Fighting for the Women’s World Championship

Though women’s teams have been playing organised hockey since 1889, by 1987 they still didn’t have an official world championship or Olympic tournament. That year, North York (then a separate city from Toronto) hosted an unofficial world championship, featuring seven teams from around the globe. The week-long event – which included hometown hero Angela James, “the first superstar of modern women’s ice hockey” – proved there was an audience for the women’s game and paved the way for the creation of the Women’s World Championship in 1990 and its inclusion in the Olympics in 1998.