Golden State Valkyries<\/a> franchise that most recently became the first pro women\u2019s sports team to reach a $1 billion valuation, everyone wants a piece.<\/p>\nArticle continues below this ad<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen one league grows, it really helps elevate all of us,\u201d Yamaguchi said.<\/p>\n
What took so long? \u201cTruth?\u201d\u00a0Chastain asked. \u201cDecision-makers seeing women\u2019s sports as viable \u2026 because women have always believed in women\u2019s sports. It takes one visionary to make a move, and all of a sudden there\u2019s something in the water.\u201d<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Valkyries and Bay FC were proof of concept. The PWHL\u2019s got next. Currently, there are only three Californian players in the league.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going to take a bit of time,\u201d said Amy\u00a0Scheer, PWHL executive vice president of business operations. \u201cWhen our junior Sharks get their scholarships to Wisconsin and Ohio State and all those big schools, then we\u2019ll start to have some more Californians in the league.\u201d<\/p>\n
As of Tuesday morning\u00a0Scheer noted San Jose has received upwards of 1,000 deposits for season tickets. Sharks president Jonathan Becher added, \u201cThey told me a number (to expect). We\u2019re already well above that.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Becher called early fan sentiment \u201coverwhelming.\u201d After several years of lobbying, he has finally got through to the PWHL about adding a team in San Jose. The league expanded by two last year. Becher said he tried then but came up short. If this year\u2019s expansion afforded only another pair, he wasn\u2019t so sure the \u201cShark Tank\u201d (SAP Center\u2019s nickname as home to the city\u2019s NHL team) would make the cut. But four?<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it was four I was pretty confident,\u201d\u00a0Becher said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been hounding them for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hockey fervor in the U.S. more generally has been boiling in the aftermath of the men\u2019s national team taking home gold at the Winter Olympics in Milan, and\u00a0Scheer acknowledged the appeal of planting a team where men\u2019s hockey has spent decades building its footprint, dating back to the Sharks\u2019 inception in the 1990s: \u201cIt’s always nice to find a partner that feels you’re additive to what they’re doing and not competitive to what they’re doing, and we feel that that’s the case here with the Sharks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tuesday was quite the production. The lot of\u00a0Chastain, Yamaguchi, Mahan, Scheer and Becher were wheeled in from the far tunnel in sleek-silver Chevrolet lowriders with ocean blue headlights. Only three seasons old, the PWHL finds itself in the left lane. A reporter asked Scheer why the league\u2019s first team in California wasn\u2019t farther south, in a place like Los Angeles. She smiled and said nothing.<\/p>\n
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Perhaps the answer was obvious. Women\u2019s sports is Hollywood in the Bay Area.<\/p>\n
“We have been waiting,”\u00a0Chastain said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brandi Chastain greets members of San Jose Jr. Sharks on stage for a photo during Sharks Sports and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":323535,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[88,90,89,200,127,8859],"class_list":["post-323618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-south-bay","tag-sports","tag-womens-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323618\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}