Retired U.S. nationwide crew captain Natalie Darwitz and former Team Canada coach Daniele Sauvageau head a listing of 4 ladies and two males named basic managers of the newly established Professional Women’s Hockey League’s authentic six franchises on Friday.

Darwitz is staying dwelling to supervise the the PWHL’s crew in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Sauvageau additionally might be working in acquainted environment as GM in Montreal, the place she established Canada’s first solely acknowledged excessive efficiency ladies’s hockey coaching middle.

Rounding out the hirings are former Hockey Canada government Gina Kingsbury (Toronto), Michael Hirshfeld (Ottawa), who spent the previous seven years serving because the NHL Coaches’ Association’s government director, Danielle Marmer (Boston) and Pascal Daoust (New York).

All six have in depth teaching and participant growth expertise and ties to ladies’s hockey.

“The search process identified a lot of impressive candidates from which we’ve assembled an exceptional group with collective experience across the highest levels of the game both on and off the ice,” PWHL senior vp of hockey operations Jayna Hefford stated in a launched assertion. “Securing highly qualified general managers was a priority to help build strong foundations of each of our original six PWHL markets, and delivering professional standards for all players.”

The six develop into the primary workers of the league-controlled and yet-to-be-named franchises. Their hiring comes on the day the PWHL opens a 10-day free-agent interval by which groups are allowed to signal three gamers, and adopted by a 15-round draft on Sept. 18.

The GMs might be liable for hiring their teaching and assist staffs, with coaching camps set to open in November and the league to launch play in January.

The 39-year-old Darwitz is from Eagan, Minnesota, and regarded among the many state’s most high-profile ladies’s gamers. She spent the previous two seasons as affiliate head coach of the University of Minnesota ladies’s hockey crew. As a participant, she gained three Olympic silver medals and three world championship gold medals representing the U.S., and was a two-time NCAA champion taking part in for Minnesota.

The 61-year-old Sauvageau coached the Canadian ladies to win their first Olympic gold medal on the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, and was the primary feminine coach of a Canadian Hockey League crew. She spent the 1999-2000 season as an assistant coach of the QMJHL Montreal Rocket. A former police officer, she additionally based the University of Montreal’s ladies’s hockey program in 2009.

The 41-year-old Kingsbury heads to Toronto after spending the previous 5 years as basic supervisor of Hockey Canada’s nationwide ladies’s crew packages. She oversaw groups that gained the Olympic gold on the 2022 Beijing Games and world championship titles in 2021 and ’22. From Saskatchewan, she was a nationwide crew participant and member of two Olympic gold medal-winning groups.

Hirshfeld is heading to Ottawa, after spending the previous seven years overseeing the NHLCA, which in 2020 launched a feminine developmental program in figuring out 50 candidates to work instantly with NHL coaches in superior coaching periods.

Marmer is from Vermont and takes over in Boston, the place she spent the previous 12 months because the NHL Bruins participant growth and scouting assistant - the crew’s first girl to carry an on-ice position. She performed faculty hockey at Quinnipiac, and later served as the ladies’s crew’s director of participant growth from 2019-22.

Daoust will oversee the New York crew after spending the previous eight years serving as GM of the QMJHL’s crew in Val-d’Or. He beforehand was an assistant coach and gained two nationwide titles with the University of Montreal’s ladies’s hockey crew.

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