Denver did not just turn up for the PWHL’s last Takeover Tour stop of the season. It broke a record Denver already held.
A crowd of 15,512 watched the Minnesota Frost hold off the New York Sirens 4-3 at Ball Arena on March 15, the largest ever to see a professional women’s hockey game in the United States. The mark it beat, 14,018, was set in this same building on the Takeover Tour’s first visit a season earlier.
Three tour stops across two seasons have now brought 41,142 people through the doors at Ball Arena, an average of 13,714 a night. No American city has given the league a bigger sample size, and none has given it a better one.
The chant
“We want a team” started early and kept going. It is the kind of thing that reads as manufactured on a broadcast and does not feel that way from inside the arena.
Seeing the attendance record go up, 15,000, and hearing the “we want a team” chant gives me chills on the bench.Micah Zandee-Hart, New York Sirens captain
Two Coloradans on the ice
Nicole Hensley grew up in Lakewood. The two-time Olympic medallist stopped 23 of 26 shots for Minnesota and picked up the 20th win of her professional career, in front of the crowd she came from.
Peyton Anderson’s night was shorter and, in its way, harder to beat. The Arvada forward played 6:58 in the first professional game she has ever played in her home state, with roughly 80 friends and family in the building.
It’s an exciting time for Denver with women’s sports. I think it’s a great time to be a female athlete in Denver, and hopefully we’ll have some here soon.Nicole Hensley, Minnesota Frost goaltender
January was the more convincing number
The season’s first Denver stop, on January 25, drew 11,612 to watch the Vancouver Goldeneyes beat the Seattle Torrent 3-1. On paper that is the smallest of the three Denver crowds.
In context it might be the most persuasive one. The AFC Championship Game was being played 200 yards away. Eleven thousand people chose women’s hockey anyway, on an afternoon when this city had a very loud alternative.
What is actually in the way
Not demand. Three sellout-adjacent crowds in two seasons have settled that question about as firmly as neutral-site games can.
The problem is the calendar. Ball Arena already belongs to the Avalanche, the Nuggets and the Mammoth, and a PWHL season would have to fit into whatever those three leave behind between October and May. That is a real scheduling problem rather than a polite excuse, and it is the one thing a chant cannot solve.
The league has not said what it is doing next, or when. What it has now is two seasons of Denver evidence and a building that keeps filling up whenever anyone gives this city a reason to.
