Reagan Carey is bringing her Olympic gold-medal-winning resume to guide the Premier Hockey Federation via a crucial offseason of growth and the looming risk of competing for ability with a 2d North American professional girls’s hockey league.
The PHF introduced Tuesday that the previous head of USA Hockey’s girls’s methods is its new commissioner heading into it 8th season. Carey replaces Tyler Tumminia, who stepped down in March after two seasons wherein the previous Nationwide Ladies’s Hockey League rebranded itself and remodeled its possession style.
Carey is well-versed within the demanding situations girls’s hockey has confronted to find its footing in North The us. Her eight-year stint at USA Hockey ended with the ladies’s nationwide crew successful gold on the 2018 Iciness Video games.
“My house of revel in and evolved experience is in reality rising issues and doing it briefly and taking issues that may wish some construction and group and center of attention to in reality power issues ahead and seize some wins,” Carey advised The Related Press.
“So I’m excited to grasp we’ve were given numerous issues transferring round right here and numerous alternatives to in reality proceed the sure momentum the PHF put ahead closing season,” she added. “And that’s to show what we’re right here to do, which is to be the most efficient league we will be.”
Carey’s arrival comes with the six-team PHF getting ready so as to add two growth franchises, one in Montreal and every other in a yet-to-be introduced U.S. location. The league’s board of governors also are dedicated to expanding every crew’s wage cap from $300,000 to $750,000 as a part of a three-year, $25 million money inflow.
The problem comes to the PHF’s ongoing rift with the Skilled Ladies’s Hockey Gamers’ Affiliation, which has intensified talks with NHL groups and its company sponsors to release its personal league inside the subsequent yr. The PWHPA, shaped in 2019, is made up of American and Canadian nationwide crew contributors who’ve balked at enjoying for the PHF.
The 2 aspects’ newest bid to enroll in forces ended unexpectedly two weeks in the past when the PWHPA’s board of governors voted to finish discussions after conserving only one assembly on the NHL’s request.
Carey was once diplomatic in regards to the PWHPA, announcing she considers any individual in the hunt for to advance the ladies’s sport as being “a teammate” and that she can have “an open-door coverage” of collaboration.
“Without reference to the entity you constitute, I’m a large believer in a single candle doesn’t lose its flame via lights every other,” Carey stated.
“And I feel that’s the place we’re with the location that growing choices for avid gamers is excellent for everybody. It best betters the game,” she stated. “I make stronger the entire folks which might be doing numerous paintings to advance skilled girls’s ice hockey, together with the avid gamers which might be running with the PW.”
Carey was once decided on via a six-person seek committee, which incorporated Susie Piotrkowski, head of ladies’s crew sports activities at Octagon sports activities company, a PHF spouse.
“Hiring the appropriate have compatibility for the long-term enlargement of the league was once crucial,” Piotrkowski stated in a PHF free up. “Reagan Carey differentiated herself now not best because of her hockey revel in however via her deep working out of the ladies’s sports activities panorama.”
All through her tenure at USA Hockey, Carey oversaw a girls’s program that received six international championships and 4 Underneath-18 girls’s championships. She was once additionally serious about negotiations to finish the U.S. nationwide crew’s risk to boycott the 2017 international championship on house soil, which resulted in avid gamers getting higher pay and extra equitable remedy.
“I feel, in the long run, it was once an ideal pivotal second for girls’s hockey, and satisfied to be part of that have,” Carey stated. “USA Hockey unquestionably had the chance to pay attention and create a greater construction for girls’s hockey, higher assets. And in the long run the ones avid gamers that led that price and everyone ended up the simpler for it.”
Whilst at USA Hockey, Carey was once additionally keenly conscious about the start-up troubles the NWHL continued, together with the league slashing participant salaries via greater than 50% all over its 2d season.
“The PHF was once imperfect, unquestionably. It had its misfires, and its hindrances, however on the identical time, it in reality stuffed the desire that was once current,” Carey stated.
“However I additionally like to have a look at the place we’re advancing and the way a ways we’ve come,” she added. “We’re now not going to get the entirety easiest transferring ahead both. I’ll be the primary to acknowledge that. However I feel it’s about how we proceed to adapt and the way we maintain the ones scenarios and ensuring avid gamers are very transparent of what we’re ready to ship and that we ship on that.”
Carey prior to now labored for the NHL’s Atlanta Thrashers and NBA’a Atlanta Hawks in sports activities construction, efficiency and advertising roles. Upon leaving USA Hockey, she returned to her local Maine the place she was once a member of the Maine Women & Ladies in Sports activities Committee, whilst additionally spending time as a sports activities and trade guide.
