Why Not San Jose? A 2019 All-Star Race Started It
Sharks Sports & Entertainment president Jonathan Becher traces PWHL San Jose back to Kendall Coyne Schofield's fastest-skater run at SAP Center.
Jonathan Becher's version of how PWHL San Jose came to exist starts with a lap around SAP Center in 2019.
Kendall Coyne Schofield had been added to the fastest-skater competition at the NHL All-Star Game after Nathan MacKinnon withdrew. She didn't win. The building didn't care.
"She was clearly fast, she was basically as fast as McDavid," the president of Sharks Sports & Entertainment told The Hockey News. "The applause from the crowd was the loudest I had heard in that building in quite some time. It was Sharks loud, it was playoff hockey loud."
From the owners' suite, Becher started asking why the Sharks didn't have a women's team. In 2019 there was no obvious answer. The PWHL didn't exist yet, and pro women's hockey was split between two leagues. He researched the Bay Area's women's hockey history anyway and found it ran deeper than he expected, back to teams in Oakland and San Francisco, including Minerva playing its first game in 1916.
Sharks Sports & Entertainment put San Jose forward in an earlier round of PWHL expansion and lost out. "We tried in the previous expansion, but I get why they were still a Northeast focused franchise," Becher said. When the league announced four more teams, he liked the odds: "When I heard there were going to be four teams this time, I was pretty sure we were going to get an expansion team."
PWHL San Jose has its own ownership and operation. The Sharks' job was the unglamorous part: finding SAP Center dates amid a roughly half-billion-dollar arena renovation and making room for a third professional hockey operation at Sharks Ice, where the Sharks and AHL's San Jose Barracuda already had facilities. Tech CU Arena was considered as a temporary home, but the plan was always SAP Center. At Sharks Ice, a potential locker room location was identified on the second floor behind the Barracuda's space.
"The hardest part was trying to figure out where we were going to put them," Becher said.
"From meeting two I knew it was going to happen," Becher said. "It was just a matter of getting the details right."
