Girls hockey in Ontario is at an all-time high — and the PWHL is helping

For Jennifer Soulliere and other girls who wanted to play hockey in the '90s, it often meant joining the boys — and getting dressed alone, isolated from the rest of the team.

“There would be maybe four or five girls in Essex County playing in boys hockey,” Soulliere says. “Of course we all knew each other, and then ended up playing together and moving forward with our hockey careers.”

Soulliere, a LaSalle, Ont., native whose last name was Hitchcock during her hockey career, went on to make her mark as a skilled goal-scorer in the NCAA and then in a European professional league.

As players like Soulliere and Meghan Agosta paved the way for local girls wanting to try the male-dominated game, the sport exploded in Windsor-Essex and beyond. 

Thirty years ago, the total number of players registered with the Ontario Women’s Hockey Association (OWHA), which includes girls and young women, was 9,626 — a record at the time.

Since then, registrations have hit a new all-time high: 41,019 players in the 2024-2025 season, according to fresh data from the OWHA. In Windsor and Essex County, registration hit 2,245 last season — the highest it's been in at least 12 years, and very likely ever (OWHA did not have local data available for seasons prior to 2012).

The sport’s surging popularity among girls comes as the Professional Women's Hockey League takes off in cities across the continent, giving the women’s game unprecedented visibility. 

“There's no more exciting time than now for girls hockey,” says Candice Chevalier, the head coach of the under-15 AA Windsor Wildcats. “It's absolutely exploding, especially with the PWHL coming up.” 

For Chevalier and other girls who started playing in the early 2000s, watching elite women’s hockey meant waiting every four years for the Olympics.

“So to see it through these girls’ lens is just incredible, where it’s just part of their everyday life, where they can throw on the TV and see professional women at a high level playing,” she said. 

The surge is also happening within a broader boom in women’s professional sports driven in part by greater acceptance and respect for the athletes.

“It's OK for girls to play hockey. It's OK for girls to wrestle or play more physical sports, where it just wasn't the norm before,” says Bill Atkinson, Soulliere’s former coach and now president of the South County Predators Girls Hockey Association.

“Everybody's considered equal, so you get equal opportunity,” he said. “And I just think it's the people 30 years ago, 40 years ago, really pushing for equality. It's finally happened. It's taken this long, but it's finally happened.”

For Soulliere’s four-year-old daughter, that means having a host of girls programs and teams to choose from now that she wants to play.