,” says Small. 

Once all-girls teams were available, some young women made the switch from co-ed. 

Hannah Robson played on a co-ed U14 team in the early 2010s in Onanole, Man. 

“We never really got passed the puck because people always thought we were the worst ones on the team,” she says.

Her mother, Trish Robson, would watch all her games. 

“You’d sit there and watch.  She’d be in a perfect spot or whatever. And they just wouldn’t pass it. So, she wouldn’t touch the puck,” says Robson.  

Without higher league development, recreational girls-only leagues remained underfunded or nonexistent outside the city before 2015. 

“When I was growing up, I know I would have loved to play hockey, but girls weren’t playing hockey. There were no girls’ teams,” says Robson, discussing growing up during the ’80s and ’90s.  

Tabin’s generation was able to experience the opportunity of an all-girls team, but she also played on a boys’ team, where she struggled with the change room situation. 

They would let her on the team, but “they would not budge on the change rooms.” 

She would have to change in another room — sometimes the coach’s room, another change room, or a storage room. 

“I hated being singled out,” says Tabin. “Later on, I understood why, but it still made me feel different at the time.” 

The inaugural season of the PWHL sparked a conversation online about the lack of women’s change rooms in hockey facilities across North America, and the feeling of being singled out that many girls are familiar with. 

TikTok user Gabi Gibson captioned her post “POV: You’re a girl who plays guys hockey and rarely have the opportunity to get dressed in a regular locker room. It’s either the bathroom, ref room, or a closet. Let’s normalize women’s locker rooms.”  

Challenges for girls and women in hockey span generations, whether it be accessibility, representation, inclusion, or just being allowed to play. Access to the game for women and girls has been incremental, but the PWHL sparked an explosion.  

Hockey Canada reported their highest percentage of women and girls ever registered for the 2023/2024 season, with 108,313 women and girls registered as players in Hockey Canada-sanctioned programs.  

Hockey Manitoba registered 5,381 athletes for girls/women sessions in 2024. 

“Increased visibility within women’s hockey at the National team level through the Rivalry Series and the Dream Gap Tour as well as at the professional level now with the PWHL is definitely a contributing factor behind the continued growth in the women’s game,” says Dustin Stewart, manager of operations at Hockey Manitoba.  

Although the conversation about the PWHL has centered around the representation for girls, it’s important to note the impact on boys as well.  

“For those boys at that period [around 2016], the only hockey they would have truly seen is the NHL or the AHL. So, I think we’re gonna see some shift in some of even the boys’ perspectives as the girls become more talked about, more seen, more visible,” says Robson.

Robson saw a change in attitudes when she surprised her daughter last year with PWHL playoff tickets. The game, which was called “Battle on Bay Street,” was between Toronto and Montreal and broke women’s hockey attendance records, with 19,285 fans watching the game at the Scotiabank Arena in downtown Toronto.

“There was about six rows up from the glass and all these little girls were holding signs and cheering for these people and there was a lot of young boys too. But it was just amazing to see that it was just as crazy a crowd as it would be if it was for an NHL game,” says Robson. 

Tabin, who was on the ice at the time, stood in amazement.  

“It was insane,” says Tabin. 

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A few years earlier, the now-PWHL athlete had quit the game entirely after graduating from Quinnipiac University in Connecticut with a master’s degree in business administration.  

“We were just about to graduate. And me and my teammate are saying like, OK, what now?” says Tabin. 

At the time, Tabin was one of 2,576 hockey players on women’s college teams in the USA with no place to go after their college careers ended. Between the National Collegiate Athletic Association and National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, there were 112 teams of female players facing the possible end of their hockey careers.  

“We had a bunch of guys from Quinnipiac who had been drafted to the NHL and that was kind of their next step. So, they had something to look forward to and we didn’t,” says Tabin.  

The Olympic and national teams provided female players the highest levels to work toward, but there are only 23 spots on those teams.  

“I want[ed] to play for Team Canada and that was kind of the only thing I had to look up to,” says Tabin.  

But even when you’re on the national team, opportunities to get paid are limited.  

“The women who are part of the national team have to fundraise for themselves to be there,” says Dustin Stewart from Hockey Manitoba.  

In comparison, the minimum salary for NHL players is over $700,000. For men, whether they are national team players or not has nothing to do with their earning power.  

Tabin got the chance to train with Canada’s national women’s team, but financially, it wasn’t feasible for her.  

“They wanted me to move to Montreal, Toronto, or Calgary and kind of train with those hubs. And I just kind of made the decision to quit hockey at the time. Like I just didn’t have the money,” says Tabin.  

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After graduating from college in 2020, Tabin found herself working as the marketing director for a campground in Wisconsin Dells, a summer tourist attraction two hours from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. If you had taken out a boat to see the views from the river and pulled into the marina, Tabin would have been helping you with your boat registration.  

“They had a new online reservation system that I kind of helped implement and get going for them,” says Tabin.  

She managed social media profiles and promoted boat and jet ski rentals. A year and half went by, and she felt like something was missing. 

“I missed hockey so much,” says Tabin. 

Tabin went back to Winnipeg and quickly realized she needed to play again. Mid-season she called the head coach of the Connecticut Whales of the former Professional Hockey Federation (PHF) and moved again to join the team midway through the season.  

“I slept on my friend’s couch for like two months while I was there, and then visa stuff didn’t just work out,” says Tabin.  

She was back to square one. But she wasn’t alone in her frustration. Jordy Zacharias and Jordyn Reimer, her childhood teammates and close friends, were experiencing the same struggle.  

“I was so frustrated,” said Zacharias. She had also tried out for the PHF and been chosen for the Calgary team. She had a lot to think about: How was she going to move to Calgary from Winnipeg? Where was she going to live? How was she going to pay her rent when the PHF would not be paying her? 

Around the same time, Jordyn Reimer and Tabin were seeing how they could possibly play in Europe together.  

Tabin said Reimer told her, “Why don’t you just go for it, you’re young?”  

The options for talented players were minimal at the time. Before the PWHL, Tabin said women pursuing hockey had three choices: play in a league that doesn’t pay you, play in a league that pays you a minimum salary of about $2,000 per season, or play in Europe for a similar amount.  

This financial reality forced dual careers: athletes needed to work to support their sport. 

Zacharias, Reimer, and Tabin’s experiences are not unique.  

The Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education at McGill University and the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Windsor studied this phenomenon of female hockey players.  

A study in the academic journal of Psychology of Sport and Exercise by Christiana Colizza, Gordon Bloom, and Todd Loughead focuses on role strain theory on female hockey players.  

The journal describes role strain as what happens “when the demands of one role (e.g., being a hockey player) conflicts with the demands of another (e.g., work related responsibilities), or when the demands of a single role become overwhelming.”  

The study showed that female hockey players with two careers experience financial instability, high performance expectations, and a pressure to pave the way for the next generation. 

“It was always in the back of my mind, but I kind of tried to trick myself and say, like no, you need to start working and get a real job,” says Tabin.  

Although these types of stressors can translate to other underfunded sports regardless of gender, there is a difference here. 

The study says, “female hockey players, in particular, face unique biases and cultural expectations that often add extra pressure and role strain as they must not only balance the dual demands of sport and vocational career, but also navigate a complex web of gender expectations and societal pressures.”  

Additionally, “these athletes often find themselves in the position of advocating for the legitimacy and recognition of women’s hockey.” 

Tabin said it created a difficult landscape to navigate when all she wanted to do was play hockey. 

“It was tough at the time since you know there was no money in women’s hockey, so you had a bunch of people in your ear saying, ‘When are you going to give up?’” says Tabin.  

With no clear path after returning to Winnipeg, Tabin began to work at the RINK Training Centre, a local hockey development facility in Oak Bluff. Unsure of what was next, Tabin’s life changed in a way she could have never seen coming. 

On May 1, 2022, Tabin called Reimer. There was no answer. Reimer always answered.  

She looked at her location on Find My Friends, and her phone was at Kildare Avenue West and Bond Street in Transcona, Winnipeg.

Still no response.  

Neighbours and friends began to talk about a big car crash in Transcona. Tabin’s mom told her that the victim was a 24-year-old female, and that’s when she knew.

Jordyn Reimer was killed after she was hit by a drunk driver travelling at 108 km in a 50 km zone.  

Afterwards, Tabin said, “I just kind of wanted to get the heck out of Winnipeg.”  

Soon after, the Toronto Six of the PHF called Tabin to come join them. While dealing with grief, Tabin was struck with an opportunity.  

“I haven’t wanted to talk about it. I think that’s an important part of kind of how I got here today and that’s also why I wear number nine. That was her number. She was always nine,” says Tabin. 

Tabin decided to join the Toronto team where she proudly wore number nine in honour of her friend and former teammate.  

Tabin still had to support herself, so she worked a part-time job at Yamaha Motor Canada. 

The Toronto Six went on to win the Isobel Cup in Arizona with a crowd of 5,000. After the celebration, Tabin was asked to hop on a call, and she was told the PHF was being bought out. 

“What the hell do I do now?” says Tabin. 

Tabin said she felt like she was back at square one. Two weeks later, the PWHL was announced.  

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After Tabin finished her first season with the PWHL, she came back to Winnipeg for the summer. At one of her training sessions at The RINK Training Centre she overheard a little boy asking: “Who is she? How many points does she have?” Later, as she walked down the hallway, she was stopped by some parents asking to get a picture for their daughter.  

“I never had that growing up like, I wish that if I walked into a gym, I would see a female NHL player,” says Tabin. 

Tabin’s presence at the rink — and on the big screen — is giving little girls and boys a chance to dream.

“And that’s just the beginning.”