Inside the 1st stop of the PWHL’s Takeover Tour, as the league eyes further expansion

Kids banged on the glass and cheered every drill and shot the pros made inside Scotiabank Centre, hoping to catch a player’s eye and maybe even a puck.

The Toronto Sceptres and Montréal Victoire opened their practices to the community in Halifax on Tuesday, to the delight of kids who got to skip school to watch their favourite players. One waved a sign saying they’d missed their school’s Christmas concert for the opportunity.

A couple hours later, Victoire players coached youth players in a clinic on the Scotiabank Centre ice, where the Victoire and Sceptres will play game one of the league’s 16-stop Takeover Tour on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. ET.

It’s all part of Halifax’s quest to be the next city to secure a PWHL franchise, as the league eyes rapid expansion.

Twelve is the magic number the eight-team league is looking to reach, and it could happen as soon as next season. The PWHL has teams in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver, Boston, Minnesota, Seattle and the New York area.

The Takeover Tour, which sees the league visit cities across North America to showcase PWHL play, is the “starting point” for considering a city for expansion, the league’s executive vice president of business operations, Amy Scheer, told a crowd of community and business leaders inside the Halifax Convention Centre on Wednesday morning.

Next is infrastructure, including the arena where players will compete and the facilities where they will train.

But there are plenty of other factors on the table, too, including travel, business opportunities and community engagement.

If the Takeover Tour is the starting point, Halifax has struck the right tone so far. Both Wednesday’s game and another Halifax game on Jan. 11 between the Boston Fleet and Ottawa Charge sold out.

“We actually had to hold tickets back from the presale to have tickets on sale for the public the next day,” Scheer told the crowd in Halifax.

Signs of the league's arrival were visible throughout downtown, including players' faces on lampposts on streets around the rink.

That tickets sold quickly didn't surprise Jayna Hefford, the league’s executive vice president of hockey operations. She won gold with Team Canada in Halifax when it hosted the 2004 world championship.

“This is a market that we had circled on the calendar as something that would be a huge success,” Hefford said.

Events East, the company that operates Scotiabank Centre, has been planning these games for months. In addition to open practices and a Halifax clinic, the group also organized a coaches’ panel and a pop-up clinic in Pictou County, where Sceptres captain Blayre Turnbull grew up.