Vancouver has waited a long time to fill the Pacific Coliseum again with top-flight hockey. The building has seen nearly everything since it opened in 1968, from years as the home of the NHL’s Canucks to various minor-league hockey teams to legendary rock concerts to ice skating competitions during the 2010 Olympics. Yet for all its history, the Coliseum had spent recent years in an unusual in-between space: still iconic, still active, but without the right permanent tenant to match its scale and potential.
That changed almost overnight with the arrival of the PWHL’s newest organization. The team now known as the Goldeneyes became the first PWHL team ever to be the primary tenant in their home arena, a distinction that has reshaped both the league’s expectations and the building’s identity. The transformation, from the first conversations to a large, fully branded home for women’s hockey came together in a sprint that even surprised the people leading it.
Talks began literally just one year ago, recalled Karen Massicotte, the Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Business Development for the Pacific Northwest Exhibition (PNE), the non-profit org that owns and operates the Coliseum and the adjacent Agrodome. “Amy [Scheer] and I were on a call on December 23rd. From then until we found out in late March we were just trying to come up with the perfect partnership, and then it was announced in April. Probably one of the shortest turnarounds I’ve ever seen, but we just had a perfect connection with the PWHL that made it worth doing,” said Massicotte, who has been with the PNE for 11 years.
From the start, the Coliseum was central to the PNE’s pitch. Built for major events, steeped in Vancouver sports history, and uniquely flexible thanks to recent years of holding out for just the right tenant, it offered something no other PWHL market had: full control and full identity in a storied venue.
“The focus of our sales is always the venues, though we’re also selling the city,” Massicotte said. “In this case, we were always selling the Pacific Coliseum as a huge benefit. Amy mentioned how the league was never the primary tenant in the buildings it played in. We knew we could offer that and we built our opportunity to do that. Primary tenancy was always our focus.”
The timing worked because the building was ready for it. Since the WHL’s Vancouver Giants moved out in 2016, the PNE made a strategic choice: no permanent tenant until they found the right fit. The venue remained busy—concerts, exhibitions, seasonal events, and steady work as a soundstage—but without a single anchor.
That flexibility meant that when the PWHL awarded Vancouver its first-ever expansion team, the PNE could do something no other market had done: build a home that felt like it belonged entirely to one team. And the results are everywhere.
“It was teamwork between PNE and the PWHL,” Massicotte said. The league handled branding concepts; the PNE made sure they were integrated into every space where fans would experience them. And that effort went far beyond dasher boards or mid-bowl signage.
The effect is striking: a modern, unified identity layered onto a building that has hosted so many memorable events. For many Vancouver hockey fans, walking into the Coliseum now feels both familiar and completely reimagined.
The numbers confirm the work is paying off. Game one was a record-setting sellout of 14,958. Massicotte said she wasn’t surprised by the turnout; rather, that she felt “validated.” Reviewing league attendance numbers from Season Two and the massive success of last January’s Takeover Tour game at Rogers Arena, she was “positive we could get to 10,000. The fact we could do a sellout opening night speaks to the interest in women’s sports in our community. The value that the PWHL is offering families in a season package is high. Families want to see hockey at a price they can afford. There was a gap in the market that the PWHL has filled.”
All of this is not going unnoticed by the women who make the PWHL tick—its best-in-the-world hockey players. Canadian National Team icon and Vancouver Alternate Captain Sarah Nurse, who scored the first goal in Goldeneyes’ history, was emotionally moved by the opening game experience.
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The success of the Goldeneyes’ lift-off in Vancouver, which continues on December 6 with the team's second home game, has accelerated other long-term plans, too. The PNE had always intended to seek a naming rights partner for the Coliseum, but the timeline shifted dramatically once the PWHL came aboard. “We were going to post it in 2027,” Massicotte said. Instead, the PNE announced recently that it is now open to a partner whose brand can align with both the venue’s legacy and the team/league’s community-focused mission. “We're working closely with the partnership team at the PWHL to make sure the Goldeneyes can be part of that,” she said. The goal is a three-way alignment: PNE, the Goldeneyes, and a sponsor equally committed to impact. “As a non-profit, the PNE is all about that. We hope that naming rights partner can be that third spoke in making that impact.”
For the PWHL, Vancouver is more than an expansion success. It’s a model of what the league can look like when a organization has a true home. League staff have noted how striking the full-venue branding is, how different it feels to walk into a building that looks and operates like a PWHL arena from the ground up. It is, in many ways, the first of its kind.
The Goldeneyes don’t just play in the Pacific Coliseum. They’ve revived it. And together with the PNE, they’ve given women’s professional hockey something it has never had before: a home built entirely for them.
Check out the gallery below for more photos of the Pacific Coliseum's Goldeneyes-heavy look.
