Team Canada Fall Festival Camp First Step on Road to 2025 World Championships

Stay plugged in with women’s sports
Get smart, reliable coverage delivered straight to your inbox — with the context that makes every game matter.

• Daily Updates Our headlines across every sport, delivered at 8:30 a.m. Monday through Saturday.
• Weekly Recap What matters most, curated by our editors, delivered every Sunday.
• Basketball Insider In-depth reporting and analysis about women’s basketball, delivered weekly by Howard Megdal.

Sign up free!

Forty seven (48 invites but Emerance Maschmeyer will not be there) players have descended into the Niagara region to participate in the Team Canada Fall Festival camp. This camp is for the senior team as the development and U18 national teams have already had their camps in the summer. This camp is the start of the journey these 47 players are about to embark upon in order to fight and earn a spot on the 2025 Canadian World Championship roster. It’s possible a player that hasn’t been invited to this camp will make the 2025 Canadian roster but your chances are always better being right in front of the Team Canada front office and coaching staff.

Now it’s no secret that the Canadian senior national team rosters have been trending on the older side. In fact, according to Elite Prospects, the last two Canadian Worlds teams have been the oldest in average age (27.87 & 28.09) in the Canadian history of the tournament. Now they did win the 2024 WHC but probably fair to say that this tournament felt closer to 2019 rather than 2022 for Canada.

It’s not just a feeling either. Renata Fast led the team in points with six points in seven games. That was good enough for 10^th in scoring in the 2024 Worlds. Part of the reason for the lack of production is the team scored twice—that’s right, only two times—on the power play. They scored in the first game and then in the Gold Medal Game where Danielle Serdachny scored the Golden Goal.

Preventative care is never a bad option and this team, if left together, maybe does just fine in future games/tournaments. Maybe this is the best 23-player unit that can be put together for Team Canada. That felt like the thinking for the 2023 Worlds and that ended in disaster. It almost happened in Utica too as Sweden was one disallowed goal away from making the quarterfinal game 2-2 and Marie-Philip Poulin couldn’t find the scoresheet really until the Gold Medal Game.

Worlds Gold Medals are great but it’s obvious what these organizations value the most and it’s the Olympics. Every team is working towards finding the best roster combination before the 2026 Olympics and Canada wants to avoid what happened to the USA in the previous Italian-hosted Olympics, where the USA did not make it to the Gold Medal Game. Obviously, Sweden deserves a lot of credit for beating the USA, but the USA did not do themselves any favours by having a team that was in the midst of transitioning.

With that in mind it’s clear Team Canada’s front office is at least open to the idea of adding some youth and new players to the roster. In the case of the players brought to camp a message is being sent to the regulars that your spot isn’t necessarily guaranteed. It’s going to take a lot to lose a spot, however the opportunity is there for the young players to make an impact. With that all out of the way now it’s time for the fun part where we dissect each position to ascertain if we’ll be seeing new blood injected into the 2025 Worlds roster.

Goalies

The toughest position and nationality to be in women’s hockey is being a goalie who is Canadian. Unlike the men’s side, there’s no lack of options when it comes to finding a Canadian goalie who can be the no. 1 goalie on the senior national team. This is the toughest position to crack by far, which makes sense considering there’s only three roster spots. You need two things going for you if you want to grab a spot, with the first being you need to have a stellar season and secondly, you need one of the goalies in front of you to have a bad year. You could make a case that Corinne Schroeder deserved PWHL Goalie of the Year last season and it still wasn’t enough to take a roster spot away.

Honestly, I don’t blame the coaching staff for sticking with the current trio of Ann-Renée Desbiens, Emerance Maschmeyer, and Kristen Campbell. Until one noticeably falters and can’t keep up anymore, they’re clearly great goalies. And until someone shows themselves to be the next Desbiens or Szabados, it doesn’t really matter, as it’s just the same skill level tier filled with a lot of goalies. You could throw a dart and there’s your no. 2 goalie easy peasy.

I know public opinion has Schroeder as the next goalie to break onto the roster, and she’s probably the closest to breaking onto the roster, but if someone is really going to push their way onto the roster my money is on Éve Gascon. She delivered in her freshman NCAA season and is going to have a great chance this season to show she’s an option. Most importantly she already plays a style that’s very refined and ready for the national level. She just needs to prove she can play at an elite level with a heavier workload.

Blueliners

Typically Canada takes seven blueliners to the WHC which means there’s a bit more wiggle room for a player to get onto the roster. The seventh blueliner is also an easy way to integrate a player onto the roster such as an Ashton Bell or a Nicole Gosling. Then there’s the fact that the coaching staff hasn’t been completely gun shy about not bringing back regulars such as Micah Zandee-Hart who wasn’t on the 2024 WHC roster.

Now as rosy and interesting as that all sounds this is going to be a tough roster to crack. Claire Thompson is making her return to hockey after a one-year hiatus. Micah Zandee-Hart will be starting the season healthy compared to the 2024 shortened season where she was injured.

Then of course there’s the Toronto duo of Renata Fast and Jocelyne Larocque who Troy Ryan really counts on while showing no signs of wanting to move on from them as a top pair in any capacity. Ella Shelton and Erin Ambrose aren’t going anywhere, nor should they. Ambrose was named PWHL Top Blueliner and Shelton is, in my opinion, the best blueliner Canada has if not in the world too. That’s a top four that isn’t moving. Just like the no. 3 spot on the Canadian goalie depth chart there’s room for movement at the no. 5-7 spots on the blueline but you need to really show that you have the talent to take a spot.

As mentioned above, you’re already going to be going up against past regulars Claire Thompson and Micah Zandee-Hart. You have to show you’re better than the other regulars in Ashton Bell and Jaime Bourbonnais, plus Nicole Gosling who is very good in her own right. With all that in mind who are the best candidates to break onto the roster this time around?

The number one candidate is Minnesota blueliner Sophie Jaques. The 2024 season did not start well for her which included some shaky rivalry series games. Once she was traded to Minnesota she turned into the blueliner we all saw her be at Ohio State. Jaques was a massive reason the Walter Cup found its first ever home in Minnesota and her numbers on Minnesota were among the elite of the PWHL blueliners. It should be no surprise if she makes the 2025 WHC roster.

The other candidate to make the 2025 WHC roster might just be a surprise in Chloe Primerano. She’s the youngest player at this camp but she has some of the best odds at making the 2025 roster among the potential first time players. There’s really no player who plays like she does, with the shot she has from the blueline, in the world, let alone in Canada. If you want to help the power play out then there’s really no better player available to add a new dynamic to a power play that has been concerning. She’s dominating the U18 level and is going into the NCAA as a U18 player, which is extremely rare. If Primerano can prove she can handle playing against older players at this camp and in the NCAA, there’s going to be no reason to keep her off the 2025 WHC roster.

Forwards

I know this is everyone’s favourite part of the roster and that’s why I’ve left it till last. There are 13 roster spots available at forward and like a child in a candy store, you don’t want to leave a single player behind. At the goalie and blueliner positions it’s clear there are some players on the camp roster who are there to establish a connection with the Team Canada front office, see where they are in comparison to the regulars and how far they have to go to get to a national team level of play.

When it comes to the forwards, if any one of them made the roster would it be a big surprise? If Jocelyn Amos or Emmalee Pais made the roster then there’d be some surprise for sure, but they had such good freshman seasons that it doesn’t take much imagination to see them follow up with even better seasons, thereby impressing the staff enough to earn a roster spot.

The fun name to keep an eye on, much like Chloe Primerano, is Caitlin Kraemer. She’s the second youngest player at camp and while she doesn’t have the same good odds as Primerano to make the roster, Kraemer offers up a very intriguing skill set. Most importantly that skill set is she scores a butt load of goals. When you’re breaking records set by Marie-Philip Poulin at the U18’s you’re going to get noticed. It also doesn’t hurt when you’re built like a young Natalie Spooner.

Just like Primerano, Kraemer will have her opportunity to show that despite her young age she can hang with the older players physically and at a mentally consistent level. Goal scoring is a rare talent, especially with how good Kraemer is at it so it’s not hard to believe that the Team Canada front office will want to get her on the roster to prepare her for a potential Olympic roster spot.

Now the most intriguing storylines when it comes to the 2025 WHC Canadian roster are going to come from the PWHL. With the Canadian head coach in Troy Ryan and the general manager Gina Kingsbury in Toronto, players are going to have multiple opportunities to make an impression.

In the case of Daryl Watts, Victoria Bach, and Emma Woods they’re going to be spending a whole season with Ryan/Kingsbury. When it comes to the players with the best chances at making the team this certainly isn’t going to hurt the chances of Watts, who might be the sole reason that Toronto doesn’t regress despite the loss of MVP Natalie Spooner.

Whether we like it or not coaches love having role players on their teams even if fans think that you just get the 13 most talented forwards and it’ll handle itself. That’s just not the reality of roster building but thankfully at this level and on a roster like Canada’s the role players are still going to be very skilled. If a player is going to make Team Canada because of how well they play their role it’ll be at least one of Sophie Shirley, Lexie Adzijia, Jennifer Gardiner, and Jessie Eldridge.

Elridge has seen time with Team Canada, Shirley has been apart of the national team program for over half a decade, and Gardiner was one injury away from being on the 2024 WHC team. Last but not least is Lexie Adzija who showed this past season that she’s a unique player with intriguing potential. Her net front presence, skill, and size have obviously caught the eye of the Team Canada staff. How she’s utilized in Boston, and her play in general, will go a long way in making her an option for Team Canada. There’s not many that can do what she does and if Adjiza finds consistency in her game I don’t know if Team Canada will be able to resist keeping her off the roster.

The question that is left remaining is where are the roster spots going to come from? Ever since senior national tournament/events started back up again post COVID lockdowns Canada has been experiencing quite the gold run: 2021 WHC, 2022 Olympics, 2022 WHC, 2024 WHC, and both rivalry series won 4-3.

As mentioned above the average age of the team has been steadily on the rise which is because there’s been a rather large core of players who have made these gold winning rosters. We’ve seen players such as Mélodie Daoust and Rebecca Johnston retire while others like Jill Saulnier look as though they’ve just been passed over as getting older is a thing that happens. And despite the fact that there are 13 spots available, if you’ve looked at the previous rosters dating back to 2021 there’s maybe 1-2 new players on the roster. So, something that the Team Canada front office will keep in mind is how much roster turnover do they want to see with the 2026 Olympics just around the corner?