PWHL expansion ‘feels like it rips your family away.’ Here’s how the past month shook out for the Fleet.

Sport admin June 23, 2026 0 Comments

PWHL expansion ‘feels like it rips your family away.’ Here’s how the past month shook out for the Fleet.

DETROIT — The last 23 days have felt like six months for Fleet general manager Danielle Marmer.

As the PWHL expands by four teams, bringing the total to 12 for the 2026-27 season, each day in the last month has brought a deluge of phone calls, tough decisions, and difficult goodbyes for Marmer.

Between the six-phase expansion process that unfolded over the past three weeks and the PWHL entry draft, the GM is so tired of making decisions that her wife had to pick out Marmer’s draft night outfit — a crisp white Ann Taylor suit and Fleet-green heels.

Since June 1, the Fleet have suffered the departure of some of their franchise cornerstones, including both of this past season’s alternate captains, Alina Müller and Jamie Lee Rattray. In total, they have lost nine players: Müller, Rattray, Hadley Hartmetz, Zoe Boyd, Jessie Eldridge, Daniela Pejsova, Abbey Levy, Mia Biotti, and Riley Brengman.

Those players accounted for 25 percent of the Fleet’s goal scoring (19 of 74 total), and almost 30 percent of the team’s total offensive production (60 of 202 total points).

“That’s the tough part about expansion,” Fleet captain Megan Keller said. “It kind of feels like it rips your family away.”

The Fleet drafted five players, signed two in free agency, and re-signed eight, bringing their total number under contract to 16. They also hold the rights to Abby Newhook, who received a qualifying offer and will remain with the Fleet after a stellar rookie season.

But the upheaval and the departure of their stars, as well as their coach, is made more difficult by the fact that nearly every player, coach, and staff member has said this was their favorite season of hockey at any level.

“To know that that was coming to an end and was going to get blown up a little bit was heartbreaking,” Marmer said. “There were days that sucked, but it’s all part of what we have to go through to continue to put women’s hockey on the biggest stage, and to create more and more opportunities for this to be a career path for women.”

Among the more challenging days for Marmer was when coach Kris Sparre requested permission to interview for the coaching position with the expansion team in Hamilton, Ontario, near his hometown of Burlington.

Sparre, named the 2025-26 PWHL Coach of the Year for his first season with the Fleet, has two young children — a 4-year-old son and a daughter born during the 2025-26 season — and the opportunity to live closer to his family was too good to pass up.

In hindsight, Marmer said, she should have known Sparre might be among the offseason departures.

“But I was naive to it, or it was just wishful thinking,” she said. “I was really excited to continue to build with him.”

The decision was by no means easy for Sparre, who held back tears as he accepted the Coach of the Year trophy in front of five of his former players. In fact, he called it “hands down the hardest decision” he’s made in 20 years of playing and coaching in professional hockey. But he decided he owed it to his wife and family to be more present after all the sacrifices they had made for his career.

“The most fun I’ve ever had coaching hockey was in Boston,” Sparre said. “It’s because of the players and the people. Imagine having to make a decision to leave that.”

Many of the players who departed, much like Sparre, did so for personal and family reasons, Marmer said — not because Boston was the wrong fit or because they didn’t think they could win with the Fleet. Eldridge (Montreal), Rattray (Toronto), and Boyd (Hamilton) were among that group.

But the Fleet also benefited from family connections, particularly in signing Amanda Boulier. The defender, who won the Walter Cup with Montreal this season, signed a two-year deal in Boston and will reunite with her wife, Laura Bellamy, the women’s hockey coach at Harvard.

“Every single person who’s coming to our organization, whether it’s a player or a staff member, I want them to want to be in Boston, and if it’s not the place that they want to be for whatever reason, I fully respect that,” Marmer said. “We have such a special culture, and it’s because people want to be here.”

Müller wanted to remain in Boston, as she said at the team’s breakup day in May. But when the Fleet opted to use their three protections in the first phase of expansion on their defensive core, the Swiss forward had to make a business decision.

She could choose to sign with Hamilton, take a pay raise, and play for a coach she knows and loves — or hold off in hopes of staying with the Fleet and risk being involuntarily selected by an unfamiliar expansion team. (Expansion teams, if they didn’t reach five signings in Phase 2, could bindingly select players under contract from existing teams.)

“Selfishly I wanted her to hang on, but she could have gotten plucked and ended up somewhere that she didn’t want to be,” Marmer said.

Müller was Hamilton’s first target, Sparre said. Her decision to leave Boston made sense to Marmer, even though she knew it was a hard one to make.

“We’re lucky to get to compete, and that’s what I have to remind myself when these moments get hard, and when you lose people,” Marmer said. “You never want to see people leave your organization, especially when they express how much they want to be here.”