Taking flight: The making of the PWHL's Vancouver Goldeneyes

As the airplane descended into British Columbia, Cara Gardner Morey peeked out of the window.

She saw the ocean bordered by mountain ranges, a world where beaches and skiing can exist close together. The newly minted Vancouver Goldeneyes general manager was back in her home country, but overlooking a landscape so foreign from the farmland she grew up seeing in Ontario’s Huron County.

“This is the most beautiful place I've ever seen,” she thought to herself.

It wasn’t Gardner Morey’s first trip to Vancouver. She’d been there before on a recruiting visit with Princeton University, where Gardner Morey was the head coach for seven seasons. But on that trip, she mostly saw the inside of rinks.

This visit was different. It was the next step in Gardner Morey’s role in bringing the PWHL to life on Canada’s west coast.

A few months earlier, just after the college hockey season ended, she’d received a call from the PWHL to gauge whether she might be interested in becoming general manager of a PWHL expansion team. At that time, the league hadn’t settled on where the expansion teams would be located, though she’d been told Vancouver and Seattle were finalists. The two cities were announced as expansion locations in April.

At first, Gardner Morey was confused about why they didn’t want her to coach the team rather than manage it. The more she researched the job, the more she realized it was quite similar to what she’d been doing at Princeton, a hockey program that’s produced the likes of Sarah Fillier and Claire Thompson under Gardner Morey's guidance.

“Building teams and creating culture is something I've been really passionate about,” she said. “I've been recruiting players at Princeton for 15 years, so trying to evaluate talent and figure out how to build the best team of players, and then how to structure the culture around them, is something that I felt was one of my strengths and something that I really love to do.”

Since taking the Vancouver job, Gardner Morey has stopped measuring time by days of the week or dates on a calendar. It’s now measured by milestones in her GM role. That first trip to Vancouver happened in June, some time between the PWHL’s expansion draft and entry draft.

When she landed, she met Tania Richards, who would be her co-pilot in bringing the new team to life. The Vancouver local is the team’s director of business operations. She was drawn to the job as a fan of the PWHL over its first two record-breaking seasons.

“To be bringing it to my hometown is something I can’t even express,” Richards said. “I’m so excited. I wear my branding in public with such pride. Everybody stops me and asks me questions, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to answer them.”

On the day Gardner Morey arrived in Vancouver, Richards was also a tour guide. She’d created a packed itinerary to introduce the general manager to the city where they’d be working together.

When they first met, the two women immediately clicked.

“I was wondering where she’d been all my life,” Richards said.

They’ve spent the last few months building the Goldeneyes piece by piece, creating a roster that many expect to contend for a Walter Cup in the team’s first season, and establishing an identity in the Vancouver area.

It will all come together on Nov. 21 at 7 p.m. PT/10 p.m. ET, when the team hosts its first game inside Pacific Coliseum against the Seattle Torrent, Vancouver's new cross-border rival.

Fans will see the Goldeneyes’ logo painted at centre ice in the Coliseum, where pro hockey is back after a 30-year absence. Vancouver is the first PWHL team to be the anchor tenant of an arena.

When the puck drops on that first game, it’ll be the start of a new chapter in a long history of women’s hockey in Vancouver, where the sport’s popularity is surging.

Two decades before the Vancouver Goldeneyes came to town, the Vancouver Griffins were the city’s pro women’s hockey team. Until 2003, they competed in the Canadian-based National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL), led by national team stars like American Cammi Granato and Canadian Nancy Drolet. They played at New Westminster's Queen's Park Arena.

The Griffins were replaced by the B.C. Breakers, a team that competed in the Western Women’s Hockey League (WWHL) until 2009.

A year later, Vancouver was where the world met a teenaged star from Quebec named Marie-Philip Poulin, who scored both Canadian goals en route to an Olympic gold medal.

It would take another 15 years for elite women’s hockey to come back to B.C. for good.

New York Sirens captain Micah Zandee-Hart was 13 when Poulin starred for Canada at the Vancouver Olympics. She’s from Saanichton on Vancouver Island, but grew up knowing she’d need to leave home to advance in hockey.

That happened when she was 15 and moved to B.C.’s Okanagan Valley to play hockey. In 2022, she became the first B.C.-born woman to make the Canadian women’s Olympic hockey team.

Her story is similar to many female hockey players who grew up in B.C. Leaving home felt inevitable, and growing in the sport almost always meant going east. It was a reality Zandee-Hart accepted as part of the sport she chose.

When Vancouver was announced as a PWHL expansion city, a few months after a sold-out game inside Rogers Arena during the league’s Takeover Tour, Zandee-Hart felt a bit emotional.

“Growing up on the west coast, I had always told myself that that was just never gonna be something that happened in my lifetime in hockey,” she told CBC Sports back in the spring.

Since Poulin starred on Vancouver ice more than 15 years ago, more girls and women in B.C have started playing hockey. Fewer than 6,800 females were registered to play in 2009-10, according to data published by Hockey Canada.

That grew to more than 8,800 last season, and B.C. Hockey expects that number will only continue to grow with the Goldeneyes in town.

“We've seen a huge spike,” said Brianna Davey, who is B.C. Hockey’s vice president of member services for minor and female hockey. “Last year was one of the highest years that we've had in women's and girls’ hockey ever in B.C. That in itself, obviously there are events occurring that are causing that spike because other girls want to be part of it.”

That’s shown up on the national team, too. Just four years after Zandee-Hart's milestone, she’s one of four B.C-based women in contention for the 2026 team. That list includes promising 18-year-old defender Chloe Primerano, who’s from North Vancouver.

Another five women from B.C. made Canada’s most recent national development team roster, meaning more west coast talent could be on the way to the senior team soon.

“The players have always been there, but finally, there’s eyes,” said Surrey’s Jenn Gardiner, who's working for a spot on the Olympic team, and will play for her hometown Goldeneyes this season. Before heading to Ohio State University in 2019, she played at home for the Greater Vancouver Comets.

“It’s pretty incredible for somebody like me at my age that is lucky and got a set of eyes, and got all these opportunities here today. But it’s pretty cool to hear and connect [with] girls that are a little bit older than me that just can’t even believe there’s a team in Vancouver. They would have killed for an opportunity like this to get to play at home.”

Gardiner was one of the first five players to sign with Vancouver, which built its foundation from players that other teams left unprotected.

The forward had a standout first professional season with the Montreal Victoire, putting up 18 points in 30 games while primarily playing on a line with Poulin and Laura Stacey. It earned Gardiner a nomination for the league’s rookie of the year award.

Beyond the tantalizing prospect of playing at home, Gardiner was drawn to the atmosphere Gardner Morey wanted to build in Vancouver.

“The organization off the ice [she] just wanted to craft into something that was the most fun environment,” Gardiner said. “Just a learning environment and amazing staff, with Cara, such an empowering woman, to kind of build out our team.”

With those first five slots, Gardner Morey also signed goaltender Emerance Maschmeyer, forward Sarah Nurse, and two defenders who’d just won a Walter Cup with the Minnesota Frost, Sophie Jaques and Claire Thompson.

It was a strong start for Gardner Morey, who’d started her job as GM only two days before she could officially sign players.

Ahead of the expansion draft, where Vancouver and Seattle had a chance to add more unprotected players, there were hours of mock drafts over Zoom and watching video for Gardner Morey and the staff she had to quickly pull together.

Inside the Goldeneyes’ war room on expansion draft night was the head scout and senior advisor to the general manager, Kathy Pippy, and Alex Jimenez, an MLB salary cap and draft strategist who’d been introduced to her through the league’s connection with Major League Baseball. The Mark Walter Group owns the MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers in addition to all eight PWHL teams.

“I know them as people, Kathy knows them as players and Alex is looking at them as data,” Gardner Morey said. “It was a really cool, I'd say complete, holistic kind of analysis on the players that we decided to bring in.”

Each existing team could only protect three players to start, followed by a fourth player once they’d surrendered two players to expansion. Lots of fans were upset as they watched Vancouver and Seattle pile up stacked rosters full of stars.

In the expansion draft, Gardner Morey used the first pick to take defender Ashton Bell, a smooth-skating puck mover who played a huge role in the Ottawa Charge’s run to the Walter Cup final.

The GM used the rest of the draft to bring in several players who could play up and down the lineup, and who could have higher ceilings as pros, including Izzy Daniel, Abby Boreen and Brooke McQuigge.

When free agency opened shortly after, several of the top names available chose Vancouver, including former Ottawa Charge forward Tereza Vanišová, hometown forward Hannah Miller, playoff performer Michela Cava and unheralded defender Mellissa Channell-Watkins.

Just before the entry draft, where Gardner Morey used her first-round pick to bring in Finnish national team veteran Michelle Karvinen, the team announced who would coach the first edition of the Goldeneyes: Brian Idalski.

With nearly 20 years of head coaching experience at the NCAA, pro and international levels, Idalski left his job with the St. Cloud State women’s hockey program to come to Vancouver. In the announcement, Gardner Morey described her new head coach as a “proven winner” who knows the sport and the players in it.

"What stands out in Brian's experience is his ability to build and transform the programs he is a part of, from his work in professional leagues, at the Olympics, and turning collegiate teams into nationally ranked contenders," she said in a release.

The players are at the heart of building a hockey team. But for Gardner Morey and Richards, there were plenty of other building blocks to put together behind the scenes to get the Goldeneyes ready for their debut.

One major piece came together when the team announced its branding earlier this month. 

The Goldeneyes’ name comes from the “fiercely protective common goldeneye,” a type of aquatic bird that’s common in the area and known for its distinctive yellow-hued eyes.

Those eyes are incorporated into the team’s logo, adding “hints of sunset gold and sky blue” to the team’s primary colours of “Pacific blue, coastal cream and earthy bronze.”

“Drawing inspiration from its speed, strength, and precision in flight, the Goldeneyes reflect Vancouver’s indomitable and unified spirit as they soar to new heights,” the league’s description of the logo says.

While there wasn’t enough time to get the logo stitched onto the jerseys players will wear in Vancouver’s first season, the branding will be everywhere inside the Pacific Coliseum, from the concourse to centre ice.

That brings us to perhaps the biggest job for the Goldeneyes ahead of puck drop: bringing the Pacific Coliseum back to life.

The arena has been home to a number of different teams over the years, including the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks until 1995. The last team to play there was the Western Hockey League’s Vancouver Giants, who left more than a decade ago.

“We’re trying to find a good balance of rejuvenating it, but also being really conscious of its history,” Richards said.

On the to-do list was building a gym from scratch, creating offices, upgrading the players’ areas and finding space for storage. Eventually, the team will use the Agrodome next door to the Coliseum as a full-time practice facility, something the NHL team in Vancouver doesn’t even have yet.

Richards has also been hard at work imagining how the Coliseum could look in game action. A new video board was a big part of the PWHL’s renovation. So was hiring the people who will make the show come alive, everyone from ticketing staff to the anthem singer.

Their vision will play out for the first time on Friday night, when the Pacific Coliseum chugs back to life with a new purpose.

Gardiner has thought about that moment, her first game for her hometown team inside the rink that feels more like a theatre. She’s imagined fans erupting as the team takes the ice.

“It’s going to be electric in there,” she said. “When you look up, the ceiling is really cool. It’s all just rafters and it has that kind of old-school barn feel to it, so you know it’s going to be loud, echoing and everything.”