Canada’s national women’s hockey team has won a dozen IIHF Women’s World Championship titles, but the sting of losing the 2023 gold-medal final to the rival United States still lingers with Blayre Turnbull.
“When you play for Team Canada, you don’t go to world championships and leave happy with a silver medal,” the veteran national team forward from Stellarton said in a recent interview. “For us, it is a bit of motivation to make sure we get back on top. We feel we have the right group to do it. We’re excited to get back and looking forward to trying to win a gold medal.”
Canada gets another crack at winning lucky No. 13 with the 10-nation, 12-day international tournament opening Wednesday in Utica, N.Y. Twenty players, including Turnbull, return from last year’s silver medalists.
Team Canada opens the tournament against Finland on Thursday. The Canadians will then play Switzerland on April 5 and Czechia on April 7 before closing out the preliminary round against the defending champs on April 8. Canada will play a pre-tournament game against Finland on Saturday in Kingston, Ont.
All but four players on the Canadian roster ply their trade in the Professional Women’s Hockey League which is taking a three-week sabbatical during the women’s worlds.
“It will be hard taking a three-week long break,” said Turnbull, a national team mainstay since 2014 and captain of Toronto’s PWHL team.
“The good thing about our group in Toronto is that we have connected really well since we got together in November. Everything is in our control.”
AIR OF FAMILIARITY
Toronto – which will play in the first PWHL game after the pause, visiting Boston on April 18 – has an air of national team familiarity on its roster and it’s not by chance.
When Gina Kingsbury, former vice president of hockey operations at Hockey Canada and general manager of Canada’s women’s team since 2018, was tabbed to be Toronto’s GM, her first order of business was to hire Spryfield’s Troy Ryan as head coach.
The 52-year-old Ryan guided Canada to a gold medal at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and will remain as head coach of the Canadian national team through the 2026 Olympiad in Milan.
Toronto’s first three signings were Turnbull, forward Sarah Nurse and blue-liner Renata Fast, each a national team veteran. In all, six from the national team (forwards Natalie Spooner and Emma Maltais and blue-liner Jocelyne Larocque are the others) play for Toronto.
Turnbull jumped at the chance to play for Ryan in the professional ranks.
“We’ve known each other for a very, very long time,” said Turnbull, who was handpicked by Ryan to be Toronto’s first captain. “He’s coached me with the national team, he’s coached me when things were going really poorly and he’s coached me when things have gone really well. I feel like as a coach and a player we’ve been through a lot together and we’ve gone on to know each other quite well.
“We have a good relationship where we both trust each other and both strive for the same goals, which is having our team to be successful. We both know what goes in to make a successful team. It’s not just winning on the ice but winning off the ice and making sure that all the players and staff know that. Tory and I really click on that.”
BLUENOSE FLAVOUR
There’s a real Bluenose flavour in Toronto, with Ryan behind the bench, Turnbull upfront, Yarmouth blue-liner Allie Munroe on defence and Amherst’s Carly Jackson in goal. Munroe and Jackson both played for Ryan in 2015 when he coached Team Nova Scotia at the Canada Games.
Having Nova Scotians in the pro game, Turnbull said, could inspire more girls in this province to take up the sport.
“I was part of the generation which didn’t have girls’ hockey teams to play for when I was growing up,” Turnbull recalled. “Now look at the players that are playing in the league. I’m sure as the league grows, the hockey back home will continue to get stronger and there’ll be more Nova Scotians, more Maritimers who are a part of this league in the future.”
Led by its Nova Scotian contingent and Spooner, a national team veteran who leads the PWHL with 15 goals and 20 points, Toronto sits atop the league standings with 13 wins and 36 points, one ahead of second-place Minnesota.
The team went on an 11-game winning streak before losing 5-3 to Ottawa on Saturday, Toronto’s final game before the break for the women’s worlds.
Quite a reversal from an inauspicious start to the season when Toronto won just two of its first seven games.
“It’s been really cool how our team stuck together after the start that we had where we weren’t getting the wins that we wanted,” Turnbull said. “We were able to figure out what makes us successful as a team which really is playing a simple game and playing really tough and fast. That was something we were trying to get better at every game since the start of the season. We’ve been making small improvements each and every game.
“For us to post an 11-game winning streak is pretty cool. When we get back after the world championships, hopefully things will go really smoothly and we take off where we left off. The important thing will be for us to play simple and to play our strengths, which is to play physical and to play fast.”
It didn’t take Turnbull long to get acquainted to the professional ranks. In fact, it took about 14 minutes for Blayre Turnbull to make PWHL history.
Although it didn’t count in the standings, Turnbull scored the first, second and third goals of the pre-season in a 5-3 Toronto win over Boston in the first-ever PWHL exhibition game, Dec. 4 in Utica.
SUCCESSFUL INAUGURAL SEASON
The PWHL is thriving in its inaugural season, exceeding expectations in ticket sales, television audiences and attendance figures. The league came out of the ashes of past failures, following the defunct Canadian Women’s Hockey League and the rival Premier Hockey Federation, which was boycotted by many former CWHL players.
Record crowds have flocked to PWHL games. Toronto – which normally plays its home games at the Mattamy Athletic Centre, located at the historical site of Maple Leaf Gardens – set an attendance record on Feb. 16 when 19,285 fans showed up at Scotiabank Arena for a home game against Montreal.
“I didn’t expect the fan response that it has had,” Turnbull said of the fledging league. “I always believed in it and knew that we would have fans. I didn’t understand how many fans we would actually reach and how many people would jump on board with this new league. It just goes to show how important it is to have the proper exposure.
“Our audience is way wider now because all our games are broadcasted on either Sportsnet, TSN, CBC or even YouTube. People having that accessibility to our game is huge and has drawn in a greater crowd than what we thought we would get.”
That attendance mark will be shattered on April 20 when Toronto visits Montreal at the 21,105-seat Bell Centre, home of the Canadiens. General tickets sold out in under 20 minutes.
“The entire rink was sold out in 20 minutes, that’s amazing,” Turnbull said.
