News

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.

The 2021-2022 Women’s Hockey League season was full of excitement – at both club and international level. While the Olympic Games dominated the global agenda, there was plenty to celebrate within the Russian championship, especially for KRS Vanke Rays.

A tense goaltending duel went the way of Noora Raty and the KRS Vanke Rays as the Russian Women’s Hockey League season came to its conclusion. The Dragons’ success seals a second title in three seasons for the Chinese franchise, while SKIF can take some consolation from a greatly improved season after falling at the final hurdle.

A late goal from Michela Cava gave the Vanke Rays a second victory in the Women’s Hockey League final. Now, the Chinese franchise can wrap up its second Russian title in three years with victory in its temporary Moscow Region home on Tuesday.

The Russian Women’s Hockey League began its final on Friday, with regular season champion SKIF Nizhny Novgorod hosting KRS Vanke Rays at the start of a best-of-five series. And the Vanke Rays got off to a winning start in their bid to win the title for the second time in three years.

The WHL final gets underway in Nizhny Novgorod on Friday, with KRS Vanke Rays back for its third successive appearance in the decisive series. This time, SKIF provides the opposition for the Chinese franchise, with the Nizhny Novgorod team making its first appearance in a playoff final.

It’s the biggest playoff in Russian Women’s Hockey League history, with eight teams ready to compete for the top prize. The action gets underway on Wednesday, and KHL.ru offers a rundown of all the key stories from the regular season.

Team ROC 2 Switzerland 4 (0-0, 1-1, 1-3)

Team ROC faces a rematch with Switzerland in the knock-out phase of the Women’s Olympic tournament in Beijing. A disappointing loss against previously winless Finland saw the team finish fourth in Group A. Thus, the Red Machine will take part in the only quarter-final that doesn’t involve an outside from Group B, which was comprised of the five lower-ranked teams in the tournament.

Team ROC women scored on Canada in Olympic play for the first time, but Monday’s game was overshadowed by controversy.

Saturday’s second game for our girls ended in a brave but heavy loss against powerful opposition.

The preparation was hugely disrupted. Several key players were isolating in hospital. Yet Team ROC rose above adversity to make a winning start to its Olympic campaign. Polina Bolgareva’s hat-trick led the win in a 5-2 success over Switzerland — and there are high hopes of more to come as the country bids for a first ever medal in women’s hockey.

When the Olympic hockey action gets underway this week, viewers could be forgiven for feeling they’ve seen a lot of this in Russian hockey in recent years. The Wukesong Arena, which will stage most of the women’s games, was the first home of Kunlun Red Star in the KHL, while Russia’s Women’s Hockey League supplies more players than ever to this year’s tournament. The entire Team ROC roster comes from the league, as does Team China. And there are plenty more with WHL connections lining up for their respective nations in this year’s competition.

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.

Olga Sosina, captain of Agidel and Team Russia, led from the front to snatch a dramatic victory for her team in the deciding game of the Women’s Hockey League season. The 2020-2021 final, delayed from March due to the pandemic, was completed at last in Mytishchi on Saturday. And, in an epic winner-takes-all battle, Agidel won the title back from the Vanke Rays in a shoot-out.

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.

KRS Shenzhen Vanke Rays forward Emily Costales was a member of the 2020 WHL Championship roster, but her season hardly ended with a happily ever after. Assisted off the ice with a knee injury in the definitive clash against Agidel Ufa, she never got to experience the rush of the final seconds or the hurricane of confetti that fell on her teammates’ shoulders. Wheeled into the locker room after the presentation had ended, her tearful reunion left a fire burning for a retake. Up until two weeks ago, the Vanke Rays were on track to deliver that redemption — winning the regular season and sweeping the semifinals versus Biryusa.

The Women’s World Championship starts next month — and the Women’s Hockey League is set to be well represented when the action gets underway in Canada. In total, 33 players from four countries have made the preliminary rosters for their national teams.

Update on the final series.

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.

2020 was a challenging, unusual and difficult year. But, at the same time, we will remember it for several reasons ... and here are some of the most important.

WHL players continue to compete, answering the unusual questions of the host Darya Mironova and guests.

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.