Unbelievable: Due to a setback, the head coach of PWHL Ottawa announced his departure from the team.

Unbelievable: Due to a setback, the head coach of PWHL Ottawa announced his departure from the team.

The newly formed Ottawa-based Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) team has named former Edge School head coach Carla MacLeod as its first-ever head coach.

Beginning with the 2017–18 season, MacLeod led the Edge School Female U18 Prep for four seasons. She recorded a 47-23-6 regular season record while playing for Edge in the Canadian Sport School Hockey League (CSSHL), and in the 2019-20 season, she helped lead Edge to their first-ever CSSHL Female Prep Western Championship.

For the 2021/22 U SPORTS season, the Spruce Grove, Alberta, native will lead the University of Calgary Dinos women’s team as head coach. She has now captained the Czech women’s national team for the previous two campaigns.

The Professional Women’s Hockey League, which was established in August 2023, is a professional ice hockey league in North America that consists of three teams from Canada (Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto) and three teams from the US (Boston, Minnesota, and New York). The teams will play 24 games in 2024, starting in January and ending at the end of May.

Ottawa PWHL coach Carla MacLeod has made jokes about how she “yells and screams and kicks a garbage can with my heels on” before the players take the ice to warm up for a game, a charming, laid-back style that has drawn comparisons to the way Ted Lasso manages his fictional soccer team.