That First Season

A breakaway is the most thrilling play in hockey. Separating from the pack, going one-on-one with the goalie, and firing a shot on net is exhilarating. It sets your heart racing and lifts the crowd out of their seats. There’s no feeling like it.

Even the word “breakaway” sends me back decades. I still remember the thrill of my first one: as a peewee with Abbeyview Taxi at Don Mills Arena, in Toronto, racing in alone only to see the puck dribble wide after colliding with the goalie. The next time was sweeter. Playing bantam for Thornhill United at the arena in Bradford, I broke free again — and this time the shot beat the buzzer with two seconds left.

Breaking away and finding open ice is also a powerful metaphor for the emotional high many women felt on Saturday, April 20, 2024, when the Professional Women’s Hockey League welcomed some 21,000 fans at Montreal’s Bell Centre, the sport’s equivalent of Mecca. The so‑called Duel at the Top, between Montreal and Toronto, was something to behold: women commentators, coaches, and players swelling with pride and tearing up with joy in North America’s largest hockey arena.

The sports journalist Karissa Donkin captures the moment well in the opening pages of Breakaway, an truly entertaining account of the creation of the PWHL and its improvisational first season. Donkin details how women athletes struggled for respect, decent pay, and stable franchises — presenting it all from the vantage point of the benches and the stands. She does so with clarity and emotional impact, offering both a chronicle of the league’s formation and a portrait of those who refused to accept second best.

This book arrives at a pivotal moment for women’s hockey, when promise and progress finally appear to be converging. Now in its third season, the PWHL has achieved what previous attempts could not: stability, visibility, and the attention of a growing fan base. Yet Breakaway reminds us that building a professional league requires steely resolve, political skill, and a willingness to learn from past failures. Donkin recreates individual games with a reporter’s eye and situates them within the broader evolution of women in professional sport.

Donkin revisits the #ForTheGame movement, the rise of the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association, and the demise of such organizations as the Canadian Women’s Hockey League. Playing for the love of the game did not pay the rent, and women weren’t compensated until the 2017–18 season, when they made “barely enough to cover the cost of their sticks.” While focused on Canadian developments, Donkin also shows that key labour battles were waged by American stars like Kendall Coyne Schofield and Hilary Knight, who staged a walkout to secure concessions from USA Hockey before the 2017 world championship in Michigan. (The United States would ultimately win gold after defeating Canada 3–2 in overtime.)

Donkin approaches the struggle through the eyes of players themselves, notably Liz Knox, a talented goaltender from Stouffville, Ontario, who worked as a roofer between games and hauled her own pads from rink to rink on weekends. The CWHL veteran endured “beer league” conditions; being handed a $3,500 invoice for goalie pads was outrageous when her total pay was $6,000 in 2017–18, the year her team won the CWHL championship. Knox describes a “dream gap”: the chasm between girls’ and boys’ hockey aspirations.

As a reporter, Donkin wisely concentrates on compelling human stories rather than organizational charts. Much of the latter half of the book follows Montreal’s marquee players, including Marie-Philip Poulin, Laura Stacey, Erin Ambrose, and Ann-Renée Desbiens. Poulin, Canada’s greatest women’s hockey star of her generation, looms large, yet Donkin situates her in a longer line of pioneers. Her vignettes underscore the inequities that long defined the women’s sport: low pay, limited facilities, precarious employment. Everything changed when the American billionaire Mark Walter stepped in, with the help of the tennis legend Billie Jean King, to launch the PWHL in January 2024.

Donkin’s proximity to the team now known as the Montréal Victoire proved advantageous. Rather than attempting even coverage of all six founding clubs — two more have joined the league this season — she opts for depth over breadth, revealing the personality of a franchise and a city embracing a new era. Montreal’s enthusiastic sellout crowds and early successes animate the story.

Despite her passion for the game, Donkin does not shy away from cataloguing the league’s growing pains: scrambling for suitable venues, last-minute hirings, missing merchandise, and the decision to launch without unique team names or logos. And she describes what I’d consider the league’s most glaring blunder: having PWHL New York play its home games in both Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Elmont, New York, before finding it a home in Newark, New Jersey.

Tearing up came easily when Donkin and fans watched the first game in the stands or on television. Seeing women represented on such a professional stage was moving, even for me. What distinguishes Breakaway is its personal portraits, common-sense logic, and even-handedness. Donkin brings this powerful story alive in vivid fashion without lapsing into preaching, cheerleading, or sentimentality.