Professional women’s hockey team to call San Jose home

San Jose is offering a warm welcome to the Professional Women’s Hockey League, which plans to launch its latest expansion team in the city.

Dozens of sports fans, elected leaders and local sports legends turned out for a Wednesday announcement event held on the rink inside SAP Center, which is set to become the yet-to-be-named team’s home arena. For many in attendance, the new franchise, which will be the city’s third pro hockey team, is the latest sign of the city’s deepening embrace of women’s sports.

“(There is) so much fun going on here for sports already, and we are so happy to be part of that environment,” Amy Scheer, the league’s executive vice president of business operations, said during the event. “We are going nowhere. We are here for the long term, and we will continue to build women’s hockey and keep growing, growing, growing.”

The San Jose expansion brings the PWHL’s total number of teams to 12, and marks the fourth and final expansion team to be added to the league’s roster ahead of the 2026-27 season. It follows the addition earlier this year of teams in Detroit, Michigan, Hamilton in Ontario, Canada and Las Vegas, Nevada.

The new team, which will train on Sharks Ice at San Jose, also marks San Jose as a special kind of hockey city.

“The PWHL San Jose team now joins the NHL San Jose Sharks and the AHL San Jose Barracuda playing here in San Jose,” Jonathan Becher, president of Sharks Sports & Entertainment, said. “In fact, it’s the only location in the U.S. where all three of those leagues play in the exact same city.”

In explaining San Jose’s selection, league officials noted that SAP Center is among the largest ice facilities in the Western United States and California ranks sixth nationwide in hockey participation among girls. By naming San Jose, PWHL has also expanded its reach in the Western U.S. League officials have previously said they are prioritizing geographic diversity and cutting down travel time between games, according to the Associated Press.

Other professional women’s sports leagues have also expanded into Bay Area cities in recent years, including NWSL’s Bay FC, which plays in San Jose’s PayPal Park, and the WNBA’s Golden State Valkyries.

Also in attendance was two-time FIFA Women’s World Cup champion Brandi Chastain. The San Jose native contrasted the remarkable expansion of women’s sports in the region to her own experience growing up at a time when there were no professional women’s sports teams in San Jose.

“We believe that women’s sports is not a hiccup, it’s not a charity,” Chastain said. “No, we have believed in women’s sports for a long time.”

The upcoming Professional Women’s Hockey League season is set to begin in the fall, and officials said they have already started taking deposits for season tickets. Meanwhile, details on the plan to integrate expansion teams into the upcoming draft will be announced in the coming weeks, they said.

While the team’s name has yet to be announced, the league did unveil its official colors — orange, blue and white. The choice of palette is a nod to San Jose’s flag, which shares the tricolor scheme.

Mayor Matt Mahan, who attended the event alongside eight other members of the San Jose City Council, said he is excited about what the new team will mean for girls and young women in San Jose.

“Because when you get past the slap shots, the power plays and the roar of the Shark Tank, this is really about possibility,” he said. “It’s about making sure that girls and young women across San Jose, across our entire region, can look out at the ice here at the SAP Center and say, ‘That can be me.'”

The extra dose of athletic inspiration already seems to be taking hold. Toci ElNaggar, an 11-year-old San Jose resident who plays in a youth hockey league, said she is eager to see a professional team playing right in her backyard.

“I want to now go push harder to go professional and get to play on TV and stuff,” she told San José Spotlight.

Contact Keith Menconi at [email protected] or @KeithMenconi on X.