Team Canada captains donate treasured jerseys to Great Canadian jersey project

Marie-Philip Poulin prepared for the Beijing Olympics four years ago without a team.

The Team Canada captain, like most of the players on the Canadian and American women’s hockey teams, was holding out for the creation of what they called a viable, sustainable professional women’s league. As such, they weren’t playing anywhere, just training with their national teams and biding their time until the Olympics.

Things have certainly changed. That league they dreamed of sprang to life as the PWHL in 2023 and has been a booming success. Poulin spent her Sunday scoring twice, including the overtime winner, as her Montreal Victoire beat the Minnesota Frost in a sold-out arena. On Friday, the Canadian women’s hockey team for the Milan-Cortina Olympics will be officially named.

It is a hectic time.

“This whole Olympic year, it’s all new to us,” says Poulin. Even in the days of the CWHL, the semi-professional league that preceded the PWHL, Olympians left their club teams for six months to train in a centralized camp. The new league can’t allow its best players to leave for such a time.

“And so all of this is new, but we’ve been working for many years to create this professional league, and that’s what we want,” Poulin says. “It’s a lot of hockey, but it’s part of being a professional league, and it’s great.”

For the 34-year-old Poulin, who has scored a ridiculous seven goals in Olympic gold-medal finals, the creation of that league was on her mind as she donated a jersey to The Great Canadian Jersey, a Rogers campaign that invites Canadians to turn in old jerseys, which will then be turned into unique pieces by designer Cameron Lizotte.

Poulin donated a jersey from her first year with Montreal in the PWHL.

“To me, it does mean a lot,” she says. “It’s just the realization of many years of progress to create this league.” It was also important to represent the women who never had a chance to play in a league like the PWHL. “So, it’s very special,” she says.

Connor McDavid, the Edmonton Oilers superstar, also went back to his roots, donating a jersey from the York-Simcoe Lions, the triple-A team from his early playing days in the Toronto suburbs.

“This one obviously has a special place in my heart,” McDavid says. “Some of the best memories I have playing hockey are still from wearing that jersey as kid, right?”

But if Poulin and her teammates are dealing with a different pre-Olympic experience, McDavid’s is that much more unusual because he has never been to one before. NHL players are returning to the Olympics for the first time since 2014.

“I couldn’t be more excited to go and be a part of the Olympics and be a part of the biggest sporting event in the world,” McDavid says.

“In 2018, when they announced that the NHLers weren’t going, I remember being initially disappointed, but not understanding the magnitude of it.”

McDavid, 28, was then just a kid at the start of his pro career, but the long NHL absence meant a lot of his contemporaries never got the chance to play in an Olympics.

“You know now how disappointing it is for those guys,” he says. “But it’s exciting that we’re able to go now. It’s going to be great for us guys that haven’t had that opportunity before in our careers.”

For Poulin, who has been on the Olympic stage four times already, she knows what the tournament will bring. “It’s about who’s going to be ready, and who’s going to elevate,” she says. “Obviously, we all go through the same thing, and it’s whoever’s going to be ready, come February.”

Jersey donations can be dropped off at participating Rogers stores until Jan. 15.