PWHL foundational player Erica Howe sees hockey parallels with her cancer journey

Erica Howe paid it forward in hockey. She wants to do the same in her cancer journey.

The goaltender who has represented Canada internationally was among the foot soldiers in the movement for a viable, sustainable professional women’s hockey league.

Howe joined the Professional Women’s Hockey Players’ Association after the Canadian Women’s Hockey League folded in 2019 and took her Markham Thunder club with it.

There was a paying women’s hockey league she could have joined, the Premier Hockey League. Howe was among the players who put their faith behind the PWHPA’s vision for four years, even if a dream league arrived too late to benefit them.

“She all along was a strong foundational player in that movement and a voice that people respected a lot,” said Hockey Hall of Famer Jayna Hefford.

Howe was the backup goalie of the Toronto Sceptres in the inaugural season of the Professional Women’s Hockey League in 2023-24. She started three games for a 1-1-0 record.

Howe retired after that season to return to her job as a firefighter in Mississauga, Ont.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer later that summer. She says it was her turn to benefit from those who had come before her.

“When I was first diagnosed and I’m sitting in the office and my oncologist tells me the plan, the plan is so clear because so many people have sat before me and raised money and funds and awareness for this cause, so that when I got there, my plan was so clear and so quickly executed because they knew what the science said and how to handle it,” recalled the 33-year-old from Orleans, Ont.

Howe saw a parallel with hockey. The PWHL opens its third season this fall after expanding from six teams to eight.

“There was another league available, but we knew that if we just all jumped over there to play in that other league, we’d get same results, but if we banded together to sit out and kind of sacrifice what we did, even if some of us wouldn’t get the opportunity to play in it, like many of my friends and teammates didn’t, we knew it would be for kind of the betterment of everyone,” Howe said. 

“You see the women who came before us who didn’t have sticks and skates, and they had to pay for everything, and they grinded so we could do better. It’s the least we could do to sit out and band together to make it better for the next wave of players coming through.

“Leaving it better than I found it. I’ve been saying that a lot, just the parallels between hockey and even like being a goalie and just trying to be present, and for my own journey, one step at a time, and then afterwards finding purpose and trying to pay it forward for the next person who has to go through this.”

After surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, Howe says her status is “no evidence of disease”. 

The Sceptres and Montreal Victoire played a December game in her honour to raise money for cancer research. The Sceptres also provided a precious service to her during treatment.

“The mental toll of being at home and not feeling well, I knew was going to be one of my biggest barriers,” Howe said. 

“I reached out to the Sceptres asking (general manager) Gina Kingsbury, ‘Do you have anything I can do because I know I’m going to need to grasp on to something normal here.’ They were like, ‘Absolutely, come into the rink. You’re part of this team.'”

Howe sharpened skates, cut sticks, handed out apparel, prepared the players’ benches for practice and helped goalie coach Brad Kirkwood with video analysis.

“My wife and I also joke about how it probably saved my life being able to go there and have tasks to do and just feel like these are my normal friends that I normally hang out with,” Howe said.

Sceptres teammate Blayre Turnbull saw Howe tackle cancer with the same strength she demonstrated as a teammate.

“She’s one of the players who had a huge role in creating this league and making sure that it was successful and that we started off on the right foot,” Turnbull said. 

“She’s someone who, years from now, I hope is able to look back and think about the last five years of her hockey career and be really proud of everything she stood for and how she showed up during that time.”

Hefford, the PWHL’s executive vice-president of hockey operations, talked with Howe about how the league could help her during treatment, and offered options.

“It was important to us to have her feel the support within our community,” said Hefford. “She chose the team route, which I think was the best one for her because she had that built-in family already in that group.”

Howe, who backstopped Clarkson to an NCAA title in 2014, played for Canadian teams at the 2014 Four Nations Cup and 2016 women’s world championship. 

She got the green light this month to ease back into recreational hockey. She’ll play Saturday in the Princess Margaret Road Hockey to Conquer Cancer tournament in Toronto to fundraise for cancer research.

“Princess Margaret is a leader in cancer research and I saw first-hand this year how important that is, so then just being able to kind of pay it forward, to make a better future for other cancer patients or anyone else who hears those words, ‘you have cancer,'” Howe said.

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