Commentator Daniella Ponticelli and colour analyst Saroya Tinker watch their broadcast segment while waiting for May 5's PWHL game to start at Toronto's Mattamy Athletic Centre.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Daniella Ponticelli got her start broadcasting roller derby. Kenzie Lalonde once did commentary for high-school sports, often soccer in the pouring rain when half the players weren’t wearing jersey numbers. Claudine Douville got behind a microphone some 40 years ago and waited decades to meet other women doing sport play-by-play.
They’ve each had a fascinating range of broadcast experiences, but today these Canadian women share something in common. They’re among several broadcasters in the Professional Women’s Hockey League’s inaugural season, women whose voices have quickly become the soundtrack of this burgeoning pro league.
Ponticelli did play-by-play for the inaugural PWHL game on Jan. 1, a game that drew a combined 2.9 million viewers across the country over the league’s three Canadian broadcasters, CBC, Sportsnet and TSN. She called the league’s first goal. “Ella Shelton scores! History is hers,” Ponticelli proclaimed, as the jubilant New York defender was swarmed by teammates.
Ponticelli has called more than two dozen PWHL games for the Canadian networks this season, plus the league’s YouTube channel, including the current playoff series between Toronto and Minnesota. There are many women starring on PWHL broadcasts, on both sides of the border, doing play-by-play, analysis, reporting rinkside or as panelists. Not every broadcast of the PWHL is an all-female broadcast team, but many are.
Ponticelli is energetic, with a polished rasp to her voice, authoritative in her running commentary of the action, introducing viewers to players and their stories in the long-awaited new six-team pro league. She is always joined by a colour analyst, former players such as Canadian Olympic gold medalists Becky Kellar and Cheryl Pounder, or Saroya Tinker, of the former Premier Hockey Federation.
Ponticelli has called more than two dozen PWHL games since the league's debut in January. May 5's showdown between Toronto and Ottawa was the last regular-season match.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Tinker, is one of Ponticelli's regular colour analysts, as are Olympians Becky Kellar and Cheryl Pounder.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Unlike her colleagues, Ponticelli didn’t play hockey. She was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and moved to Winnipeg with her family at 10 when her mother came to work as a radiation therapist at a new cancer facility.
Ponticelli participated in dance, cheer and acrobatics, even performed as an aerial acrobat with Team Canada at the World Gymnaestrada, a global exhibition of gymnastics. She studied communications at Red River College and University of Winnipeg, graduated in 2012, then worked a variety of journalism jobs in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
For fun, she joined a roller-derby team in Saskatoon in 2016, and that full-contact sport on roller skates provided her eureka moment, when she saw two women calling a roller-derby bout. She thought, “I could do that, and I want to do that.” So she volunteered to call the action, learning to educate an audience that didn’t know roller-derby rules, and the stories of its little-known athletes.
In the years since, she has been host of shows for the Saskatchewan Rush lacrosse team, was the first female play-by-play voice for University of Regina Rams football, and the first woman on Saskatchewan Roughriders radio broadcasts as host and sideline reporter. She did colour commentary for hockey’s Junior A Regina Pats, play-by-play for University of Saskatchewan women’s hockey, for para hockey and some women’s international hockey events, too.
“I just wanted to keep saying yes,” Ponticelli said.
‘She scores!’ Listen to a sample of Ponticelli’s play-by-play from May 5′s game. Ottawa lost the game 5-2 to Toronto, missing a spot in the playoffs.
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She was invited to audition for the PWHL play-by-play in a Toronto studio, by calling a women’s game off television. She landed the gig and relocated to Toronto. She’s freelance, and opportunities keep coming her way.
Ponticelli has called games for all three Canadian teams this season. She stands all game, leaning over the table and her notes as she calls the action. Some fans stop her in the rink to chat. “This is a livelihood, it’s what I do,” Ponticelli said. “For the first time in my life, this is my full-time job.”
She and her broadcast partners prepare meticulously, consulting stats and news clips, as well as talking to coaches and players. The PWHL says viewers from some 88 countries have watched games on its YouTube channel, so it’s no hometown broadcast. They cater to fans devoted and new, watching from all over.
“It’s about constant preparation for all of us,” Kellar said. “Even now, when I watch NHL hockey games I’m studying like, ‘okay, what’s the colour guy going to say now?’”
Kellar juggles her PWHL and international hockey work with a colour-commentary job for the Toronto Marlies of the AHL. She gets coaching from veteran broadcasters, even outside hockey, such as long-time Toronto Raptors NBA broadcaster Leo Rautins.
While TSN, Sportsnet and CBC have all carried games in Canada during the PWHL’s regular season, only TSN is carrying the playoffs.
Kenzie Lalonde and Cheryl Pounder are broadcasting the other PWHL semi-final, between Montreal and Boston. They brought audiences a wild Game 1 on Thursday inside a packed Place Bell, a stunning overtime road win for Boston. The duo, now close friends, have also broadcast many of the biggest women’s international games of the past few years.
Lalonde grew up in Stittsville, Ont., played hockey for the Kanata Rangers, and later in a provincial league that also featured some of the PWHL stars – such as Toronto’s Sarah Nurse and Montreal’s Laura Stacey – she now covers. She played hockey at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., while studying business. She started out making videos for the school’s athletic department.
Lalonde tried her hand in local TV, exposed to everything from girls soccer to volleyball to ringette. Calling hockey really zinged, from her first chance in 2019, when she called the Nova Scotia high-school girls hockey championships for Eastlink Community TV. By 2021, she became the first woman to call QMJHL games on television when she covered a Halifax Mooseheads game.
“Community programming is hard to find nowadays, so I’m so grateful I was given an outlet to try different roles,” Lalonde said. “I would do play-by-play on a Quebec major-junior game, then the next morning I’d host a community TV show talking about Pancake Week. I dipped my toe in a lot of things.”
She got her foot in the door at TSN in 2021, calling the 2021 women’s world hockey championship in the Calgary bubble during the pandemic, and has been a constant voice at that event since. She holds a full-time role at TSN, doing women’s hockey play-by-play and reporting on the Montreal Canadiens. Her experience and knowledge of the players made her an obvious choice to call PWHL games.
“It’s finally happening and I want to do it justice, because it’s very much about broadcasting to new fans,” Lalonde said. “Let’s make sure these stories get told. These women are the best in the world at what they do, so let’s do this right.”
In 2011, Pounder, started doing colour on women’s games, usually just the biggest international games. She was lucky to get four broadcasts a year. Now TSN calls a lot more games at those events, and the pair may call more than one a day. Pounder, who balances international games, PWHL and NHL panel work on TSN, is thrilled by the volume of women’s hockey on TV now.
“Now I’m doing in one month what I used to do in a whole year,” Pounder said. “Now here is an opportunity for women to play hockey professionally after college and that same opportunity exists in broadcasting, too. You get a young girl hearing Kenzie’s voice, or Daniella’s and it’s becoming familiar. It’s another platform to get other voices into the game.”
A former player with an engaging, excitable cadence, Pounder marvels on air at scenes such as Marie Philip-Poulin’s edge work, or how spicy the hits are. “Mark that,” she calls to the TV production truck during the game, pushing her talk-back button to request isolated clips so she can later break down that play for the audience. She learned it from her old teammate and broadcasting veteran, Cassie Campbell Pascal.
As Thursday’s Montreal-Boston game went to overtime, Pounder and Lalonde explained to viewers that in the PWHL playoffs, it’s 5-on-5, sudden death. After Boston’s Susanna Tapani scored in OT to surprise Montreal, the two broadcasters said nothing for several seconds as the silence of the crowd told the story.
They’ve been helping others learn the trade, too, welcoming young broadcasters to shadow them in the booth, and to tell them how they can get experience.
“It’s difficult in this industry to get reps,” Pounder said. “But you need reps to get good at the craft and when you get your shot, you want to be ready”
Veteran sports broadcaster Claudine Douville provides the French-language play-by-play of PWHL Montreal games for RDS, including that overtime thriller on Thursday night. For some 40 years, Douville has worked on TV and radio, calling everything from Major League Soccer and the World Cup, to rugby, Olympic gymnastics, Esso Cups and big women’s international hockey games.
Starting soccer play-by-play in the 1990s she never saw other women in announcer roles. In recent years, she is seeing more women in the job, and especially in hockey. “That pleases me a lot,” she said.
This spring, Douville divides her time calling PWHL games and MLS matches. On Saturday, in order to broadcast Game 2 of Montreal’s playoff series with Boston, Douville will miss calling CF Montreal’s home game against Inter Miami and global soccer superstar Lionel Messi.
She is joined in the hockey booth by colour analyst Isabelle Leclaire, coach of the Université de Montréal Carabins women’s hockey team. The PWHL gives more regular opportunities for media to spend time around women players and coaches, and Douville says that has enriched her storytelling.
“I feel that we are writing history,” she said. “It’s an honour to be part of that.”
Douville says she feels honoured to be involved as the PWHL breaks new ground for women in sport.Selena Phillips-Boyle/The Globe and Mail
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