Jayna Hefford once dominated women's hockey. Now she's changing the game – National Post

From an on-ice leader to a top boss of the wildly successful PWHL, Hefford is reshaping views about women in sports — and in the boardroom
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In an earlier life, Jayna Hefford was among the best clutch-goal scorers in the history of Canadian women’s hockey.
She scored one of the Canadian national women’s program’s most important goals, at the Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002. With just 20 seconds left in the second period, and Canada holding a 2-1 lead, Hefford sped in behind the U.S. defence, somehow managed to pull a high pass out of the air with her glove, then scored on her backhand to give the underdog Canadians a lead they would not relinquish.
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Canada’s 3-2 victory over the U.S. marked the first of four Olympic gold medals during Hefford’s national team tenure.
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The scrappy right-winger went on to score 157 goals for her country over 17 years. She played in three more Olympics, winning gold each time. There were eight more world championships after Salt Lake City: three golds and five silvers. Hefford had a hand in every one.
But ask the woman who is now executive vice-president of hockey operations for the wildly successful Professional Women’s Hockey League what stands out on her journey, and she recounts a more modest scene:
It was in 2025, a year or so into the PWHL’s existence, in the dressing room of a community hockey arena before a game in which her eldest daughter, then 11, was going to play. Hefford, who has two girls and a boy, witnessed a room-wide conversation that would never have happened in her own playing days.
“It was a bunch of 11-year-olds in a dressing room talking about who was playing tonight on TV and who was in first place,” Hefford recalls. And, no, they weren’t talking about the NHL — they were talking about the PWHL.
“That’s the kind of stuff that hits,” Hefford says. “You are impacting so many people on a broader scale and not only in hockey and not only in women’s sports, but societally.
“I talk a lot about my son and how he sees these powerful women all the time,” Hefford says. “He’s 10 now but when he’s 30 and he’s in a boardroom, he is going to think differently than this generation does. We are using hockey as an avenue to get there but we are trying to close this (gender) gap. I just think this is so much bigger than anything I did on the ice.”
Yet what Hefford, now 48, has accomplished is impressive. The PWHL, now entering its third season, has faced its share of challenges, but many say Hefford’s leadership style — the same style that drove her on-ice achievements — has been fundamental to its success.
Possessing a quiet confidence, is how I would best describe Jayna.
“I was obviously impressed with all her gold medals that she has shown to my kids — and that will never wear off — but I was equally impressed with her incredibly even-keeled, calm and communicative persona,” says Chris Burkett, who eventually became Hefford’s right hand in her PWHL dealings. “She really had a clear vision for what she wanted to build.”
As a top executive shaping the PWHL, Hefford has an all-encompassing role: from establishing and modifying league rules, to helping push its aggressive expansion plans, to setting up the expansion draft. Hefford’s superpower, as described by others, is her inner belief that what she and those around her set their minds to can and will get done.
“I think that quiet confidence is a massive presence of who she is and allows us all to follow her lead,” says one-time national team teammate Gina Kingsbury, general manager of the PWHL’s Toronto Sceptres.
This is a story about a woman whose name once dominated the sport of women’s hockey for what she could do with a puck. Only this chapter is about how she has taken that love for the sport and reinvented both herself and the way the women’s game will be played and consumed for decades to come.
It wasn’t long after Hefford’s fourth Olympics, representing Canada at Vancouver 2010, that the Kingston, Ont.-native started to get really serious about her post-playing future. Her on-ice career was winding down but she knew she wanted to stay in hockey in some capacity.
She had tried her hand at coaching, joining former national team teammate and good friend Vicky Sunohara behind the University of Toronto bench, but that didn’t scratch her itch. “I always knew coaching wasn’t what I wanted to do ultimately,” she says. “As much as I enjoyed the game, it just didn’t do it for me.”
A general manager gig might have been something she would have enjoyed but before the PWHL, the only top GM jobs were in the NHL and, as she correctly points out, women aren’t in those roles even today.
“So, I thought I would land in sport, but I didn’t know even if it would be hockey because there just weren’t that many opportunities,” she says.
As it turned out, creating those better opportunities for women in hockey would be the answer.
Having graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in phys-ed, Hefford opted for a business certificate through U of T Continuing Studies, and a business certification program through Queen’s University, supported by GamePlan and the Canadian Olympic Committee, perks of her long tenure with the national team. “It had some executive leadership stuff in it and private management, that sort of thing,” she says.
Meanwhile, the end of her playing career coincided with the expansion of her family. Two of her three children were born soon after she retired and Hefford decided to stay home for their early years.
Her absence from the hockey world didn’t last long. The Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL), one of the many women’s leagues that predated the PWHL, was looking for an interim commissioner, and representatives of that league reached out to Hefford in 2018.
“I always knew I wanted to help (grow the women’s game),” Hefford said. “I was still in that mindframe where I felt like I was a player a little bit, so how can I help make this better? I really had goals around the visibility of the players and building their profiles and I felt that was how we could help build the game.”
Those plans were quashed in less than a year; the CWHL ceased to exist by May 2019. A lack of sponsorship investment, of any consistent television coverage and even lukewarm fan interest were blamed for the shutdown.
There had been some positives. “Despite the fact that year was the year the league closed down, we actually had a pretty productive season in terms of the biggest all-star event we had ever had,” she says, a reference to the first nationally televised all-star event — with beefed-up sponsorship — which was played at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto.
“It wasn’t very long from the time I got in that position (as interim commissioner) that I realized the business structure itself didn’t work — you know, based on donations,” Hefford says. “We could barely get companies to give sponsorship dollars and I almost couldn’t blame them because we didn’t have a lot of assets to offer them.”
It wasn’t that the league had no talent, but that the talent wasn’t considered by sponsors to be known widely enough to use in national marketing campaigns beyond a handful of national team players. For all its success, the CWHL was still a weekend league with players working 9-to-5 jobs and fitting their hockey in around that.
“The idea that we called (the CWHL) professional hockey was really only because it was the best players,” Hefford admits. “Once I got in and saw what was really happening behind the scenes and had conversations with sponsors and partners, there was really nothing for them to invest in. As I learned, I think there were a few years over the course of that league that it almost shut down and somebody saved it with a cheque.”
Hefford did not enjoy being the one to break the news to the players that the league was finished, but there’s no question in her mind that the only way something better would come along was if the CWHL ceased to exist. Looking back, she says going through that time helped prepare her for what was to come.
“I would say it was like a crash course that I couldn’t pay for,” Hefford says. “A really difficult time but a lot of learning and I still had the hope that it would lead to something better.”
Better was coming, though not quickly.
After Hefford laid the CWHL to rest in 2019, she again stepped away from the game, but this absence would be just as short-lived.
A group of players led by Kendall Coyne Schofield, a star south of the border where she captains the U.S. national women’s team (and made hockey history in 2019 as the first woman to compete in the NHL all-star skills competition), was looking for a solid landing place. Schofield approached Billie Jean King, the former tennis star who has been a huge advocate for women’s sports since retiring from the game, for some advice.
“At the very beginning when the players didn’t know what to do, the first thing every sport does is call Billie Jean King, right?” Hefford says. “I mean, the same thing happened with women’s soccer.”
In her post-playing days, King has been at the forefront of the push for equality and closing the gender pay gap in sport but hasn’t limited her influence to sports circles. She is also an advocate of women in corporate leadership.
King’s first message to the group of hockey players looking to build the ultimate professional women’s league was to unionize. She told them they couldn’t succeed if they didn’t have a united voice. “‘You need one voice. You don’t have one voice, you won’t create change,’” Hefford recalls King telling the group.
Days later, the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association (PWHPA) was born. Not long after, in late 2019, Hefford’s phone started ringing.
“I got a call from Kendall and Ilana (Kloss, King’s longtime partner, who also leads Billie Jean King Enterprises),” Hefford says. “I had followed what the players were doing (since the shutdown of the CWHL) but I didn’t really have anything at all to do with it until that point. Then they asked if I would consider leading the day-to-day operations of the PWHPA.
“At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted to get back into that. I had just gone through that very difficult time (shutting down the CWHL). Why would I want to jump back in?”
Kloss recalls the conversation and the circumstances around it vividly. “We actually had someone else working for us and trying to help pull it together and it wasn’t going well, so I said to Kendall, ‘Who is the best person you know who could do this? Don’t worry about money. Don’t worry about anything. Just give me the best person.’
“Without any hesitation, she said Jayna Hefford, because she was the CWHL commissioner and she had played, so I said, ‘Give me her number.’
“I didn’t know (Hefford) at all and she hesitated at first,” Kloss says. “She said she had kids and I said, ‘Look, we want to pay you. We don’t want you to do this for nothing and you’re the right person, so tell me what you need.’”
Hefford really just needed one assurance.
“The one thing I asked was, ‘Do the players want me to do this?’” Hefford says. “They said, ‘Yes, the players selected you. They want you to do this,’ so that kind of changed my mind. As long as I had their trust, I felt I could keep going.”
The women had settled on a mission: a sustainable, truly professional league of their own with salaries and benefits, and a travel budget — in short, everything NHL players have ever had — four months before Hefford came on board. What they didn’t know was how to go about getting it. Fortunately, Hefford, with help from some influential new friends, would figure that out.
Professional purgatory might be a generous description of where the best female hockey players in the world found themselves in the four-and-a-half years between the end of the CWHL in May 2019 and the formation of the PWHL — which technically came in July 2023, when a collective bargaining agreement was negotiated with league owner Mark Walter. Until that agreement, some of the players worried about blindly trusting their union, the PWHPA, and its leader, Hefford, to successfully navigate the creation of a sustainable league.
Today, Laura Stacey is going into her third year with the Montreal Victoire but she recalls that time as full of questions and anxiety. “We didn’t know what was going on. It was really hard,” Stacey says.
Her own situation was further complicated when her national team role started to dwindle. Stacey knew she needed to play more consistently to work her way back up the depth chart on the national team, so all the talk of staying united within the PWHPA, while sounding good for the long-term of women’s hockey, wasn’t doing her short-term personal prospects any good. She needed to play right away but the union wasn’t giving players any indication of when that might be.
Hefford was well aware of this general concern among players.
“You would feel these ebbs and flows of the season where frustration was high — is this (new league with a deep-pocketed owner) ever going to happen? — and we had those same thoughts but there were times where you just had to reassure them that work was happening and the right connections were being made,” Hefford says.
“We recognized how difficult that was, let alone the other temptations.”
For example, some players were offered European contracts or the opportunity to play for the PHF, the lone remaining professional women’s league in North America (Walter would eventually buy it out when he formed the PWHL). “Were they going to continue to blindly follow us or was enough enough?” Hefford wondered.
“It was hard because you understood from the player’s perspective how much of a sacrifice it was. Many of them were in the prime of their career (and not playing) … A lot of it was just figuring out ways to keep people connected and united.”
Hefford started her new gig with the PWHPA in late 2019 with nothing but the basic goal of building a truly professional league for women.
“We had no money, no rinks, no jerseys or equipment and somehow we had to figure out a way to get these players to play (in the interim) and then what?”
“Then what” was COVID, arriving to throw another wrench into the plan for a professional league.
But it forced the group to take their future into their own hands.
“In the early days, we hoped that maybe somebody would step in,” Hefford says — perhaps the NHL or an established business that would commit to bankrolling a new women’s league. “There was a lot of swirling talk around that kind of stuff.”
The pandemic pause forced Hefford and the PWHPA to decide that they were done waiting for a white knight. A timely meeting with a Deloitte lawyer who had a keen interest in hockey, and women’s hockey in particular, changed the momentum drastically.
Through a mutual connection, Hefford was introduced to Chris Burkett, who was leading the legal practice for Deloitte in Canada. He had a hockey history of his own and, perhaps more importantly, two young daughters just getting into the sport. That was 2020.
“A friend had said, ‘I know this guy from Deloitte and maybe they can help you with some strategy’,” Hefford says.
Burkett, who played university hockey at Queen’s and was actively involved in coaching hockey in his local Leaside association, recalls that first meeting with Hefford and how he quickly concluded that she and her group were on the cusp of something very big — and he wanted to be a part of it.
“It was really apparent to me early on that she had a strategic vision for the type of league she wanted to build,” Burkett says. “She had been through the end of the CWHL, understood why that failed. She articulated clearly that the sport, the product and the athletes were all poised for a massive opportunity. It just needed the right partners (financial backers) that shared the values that she believed in.”
For Burkett, the idea of the league was impressive in large part because of the woman pitching it. “(Hefford) has got the strength of a lot of good leaders,” Burkett says. “She knows how to build a really good team around her and knows how to motivate people to work exceptionally hard with a shared mission and vision.
“She probably had this ability to do it as a leader with Team Canada (as a player) and now has that same ability in business — people will work exceptionally hard for her.”
Eventually, Burkett chose to walk away from the lofty heights at Deloitte to join Hefford full-time in the PWHL offices. The two have worked side by side since.
“What I believed I was looking at was a rocket ship that was just getting ready to take off,” Burkett says of that time after helping to draft the business plan that would land on the desk of Walter, the eventual league owner, then helping to negotiate the first collective bargaining agreement for the PWHPA against Walter’s legal team.
Stan Kasten and Royce Cohen, who worked on Walter’s behalf to get the PWHL up and running, came away so impressed with what they saw from Burkett that they offered him a role in the PWHL before he could apply for it.
Burkett knew very early on that he wanted in on this for the long-term. “Having spent a number of months working across from Stan Kasten negotiating the (players’ collective agreement) and having gotten to know Jayna and gotten to know the athletes that were at the bargaining table, like Kendall and Sarah Nurse, Brianne Jenner and Hilary Knight, my sense was, and what I said to my wife is, you don’t get more than one opportunity like this in a career.
We didn’t have a coach, a trainer, a GM, a venue, a broadcaster, nothing.
“To work with people of this quality and doing something that hopefully has a massive impact … But Jayna was central to that whole story. Without Jayna, my role in all of this doesn’t happen.”
Deloitte’s role in helping bring the PWHL to fruition can’t be overstated. It was through that association with Burkett and, by extension, Deloitte, that the players’ union, under Hefford’s leadership, took control of the process, spelling out exactly what it expected in order to create the league the players wanted.
“Chris brought us together with his people at Deloitte and it started with a strategy session of like, ‘What do you guys want? What does that look like? What would need to be true? What would be a (yearly) salary that the players would be OK with? We know you want more, but what’s the bare minimum?’ Really kind of figuring out what those aspirations were,” Hefford says.
That was around 2021. It would be another two years before that business plan found its way to Walter’s desk. How long Walter was in King’s and Kloss’s plans as the league’s eventual money-man, even Hefford isn’t really clear on.
“Billie and Ilana didn’t say anything about Mark for three years,” Hefford says. “I don’t know if they (King and Kloss) got to the point where they wanted us to actually go and do the work before (they would take it to Mark) or if their mindset changed once we did the work, but at some point in time they felt comfortable going to him and saying this might be something you want to do.”
Walter’s sports empire is gargantuan and continues to grow. Before he added the now eight-team PWHL to his empire, he owned controlling interest of the L.A. Dodgers baseball team, bought into the Los Angeles Sparks with Magic Johnson, and was a part-owner of Premier League soccer team Chelsea and the soon-to-debut Cadillac F1 team in auto racing. More recently, he bought controlling interest in the Los Angeles Lakers in the largest sale of a U.S. professional sports team ever.
For Hefford and her team, all of that was irrelevant. What they knew was they had found the backer they needed to finally give the best female hockey players in the world a truly professional league to call their own.
One would think that upon the settlement of a collective bargaining agreement in July 2023 covering the first eight seasons of the PWHL’s existence, Hefford’s work schedule as head of the players’ union might have lightened up a little.
Instead, the league hired her, and her team.
Kasten oversees a number of Walter’s sports holdings, including the Dodgers, of which he is a president and part-owner. With Walter’s decision to add the PWHL to his list of holdings, Kasten, who now sits on the PWHL’s board of governors, was tasked with hiring the right people to run the league.
“I had some decisions to make when we were putting this league together,” Kasten says. “Do I get a business person or do I get a sports person and hockey person to lead it? The fact that I was able to find all three and it be a woman and be a Hall of Fame player — that was too many good things for me to expect to happen but I found them all in Jayna.”
The collective bargaining period was not quick, but it allowed Kasten to get to know Hefford and her team better. One meeting in particular was pivotal in Kasten’s eventual decision to hire not just Hefford but the entire group that worked with her at the PWHPA.
“They had a game in Palm Springs when the PWHPA was still putting on their (Dream Gap) exhibition tour,” Kasten recalls. “I remember, though, it was a late scheduling thing, so there weren’t more than a couple of hundred people in the building but that’s not what I was looking at. What I was looking at was, ‘OK, they have this tour they have put on by themselves. This tour has sponsors. This tour has equipment. This tour has uniforms. This tour has staff and players and people who work together trying to produce something on their own.’”
It was about then that it dawned on Kasten that the answer to all his staffing questions was right in front of him.
“Stan, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Hire them,” Kasten recalls telling himself.
Hefford’s group at the time included Chelsea Purcell, Alexis Miller, Maria Tassone, Jana Arbour, Janice Donaldson and Ashley McLellan. Only Arbour has left the fold to return to a job with Bell. Everyone else remains PWHL-employed. There are countless others, too many to name, who gave up their time to help move women’s hockey forward in those years without a league.
Through those four-and-a-half years with the PWHPA, Hefford points out, she was the only member of that group drawing a salary. Purcell and Miller were basically working full-time volunteer hours for the PWHL while also holding down full-time jobs.
Upon the signing of the collective bargaining agreement in July 2023 and the formal birth of the PWHL, those hours would be paid — but they became even longer as the group met yet again, this time on an “all-company call” in August 2023 with Kasten, who told the handful of folks that then made up the company, “OK, we’re going to do this now, so over to you guys and we are going to drop a puck in four-and-a-half months.”
Burkett, who was about to leave Deloitte for good and join the PWHL full-time at Cohen and Kasten’s request, recalls the scenario.
“We didn’t have a coach, a trainer, a GM, a venue, a broadcaster, nothing. None of the infrastructure,” Burkett says. “And somehow because everybody was so committed to seeing it through and because Jayna knows how to pick people that are able to achieve things that most people would find impossible, we did.”
Those who built a functioning league in four-and-a-half months now wonder how they got it done. To call it a whirlwind would be an understatement.
About two months before the puck dropped, the league brought in Amy Scheer to head up the business side and allow Hefford to focus on the hockey side of the operation.
The two have worked in lockstep to keep the league moving forward ever since.
Scheer came to the PWHL from the NFL but brought with her close to 40 years of experience, almost exclusively on the business side of sports. She says she was only vaguely aware of Hefford’s hockey history when they met, but it didn’t take her long to catch up.
Their first meeting came on a Zoom call.
“It’s not often 37 or 38 years into your career, you are the less accomplished one on the call,” Scheer said, “but it was with her and Ilana Kloss and I was like the bum on the call. You get on the call and I don’t want to say it’s intimidating, but sure, you are on Zoom with this woman who is so accomplished in her life and her career, but the conversation was really comfortable.”
Scheer need not have worried about Hefford lording her playing days over her. Hefford rarely, if ever, references her own playing career.
Today, Scheer says she couldn’t be happier with the working relationship the two share. Just don’t call them co-commissioners.
“Stan (Kasten) will tell you he prides himself in not having a commissioner,” Scheer said. “So Jayna and I are equals in the organization chart and she oversees the hockey and does her hockey things and I stay out of it. On the business side, I run the business and I think we meet once a week and bring our leadership teams together and make sure we keep each other in the loop, talk things through, and be as good a teammate as we can for the other to make sure we are running this business collectively as a whole.
“We are united in a lot of the big things and it’s nice to be partners with someone who has made a living out of leading,” Scheer says. “Jayna has a very quiet confidence. She speaks when she has something to say. Otherwise, she will listen, formulate her opinions and contribute, not to be heard but when it matters.
“I’ve had the opportunity to work throughout my career with a lot of Hall of Famers and superstars and a lot of them come with egos and want to be heard and seen and feel important and she is none of those.”
Talk to Jayna Hefford’s former teammates, who knew her long before she ever thought about impacting the women’s game beyond playing, and they will tell you she is the same person today as when they played with her.
Kingsbury, GM of the Toronto Sceptres as well as GM of Canada’s women’s national hockey team, was a teammate of Hefford’s for two of her five Olympics, in 2006 and 2010, and all the national team camps in and around those eight years.
“Possessing a quiet confidence, is how I would best describe Jayna,” Kingsbury says. “Our whole team always looked to her in that way. Just her demeanour and the calmness to her. It could be a gold-medal game and in the locker room she always stayed status quo. She never went high, never went low and I think that is something I gravitated towards. I know I looked to her just in terms of giving me a little calmness in those pressure moments.”
Kingsbury continues to see that every time she crosses paths with Hefford.
“She is never the most outspoken one. She holds her cards very close in a good way …”
But it’s passion for the game as a whole that Kingsbury believes makes Hefford most effective in her current role. “She’s always been passionate about the game and that’s important because this (the PWHL) is a startup,” Kingsbury said. “You are building something from scratch. It’s long hours with a lot of challenges all the time. There’s a lot of people with high expectations and you only have so many hours in a day to get things done.
“Being able to manage the highs and the lows is important. You can get caught up prematurely celebrating that we’ve arrived. She doesn’t, and there’s a lot of times it’s discouraging, too. Like, I’m sure she heard a million times there was not a chance she would be able to drop the puck on Jan. 1 that first year but she didn’t let that weigh her down. I think that’s her greatest quality as a leader. She stays the course and has the ability to be controlled in the highs and the lows.”
You don’t have to look too hard to see the stamp Hefford has put on the league she oversees. From the wildly popular Jailbreak rule, which allows teams to break a teammate out of the penalty box if they can score a short-handed goal, to the adoption of the Gold Plan that ensures teams playing out the string are still motivated to win, Hefford has shown a willingness to be creative even within the traditional — some would say stodgy — rules of the game of hockey.
Hefford is quick to firmly establish where she and the league stand with regard to even small changes to the game, however.
“We don’t want to be a league that is changing things just to change things,” she says. “We only want to do it if we think it actually adds to the product and the fan experience. That’s what we are negotiating now. Is there anything that makes it better, or are we good where we are? I think we’re really good where we’re at and we’ll see after that.”
Hefford admits the Jailbreak, which has been met with almost universal approval, even from hockey traditionalists, is her favourite tweak.
“First person I talked to about that was Jeff Marek,” Hefford says of the well-known hockey podcaster. “Jeff used to talk about this a lot on his podcast and I really liked it, so I brought it to our team and they really liked it.
“I think from leadership down, we just have this culture of let’s think outside the box, let’s be as creative as we can be. We are a single entity league, so we don’t have to answer to anyone. Nothing has to be voted on. We go to leadership and get approvals and that’s it. We all love the game so much that none of us want to change it substantially but if we can find ways to be more engaging for fans, or more interesting, then I think that’s a good thing.”
The PWHL is far from a finished product, but what Hefford has achieved will leave an indelible mark on the game regardless of how many more years she remains in her role.
The league is on solid footing and expanding — from six teams in Season 1 to eight in the 2025-26 season — and perhaps by as many as four more teams at the end of this year, if some reports are to be believed.
Which does not mean it’s been smooth sailing. The initial rush to launch meant the teams had no names for their first season. Yet it worked out: the league’s name recognition spiked every time a team was mentioned: PWHL Toronto, PWHL Montreal, PWHL Ottawa and so on.
The merchandise rollout was a bit of a mess, too. And while attendance has been solid as a league, both the Boston and, to a greater degree, New York franchises have struggled to keep pace.
The Ottawa Charge are embroiled in a fight with the city over upgrades to the arena at the Lansdowne sports facility arena, which it shares with the OHL’s Ottawa 67’s. Fewer seats would suit the OHL tenant but would not meet the demand for seats that the Charge enjoys.
There is no shortage of cities, however, that are willing and eager to become that next PWHL hub. Season 3 begins Nov. 21 with no let-up in the popularity of the women’s game.
Asked if it’s possible to compare the success Hefford enjoyed as a member of Canada’s national team for more than 17 years (seven world championship golds, four Olympic golds, Hockey Hall of Fame induction) to the string of successes she and the PWHL as a whole have enjoyed since she helped bring it into existence, she says, “It’s hard to compare, obviously. Everything that happened in my playing career was amazing and I feel so fortunate that I had the opportunities I did and got to live out the longevity of my career and decide on my terms when I was done. I really feel lucky about that. The wins are amazing and those are memories that will never go away, of course.
“But his whole (PWHL) thing is so much bigger,” Hefford says. “I don’t even really like to compare it. I mean an Olympic medal is amazing. A game-winning goal is amazing, but when I see, like, a young girl walking down the street wearing a Toronto Sceptres jersey …”
Hefford doesn’t finish the statement. She doesn’t have to. The meaning is clear. Getting women’s hockey to a spot she always believed it deserved will be her legacy.
mganter@postmedia.com
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