Putting pen to paper for women’s hockey history

There are plenty of books out there to read about men’s hockey but far, far fewer exist that focus on women’s hockey. CBC Sports reporter and author Karissa Donkin is doing her part to change that with her upcoming release, Breakaway: The PWHL and the Women Who Changed the Game.

Donkin now covers the PWHL, among other sports, for CBC, but her book came about in a completely unrelated manner, started as a passion project during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. A longtime fan and supporter of women’s hockey, Donkin took on the arduous task of documenting women’s hockey history during the formation of the PWHPA, the years that followed and, eventually, the formation of the PWHL as we know it today.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length.

Melissa Burgess: What made you want to write a book about the PWHL?

Karissa Donkin: I’ve been a journalist now for the better part of 15 years. My background is news — I worked in an investigative unit at CBC for a long time, and I did some pretty difficult stories. Going back to 2022, we had some lockdowns here in New Brunswick where we couldn’t go outside the province. I just felt like I needed a project outside of work, and outside of some of the difficult topics I was covering.

I thought, ‘I need to do something with myself,’ and then I thought about writing something. I thought, ‘If I could write about anything on the planet that I would be interested enough in to do it in my free time and that would maybe contribute or add something, what would be it be?’ and I settled on women’s hockey.

I wasn’t a women’s hockey journalist at that point. I was a journalist, but I’d just been a fan of women’s hockey for years. I would have always loved to have read a book like this, but it didn’t really exist.

Melissa Burgess: And of course, the PWHL didn’t exist then, either.

Karissa Donkin: I started working on [the book] just before the 2022 Olympics. We all thought at that point that the PWHPA would translate into the league they were trying to create the next season. My original idea was to follow the first season of whatever they [the PWHPA] were going to create. It turned out they didn’t create a new league that year, so I went to a bunch of the showcases, got to know people and work that into it. It ended up being about the creation, but then also a season in time, as well. I really liked focusing on a season in terms of storytelling, kind of picking a team and focusing on them. I really wanted to do that. I wanted it to kind of be like Drive to Survive, but make it women’s hockey.

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MB: Why focus on one season, rather than wait a few years until the PWHL is a bit more settled?

KD: The short answer is, I started working on a while ago. If I had a crystal ball and I knew that it would take a little bit longer for the league to get going, maybe I would’ve done it that way, but I was already going with it. Being at home during COVID, I felt like I wanted to do something with myself. I was collecting dust, so I was like, let’s work on this.

One thing I felt when I was writing it is, there’s so much pressure because there’s so much history in women’s hockey. I feel like people will read it and say, ‘Oh, well, you just sort of glazed over the CWHL, and you glazed over the PHF.’ But when you think about men’s hockey, there are like, 40 books on the Summit Series alone. There are books just about the Stanley Cup. There are books about every team and individual athletes. We just don’t have that much documentation of the sport’s history in the book form.

MB: What was the writing process like?

KD: I didn’t have a publisher when I first started working on it, so this was all my own free time. I paid for any trips I went on. I remember sitting with the publisher and just talking [about it]. The league hadn’t launched, but I was like, there’s definitely going to be a team in Montreal. I can’t tell you who’s on it at this point, but it’s probably Marie-Philip Poulin, and they’re probably going to do something at the Verdun Auditorium and Danielle Sauvageau is going to be involved. I had to sketch of what it could be. It certainly would’ve been easier if I pitched a book to a publisher about a league that already existed.

[Writing the book] was a lot of fun. It was something I’d do on my vacation from my day job at CBC. It’s totally separate. I’d be doing some really tough subject matter in my day job, and then I just really loved getting to talk to some of the women that I met in working on this book. Here and there, I’d written about sports, and those were always my favorite stories to work on.

I don’t know if it’s a very glamorous story, but I just really loved it. I had so much fun going on these reporting trips by myself to these showcases. And I just felt like, yeah, I’d like to stick around beyond writing a book. It just was something that I really wanted to do, and it’s the most fun I think I’ve had in journalism.

MB: You didn’t cover women’s hockey then, but you do now. How did writing the book foray into your current position?

KD: I worked for CBC News at the time — sports and news are different divisions — and I just reached out to CBC Sports. This was before I had even signed a publishing deal, I was just working on this book. And I said, ‘I’m interested in writing about sports, and I think I have a unique perspective. I think I could help with your women’s hockey coverage.’ I didn’t know at that point CBC was going to have rights to the league. So of course, that has helped too.

I think it’s good to try and do different things too. I’ve covered courts, I’ve covered provincial government here. I’ve done investigative stuff, and I did that for the better part of a decade, and now I’m doing something totally different, and it’s a lot of fun.

MB: How does writing a book compare to writing news articles?

KD: You can have a fun with a little bit of it. It doesn’t have to be straight reporting — and it is pretty straight as far as reporting goes. I just tried to have fun with it, and it is fun. Women’s hockey is very fun, and the people are fun. Somebody like Marie-Philip Poulin is actually very funny! I feel like a lot of people don’t know that.

I’ve always written long anyway, so it wasn’t actually super hard to write as many words. And coming from investigative, it wasn’t unusual to work on a project. The research side was very similar to what I did with in investigative land, where I’d make really long timelines. I went back very far in my research in Canada, back to the 1800s. There are a lot of things that didn’t make it into the book, but the research of it, organizing it, planning out chapters and working on something for years before it comes out — that part wasn’t unusual to me.

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MB: How important are books & stories like these to help preserve women’s hockey history?

KB: So many leagues have come and gone over the years. A league folds and their website [is] going, and you try and find basic stuff. Thank goodness for The Ice Garden and [people like] Jared Book, folks who’ve been around and who’ve covered it. That’s really all we have, because you can’t go on the PHF site or the CWHL site and look something up. History is gone, and that’s our recent history. I was talking with Richard Scott, who writes the Who’s Who hockey books. It’s comprehensive; he has stuff going back to, I think, as far back as the 70s and 80s. There’s still gaps that frustrate him, like gamesheets from the [original] NWHL that are just gone.

It’s super important to have the game documented and the history documented, because that’s how we can learn from it for the future. It’s also like, these are women doing really great things. We talk about somebody like Marie-Philip Poulin being the best woman to ever play the game, and we’re so lucky that her career coincided with this league. It’s sad to me that there are goals she scored that were never broadcast. We may never see another Marie-Philip Poulin again.

It’s super important, number one, to document the history of the game, but also just so people know what’s possible. Growing up, I loved reading hockey books. My grandfather had a lot of hockey books, but they were mostly about men who played for the Toronto Maple Leafs or things like that. I’ve got a bunch of hockey books behind me, but they’re almost always written by men, and even more often, they’re about men.

I would have loved to have read a book like this, and it just didn’t exist. I wanted to write something that I myself would like to read. I think there should be more hockey books, more sports books about women, written by women. And that’s what I hope I can keep doing.

MB: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

KD: I picked Montreal [to focus on], partly because I can drive there from New Brunswick, and also because I think it’s kind of the center of the women’s hockey universe. Jared Book has a saying like, you can’t talk about women’s hockey without talking about Montreal. Obviously, he’s a little bit biased, but he’s not wrong, and it’s such an interesting place, and it just felt like the perfect place to do it.

I really appreciate all the conversations that the players had with me and the time they gave me. I’m sure when I first came in, I probably asked them stuff they’d answered a million times, but I just really appreciate the time that they gave me, and their willingness to be vulnerable.

Donkin’s book can be pre-ordered here and is set to hit shelves on September 30.

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