Canadian women’s hockey team: Road to Olympics begins in Calgary in late August

The Canadian women’s hockey team will begin its quest to defend its Olympic title with three training camps throughout the country this summer and fall.

It will be the first time that Hockey Canada must work around the PWHL as it builds the roster that will head to Milan Cortina in February.

Players won’t be participating in what has long been called centralization, a months-long process that saw Olympic hopefuls move to Calgary for several months and train full time in the pursuit of a roster spot.

This time around, 30 players identified by Hockey Canada will start the road to Olympic selection on Aug. 26 in Calgary. They’ll attend a three-day, off-ice orientation camp with players invited to train for the men’s and Para hockey programs, followed by training from Aug. 30 to Sept. 12.

After two weeks off, another training block will begin in Toronto at the end of September.

The third training block is set for the end of October in Montreal, and will wrap up with two Rivalry Series games against the United States in Cleveland (Nov. 6) and Buffalo (Nov. 8). PWHL training camps are expected to begin in November.

Two more Rivalry Series games are scheduled for December. Those games will be in Canada, but the locations and dates haven’t been announced yet.

It’s a training program that Hockey Canada has been working on since the PWHL was created in late 2023, altering the landscape of professional women’s hockey.

Building that plan has been a balancing act, as they prepare athletes for what could be their heaviest workload to date this upcoming season. In addition to the Rivalry Series and the Olympics, PWHL players will play at least 30 regular-season games, not including potential playoff games.

“We need them to be healthy in the PWHL, so managing what that looks like and managing also volumes and loads, it’s a pretty complex matter that has a lot of experts weighing in on what we can do, what it should look like to maximize our athletes,” the Canadian team’s general manager, Gina Kingsbury, said in an interview with CBC Sports.

Those four Rivalry Series games against the U.S. are likely to be the only games the Canadian national team will play together prior to the Olympics, as players focus on their PWHL seasons.

With time together feeling a bit more rushed since the advent of the PWHL, Kingsbury hopes to use the national team training blocks to focus on her team’s on-ice identity.

“We’re a very close-knit tight team, but we want to continue to dive a little bit deeper into those relationships,” she said.

“We’ve got some newer players coming in. We’ve got to make sure that they feel that connection, and we want to make sure we’re staying fresh in the relationships we have, that we’re going to be as unified and connected as we possibly can be for February.”