MILAN — Shortly after the U.S. women’s hockey team landed in Milan late last week, captain Hilary Knight took to TikTok to give her followers a tour of the Olympic Village rooms.
In the two-minute video, Knight shows her Team USA merch, her Olympics pins, her bed, her bathroom and even her adopted house plant. The post was boosted by the official accounts for the PWHL and the Seattle Torrent, her current team, and now has nearly 110,00 views.
Knight is one of many hockey players juggling multiple jobs at the Olympics. In addition to the pursuit of medals and national glory, both the PWHL and NHL have asked their stars to spend a bit more time creating content. The two leagues are hoping to use their players’ stardom and their unique access inside the sports world’s most restricted media zone to help grow the professional game.
“We’ve talked to players already,” NHL chief content officer Steve Mayer said in an interview. “We’re going to talk to them when they come to New York, we’re going to talk to them when they’re boarding the airplane, and we’re going to remind them during the tournament how important it is to the show the world what’s going on [at the Olympics].”
The proactive, detailed encouragement by professional leagues to turn athletes into content creators sharply underlines changing dynamics in the overall sports and media landscape, and at the Olympics themselves. To protect the companies that spend billions for exclusive storytelling rights to the Games, the Olympics has restrictive rules about what, where and how outside companies (whether they are media outlets, corporations or hockey leagues) can discuss the Olympics. While there are rules for athletes too, their access gives them unique freedoms. Sportico wrote earlier this week about the broader emergence of Olympians as social media sensations.
Hockey players, however, are team sport Winter Olympians who play professionally in leagues looking to capitalize on the millions of global viewers that might stumble onto the sport over the next two weeks. No longer do those professional leagues view the Olympics as taking the spotlight away from their season; rather, they want to leverage any social media boost the Winter Games affords their players, for the leagues’ benefit.
Amy Scheer, executive vice president of business operations at the PWHL, told Sportico that the league held meetings with U.S. and Canadian players late last year, giving them pointers for how to show up on Instagram and TikTok and drive engagement to the league. Among the league’s specific recommendations: film tours of the dining hall, their rooms in the athlete’s village, and pin trading. In addition to Knight’s room tour, the league recently reposted a TikTok from Czechia forward Kristýna Kaltounková, who plays for the PWHL’s New York Sirens, unboxing a gear bag that has more than 233,000 views.
“What’s the opportunity for you here today going to the Olympics?” Scheer said she asked players at the meetings, held during the USA-Canada Rivalry Series. “How do you build your brand? How do you turn these folks into PWHL fans, and how does it allow us to build our brand to grow the league?”
Before Friday’s Opening Ceremony even took place, the PWHL said its players competing in Milan had already added 80,000 new followers across Instagram and TikTok.
For the NHL, whose players are back in the Games for the first time since 2014, the instructions have been similar to those in the PWHL. The league has shared a one-sheet guide with players that shows how to best capture mobile-optimized video, Mayer said. It is also interested in featuring whoever has joined the NHL stars for their time in Italy.
“When the players are outside of the IOC’s restricted areas, we believe we’ll get a significant amount of content from players, their families, their wives and girlfriends,” he said. “We’ve built relationships with a lot of those players and their families for that purpose.”
Scheer said she pointed PWHL players to the example of Team USA Rugby star Ilona Maher, whose charismatic TikToks from the 2024 Summer Olympics turned the bronze medalist into an overnight household name. “What she did in Paris was so unbelievable,” Scheer said.
To be sure, there are limits to how much leagues can lean on players for social media engagement. “The players have a lot more access and the ability to post things that, as a for profit league, we cannot,” Scheer said. As a result, the PWHL has asked players to collaborate with the league on some social media posts, and it supplied athletes with a list of other news outlets that will be present in Milan to tag. After the U.S. beat Czechia in their opening game on Thursday, thanks in part to two goals from Hayley Scamurra, the PWHL, Scamurra and the Montreal Victoire collaborated on an Instagram post celebrating the win.
Specifically off limits for league collaborations, however, are posts from players that contain video or mention athlete sponsors.
Ultimately, Scheer said that the PWHL wants to make the content creation lift “as easy for them as possible,” and has offered to provide editing services to the players.
“We’re trying to get players to be cameramen for us and video producers for us,” Mayer said, ”because that’s really valuable for us.”
