Commissioner Of The Premier Hockey Federation, Reagan Carey, Elevates Women’s Sports

Ladies athletes are lastly beginning to see respect on paydays. It’s a gradual begin, however it’s taking place.

The Premier Hockey Federation, the skilled girls’s hockey league, introduced yesterday its plans to extend its wage cap to $1.5 million per workforce for the 2023-24 season. This comes months after the U.S. girls’s nationwide soccer workforce’s historic collective bargaining victory—the lads’s and ladies’s groups will earn the identical amount of cash.

Reagan Carey, commissioner of the Premier Hockey Federation, is already bettering the women’s hockey league and creating her legacy. In lower than a 12 months, she has already led the league via an enlargement from six groups to seven. Moreover, when she got here on board, she oversaw the implementation of the elevated wage cap for this season, which was a document $750,000 per workforce. Additionally, this season, the league has carried out potential signing bonuses for gamers.

“The whole lot looks like a brand new initiative apart from honoring the previous, which is necessary to us and honoring these previous 5 years,” Carey shares. “Respecting the truth that lots of people did numerous work earlier than us to present us this chance to make a distinction proper now. We’ve received assets for gamers. Full medical advantages, which is new for girls’s skilled sports activities. Our wage cap has elevated by 150%. We’ve received ESPN on board for a two-year partnership, which hasn’t been performed in girls’s skilled sports activities. So there’s simply so many new points coming in a really quick time frame that lends itself to understanding we’re going to maneuver ahead shortly.”

Rising up, Carey’s household moved round a number of instances. So sports activities turned an outlet for her to attach with others in every neighborhood. Throughout the summers in school, she interned for NHL’s Atlanta Thrashers throughout their inaugural season. After commencement, she interned within the advertising division for the corporate that owns all three skilled sports activities groups in Atlanta. That have taught her the interior workings of the sports activities business in addition to the totally different cultures between leagues.

Carey shortly realized the significance of branding and being modern within the advertising strategy. She helped the Atlanta Hawks via a rebrand, after which working with a brand new workforce in hockey, she helped create a unique strategy to the Thrashers’ advertising technique.

“We constructed a model and a neighborhood,” she explains. “Simply the 2 experiences collectively, I realized how highly effective it’s and the way necessary it’s to have the ability to inform the tales of the gamers and what the tradition represents; what that model represents. In order that they had been very totally different throughout the two leagues through which I spent most of my time with the NBA and NHL. I realized how necessary it’s to be clear and to welcome folks into that.”

Ultimately, the internship became a full-time place. Carey remained with the Thrashers. She transitioned to fan and hockey growth.

Then the overall supervisor of the hockey franchise inquired about her curiosity in USA Hockey. In consequence, Carey turned the director of ladies’s ice hockey from 2010-18, overseeing the U.S. girls’s nationwide groups that gained Olympic silver in Sochi and gold in PyeongChang. Her management helped produce a document variety of World Championship victories for the ladies’s program. Moreover, she served as normal supervisor of the ladies’s nationwide workforce.

“My time at USA Hockey lends itself extra in the direction of efficiency and sports activities growth,” she states, “and excessive efficiency and all of the areas which are required to make sure you have success on the scoreboard. But in addition, off the ice, we had numerous success rising the game. All of that comes collectively to be a extremely good match for the place girls’s skilled hockey is… With USA Hockey, we had not gained a gold medal in this system since ’98. And there was an actual excessive expectation to create a successful legacy inside that program.”

The PHF launched in 2015 because the Nationwide Ladies’s Hockey League, rebranding to its present identify in 2021. The league was established to offer alternatives for elite feminine hockey athletes to earn a dwelling taking part in the sport they love whereas fueling the game’s continued development. After the seventh season, PFH’s board of governors approached Carey to change into the league’s third commissioner.

The league has made nice strides in supporting girls’s skilled hockey gamers. It established a three way partnership possession mannequin, generated landmark broadcast and company partnerships and redefined its model based mostly on the singular expertise of its athletes, along with rising the wage cap.

The rise will double every workforce’s present cap and is a part of an total $25 million, three-year dedication authorised by the league’s board of governors. This season’s improve led to Mikyla Grant-Mentis turning into the primary girls’s hockey participant in North America to signal an $80,000 contract with the Buffalo Beauts.

As Carey continues to evolve in her profession and develop the PFH, she focuses on the next important steps:

• Create an inventory of all of the issues that drive, encourage and energize you. Then, see the place you’ll be able to apply that keenness and power.
• Be self-aware of your strengths and weaknesses.
• Be sure you are prepared and ready for when the chance presents itself.

“There’s a consolation degree as you acquire expertise with actually acknowledging what you do and don’t know,” Carey concludes. “Management is about bringing extra folks into the combination and permitting these conversations. It’s actually one thing that I’ve seen in my management of welcoming different leaders and specialists and simply studying and rising with them. My job is to facilitate a optimistic surroundings for folks to do nice work.”