News media coverage of women’s ice hockey is an understudied area. Existing studies primarily focus on the Olympics (e.g., Poniatowski & Hardin 2012), rather than specific leagues or teams. Yet the story of women’s hockey is much more than solely that of the Olympics. The Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL) was active from 2007 to 2019, and the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL) in the United States was active from 2015 to 2023. Thus, news coverage from 2015 to 2019 offers a chance to analyze national differences in the amount of coverage of Canadian and American women’s hockey teams.

To determine the relative amounts of news coverage for both men’s and women’s Canadian and American hockey teams, the researcher searched the Nexis database of online news for the names of the four CWHL, four NWHL, and thirty (twenty-three American, seven Canadian) National Hockey League teams that played during those five years to compare coverage along both national and gender lines. Preliminary data indicate that Canadian teams receive more coverage but that there are more factors at play in women’s coverage than simply national differences in hockey coverage.

With the advent of the Professional Women’s Hockey League in 2023 spanning Canada and the United States, understanding how differences in national coverage may impact media portrayals of women’s hockey is important. Further research is still needed in how national differences impact the types of articles written about women’s ice hockey teams as well as in thematic and content analysis of such articles.