Each the Clarkson and the Isobel Cups have storied histories in Canadian hockey. The creation of the PWHL is an opportunity to honour them.
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As pleasure builds across the January debut of North America’s new Skilled Ladies’s Hockey League — and its six groups in Ottawa, Toronto, Minnesota, Boston, Montreal and New York lace up at their first training-camp skates — a key query lingers: What prize will they be enjoying for?
League spokesman Paul Krotz informed the Citizen: “There haven’t been any choices made but relating to PWHL trophies.”
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That’s not the one unknown. The golf equipment’ rosters gained’t be finalized for weeks. And the groups’ names haven’t been revealed but.
However there may be one field PWHL executives might tick in the event that they wish to honour the historic roots of ladies’s hockey and the 2 important skilled predecessor leagues — the Canadian Ladies’s Hockey League and the Premier Hockey Federation — that made the start of the PWHL doable.
PWHL execs ought to negotiate the rights to award the PHF’s Isobel Cup to the brand new league’s high common season workforce and the CWHL’s Clarkson Cup to the PWHL’s playoff champion.
Every trophy has a venerable historical past linked to the origins of the ladies’s sport and to the laudable achievements of the 2 earlier leagues that helped convey ladies’s professional hockey to this landmark second.
The brand new league rose from the ashes of the PHF, which folded in June after awarding its final Isobel Cup (the seventh since 2016, the primary to a Canadian workforce) to the 2023 champions Toronto Six.
The pioneering CWHL had an earlier and longer run than the PHF, awarding its Clarkson Cup 11 instances from 2009 to 2019 earlier than the league disbanded. As with the Isobel Cup, each Canadian- and American-based champs took residence the {hardware}: groups from Minnesota, Boston, Montreal and Calgary are amongst these honoured within the annals of Clarkson Cup historical past.
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The Clarkson and Isobel cups share vital connections to Ottawa’s Rideau Corridor, the official residence of Canada’s governor basic and a widely known incubator of the emergent sport of ice hockey (for each women and men) within the late nineteenth century.
It was additionally, in fact, the place the place Lord Stanley of Preston, Canada’s vice-regal consultant from 1888 to 1893, lived when he donated a sure silver bowl that ultimately turned the world-famous championship trophy of the Nationwide Hockey League.
In reality, the “Isobel” honoured within the identify of the PHF trophy — formally the Woman Isobel Gathorne-Hardy Cup — was Lord Stanley’s daughter, an early hockey fanatic who was pictured chasing a puck at Rideau Corridor within the oldest recognized {photograph} of ladies enjoying the sport.
The Clarkson Cup is called for — and was commissioned by — Adrienne Clarkson, the previous broadcaster who occupied Rideau Corridor as Canada’s governor basic from 1999 to 2005.
She introduced her namesake cup in July 2006 to Crew Canada captain Cassie Campbell in recognition of the workforce’s Olympic gold that yr. However Clarkson made it clear that she meant or not it’s awarded to one of the best workforce on this planet’s finest ladies’s hockey league.
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There have been as soon as plans to award the cup to the champs of the previous Nationwide Ladies’s Hockey League (1999-2007), however a two-year authorized dispute over the cup’s possession meant it was by no means formally introduced earlier than that league folded. The CWHL shaped two years later and its groups — together with golf equipment, for a short time, from the previous Western Ladies’s Hockey League (2004-2011) — competed for the Clarkson Cup for greater than a decade.
It’s price noting that the PWHL partly owes its existence to the Skilled Ladies’s Hockey Gamers’ Affiliation, which grew out of the collapsed CWHL and arranged high-level competitions lately with a trophy of its personal: the Secret Cup, donated by the eponymous deodorant firm.
It’s a positive agency with many fine-smelling merchandise, and hats off for supporting elite ladies’s hockey with a fine-looking prize. However PWHL: please don’t go there.
The Isobel and Clarkson cups characterize continuity within the development of ladies’s skilled hockey on the highest stage and are in search of a renewed function. They’re deserving trophies that might convey wealthy legacies to what guarantees to be the world’s finest ladies’s professional hockey league for a few years to return.
Randy Boswell is a journalism professor at Carleton College and a hockey fanatic. In February 2005, he wrote a Citizen column urging then-governor basic Adrienne Clarkson to lend her identify to a championship trophy for elite ladies’s hockey — which she introduced in September 2005 that she would do.
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