The San Jose Sharks' arena is about to roar for a different kind of game. When the Professional Women's Hockey League announced Tuesday that it will place a team in San Jose for the 2026-27 season, it marked a remarkable turning point for a region that spent more than a decade without a professional women's sports franchise in a top-tier league. The Bay Area is no longer chasing women's sports—it has become a destination city that rivals only New York and Seattle among U.S. markets with all three of the nation's most prominent women's sports leagues: the WNBA, NWSL, and PWHL.
This shift matters deeply because it reflects both the explosive growth of women's professional sports and the economic vote of confidence from major leagues and investors. A decade ago, the Bay Area hemorrhaged its men's franchises—the Raiders and A's departed, leaving crushing voids for Oakland fans. But the region's future as a sports hub now looks brighter than ever, powered by women's teams that are drawing fans, commanding significant investment, and capturing the attention of major sports figures.
The PWHL San Jose team will play most of its games at SAP Center, the very arena where the Sharks saw attendance climb from 14,216 per game in the 2024-25 season to 16,173 in 2025-26. The league itself is expanding rapidly: it launched in 2024 with six franchises, all owned and operated by the Mark Walter Group, and will grow to 12 active teams by the time San Jose joins. The WNBA, NWSL, and PWHL generate the highest attendance of any U.S. women's sports leagues, signaling that fans are ready and eager to support professional women athletes at the highest level.
But hockey is just one piece of a much larger transformation happening across the Bay Area. League One Volleyball's San Francisco franchise—backed by more than 50 owners and investors including NBA coach Steve Kerr, Olympic gold medalist Brandi Chastain, and Abby Wambach—will play its first match in 2027. A rival operation, Major League Volleyball, is launching a "NorCal" team next year spanning territory from San Jose through San Francisco and Sacramento, with ownership including three-time Olympic gold medalist Kerri Walsh Jennings and Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadivé. The Golden State Storm, a women's tackle football team, wrapped its inaugural Women's National Football Conference season with a 3-3 record after drawing more than 2,000 fans to its first home game at Laney College in March. The Women's Professional Baseball League debuts in August with one team called "San Francisco," led by founder Justine Siegal, who aims to expand the league nationally.
The contrast with the Bay Area's women's sports history is striking. The San Jose Lasers, San Jose CyberRays, and FC Gold Pride all launched and folded between 1996 and 2010, leaving the region without a top-tier women's franchise for more than a decade. Now, the Valkyries hold the distinction of being the first women's franchise in the world with a $1 billion valuation, and Bay FC is valued at more than $200 million. Nearly every emerging women's sports league, including the PWHL, now considers the Bay Area essential to building a committed fan base.
If each of these new women's sports franchises successfully launches within a year, the Bay Area could soon have more local professional women's teams than men's teams in top leagues. That would represent not just a change in the regional sports landscape, but a fundamental shift in how professional sports leagues value and invest in women's athletics.