Draft season isn’t just a big deal for players: it’s a big deal for their agents as well. With the inaugural PWHL draft taking place on Monday, September 18th, The Ice Garden spoke to Hecate Sports Group founder Eleni Demestihas on Saturday night as the clock ticks down to draft day.

TIG: How are you feeling with less than 48 hours to go?

ED: I actually think I feel okay. It comes and goes. I think when I say I feel okay, I think mostly I feel like I did everything that I could have done. What I told one of my players the other day, she said something to me about how I have a second job and how she was surprised at how much I’ve been getting done. And I was like, when the draft happens on Monday, I want to feel I want to feel like I did everything that I could have done. And so I feel good about it.

It’s one of those things where you always want to do more, and you’re always like, what else? What else can I do? And at a certain point, you’re gonna have to sit in the discomfort and the unknown until it’s over. So I think I’ve made peace with that. We’ll see how I feel when I wake up Monday morning. I probably won’t feel this zen about it.

What’s the number one thing you’ve been telling your players?

That’s tough, because I feel like they’re all so different, and they all need different things. But I’ve done a lot of…there’s a lot of acknowledging the situation that they’re in emotionally. And being like, ‘I know this is really stressful, and you’re not crazy. It’s important to me that you know that you are not crazy, and the reaction that you’re having to this is normal.’

So another thing that’s a big one is reminding them that mock drafts – typically the people making mock drafts – don’t necessarily have any insider knowledge of what the GMs are thinking or doing. Because if [they] did, [they] probably wouldn’t report it that way. It wouldn’t be in a mock draft, [they] would just report [it]. Yeah, it’s cool when it goes well for us, but the mocks are not worth it. I can guarantee you that. The actual day-of is going to go completely different from how anyone’s predicting it, including the GMs. I don’t think the GMs can even predict it right now.


And the other thing that I’ve told a lot of players that have been PHF veterans or have played multiple years in the PHF, which is a lot of my clients, is that really the thing to remember is that you didn’t give up. I totally understand anybody who made the decision to be like, ‘I’m not dealing with this.’ I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But, for the players who stuck it out to this point and entered the draft, I think it’s really important for them to hear. No matter what happens on Monday, it matters that you tried and that you saw it through to the end. You should be proud of that no matter whether or not your name gets called on Monday.

And then the last one is there’s a lot of different ways to end up on a roster, and the draft is only one of them. At the end of  the draft, any given team will have only 18 of their 23-player roster. So there’s still spots to be had after the draft.


This is your first draft since founding Hecate Sports Group and becoming an agent. Do you foresee it getting easier in years to come?

I mean, I hope so. I think so. And I think the main reason is because…well, there’s two reasons. One is that the next draft, and I’m not sure that it’s going to look like this, because you would think the next draft is probably going to be a college draft. But, I’m not sure what they’re planning on doing. This draft is very much like a fantasy hockey draft, where you’re building your team from scratch. I hope that next year will be easier.

What are you proudest of?

I feel like it’s a cop-out to say I’m proudest of the players, because that’s not really about me, it’s about them. I think I’m really proud of the players. Many of them have made crazy mental adjustments. They’ve had to completely rethink their relationship to the sport and their priorities, and what kind of person they are and what kind of player they are.

Every single day, someone says something that makes me have to take a step back and really appreciate the process that they’ve had to go through. And I, regardless of how I feel about Monday, I know that all of them are ready. They would all disagree with me. Except maybe one of them, they would all be like yeah, no, that’s not true, but they are ready. And they have all done a lot of work to get to that point mentally where they can persevere through this.


But, if it’s got to be something about me and the business that I’ve built and separately from the things that they’re doing, I think that I have done a really good job of being extremely accessible for someone who has a nine-to-five, and also being really flexible to what they need. So the services that I provide – and I don’t provide the same thing to any two players – they all have different relationships with me, and different ways that they talk to me, and different priorities. I have players where most of what I do is promo on social media, and I have players where I will logistically go through every single step of like getting them somewhere. And I can do any of those things. And I think that that’s kind of been fun for me too.

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