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As the All-Star Game approaches, most teams in the WHL are about halfway through their season.

From the 2023-2024 season the Women’s Hockey League is lowering the requisite to consider its players Unrestricted Free Agents from 27 to 25 years of age.

Danish-Finnish forward Michelle Karvinen had a unique, albeit brief introduction to Russia’s WHL. She was called to pinch-hit for the KRS Shenzhen Vanke Rays in the postponed championship final, after COVID-19 delayed the postseason and precluded several team members from returning to the squad. While she did not play the regular season with KRS, she had an opportunity to experience their passion and the league’s hottest rivalry first-hand—not to mention a reunion with her college coach, Brian Idalski, in the process.

As a child, Kimberly Newell could never have aspired to a professional hockey gig in China. It was an option that did not exist until after she had retired post-graduation from Princeton University, one that the KRS Vanke Rays netminder joked she thought was a “scam” when it was first proposed in 2018. But this twist of fate allowed Newell to fulfill another dream simultaneously, a goal that she had set while studying Chinese in college. After the 2018-19 season, she had the opportunity to travel to her family’s home in Hangzhou, where she had one final conversation with her grandfather.

You could hardly say that “everyone and their mother” is an Olympian—but in the Vafina household, this is exactly the case. When Dynamo-Neva forward Alexandra (Sasha) Vafina represented Russia at the 2010 Vancouver Games, she bore the literal and figurative torch from her mother Lyubov, who represented Kazakhstan in their first Olympic appearance in 2002. The mother-daughter pair even played together in Chelyabinsk for a time, an opportunity whose singularity only became clear later.

The climax of the 2020/2021 Women’s Hockey League season will be played at a later date.

Finnish international goalie Noora Raty could be close to a return to the Women’s Hockey League — barely a month after the injury that threatened to end her season.

It’s playoff time in the Women’s Hockey League this week, with the semi-final action starting on Wednesday. We have two best-of-three series on the way, starting in Krasnoyarsk, where Biryusa faces defending champion KRS Vanke Rays, and moving on to Nizhny Novgorod where a fast-improving SKIF takes on Agidel.

When Vanke Rays defenseman Jessica Wong hits the ice in Shenzhen, she is 12,348 kilometers from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. In some ways, it is the closest she has ever played to home.

KRS Vanke Rays goalie Noora Raty posted an update on her injury. The Finnish international was hurt during last Friday’s exhibition game against Team Russia and had to be stretchered from the ice.

The KHL isn’t alone in preparing for the final weeks of the regular season. In the Russian Women’s Hockey League, the battle for playoff places and championships is heating up. Meanwhile, Team Russia took on the best in the league as part of its preparations for April’s World Championship in Canada.

The KRS Shenzhen Vanke Rays were first named for the rays of light they cast on Chinese women’s hockey. Despite their on-ice luminosity—crowned WHL champions in March after a masterful league debut—there is one small irony. The team has barely seen sunlight since winter began in their temporary home of Stupino, Russia.

Women’s hockey is here to stay – and the recent Moscow FemFest was out to tell the story of how Russia’s Women’s Hockey League is a trailblazer in giving women the opportunity to play their game at the highest level.

KRS Vanke Rays forward Alexandra Carpenter received a special award for the Russian Women’s Hockey League MVP in the 2019-2020 season.

Rachel Llanes took her first strides on-ice at a middle school birthday. Twelve years old and already years behind her counterparts, the California native was among the least likely to advance in professional hockey. “I think the best part about it was that I never expected to go so high,” the KRS Vanke Rays star described on the eve of her departure for Russia. “I was only doing it because I really loved it.” Llanes was the first player in history to win the Isobel Cup, Clarkson Cup and WHL Championship—an impressive trophy case for a career that began at a party.

My first meeting with U.S. Olympian Alex Carpenter took place one degree south of the Tropic of Cancer, nearly one year ago to the day. The clawing humidity of September in southern China was hardly the autumn I knew. Carpenter grew up in Massachusetts, where dropping temperatures and black ice would have been unmistakable heralds of hockey season. In Shenzhen, flowering vines and lush Southern Hemisphere sunsets categorize the brief and mild winter, if you can even call it that. China’s sprawling tech hub is perhaps among the most unlikely destinations for a women’s hockey capital, and yet, they boast one of the most decorated and visible captains in Alex Carpenter.

Anna Prugova was the youngest hockey competitor at the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver, debuting between the pipes for Team Russia at sixteen years and eighty-six days old. The Khabarovsk native’s career had begun only a handful of years prior, when her father stood the young goalie in front of a glass window and began to shoot pucks in the family’s backyard.

If you think Instagram cannot change the course your life, then you clearly have not met Hayley Williams.

Sporting an unmistakable mullet wig and a few dipsy-doodles, Alena Mills’ impression of fellow countryman Jaromir Jagr was one of the most memorable moments of the 2020 WHL All Star Weekend. While the joke elicited a response from the The Ageless Wonder himself, I recently discovered something interesting: this was hardly the first time Alena Mills had impersonated Jagr.

There are head coaching debuts, and then there are baptisms by fire. I think it is fairly obvious which category Brian Idalski’s inaugural WHL season would fall into, one that featured both a global pandemic that rendered his team homeless, and a fairy-tale ending—the championship title.

A reporter’s notebook from a season unlike any other for the KRS Shenzhen Vanke Rays.

The KRS Shenzhen Vanke Rays have not played in their home arena since January of this year, but they appear to feel quite at home 5,944 kilometers away – ironically in enemy territory, the Bashkortostan capital of Ufa. Despite dropping three of four regular season matchups against reigning champions Agidel, they lead the WHL Finals 2-0 – one win away from their first-ever title.

It is difficult to imagine a better plot than the one unfolding in Russia this week—with reigning champions Agidel Ufa looking to defend their crown against the WHL’s newest arrivals, the KRS Vanke Rays of Shenzhen.

The WHL playoffs begin on February 27th, with four squads from two countries preparing to do battle for the Russian Championship.

Growing up, all of Noora Räty’s role models were men. Up until the age of ten, the Finnish supernova had no idea that her country even had a Women’s National Team in ice hockey—a squad she would someday anchor at four Olympic Games.

The unofficial Soviet hockey anthem was a song entitled “Трус не играет в хоккей,” or “No Coward Plays Hockey.” It was composed in 1968 and rose to prominence during the Summit Series of the 1970s.