It’s been a whirlwind of a month for Malaika Underwood.
After taking over as the PWHL Players Association’s executive director on March 3, she visited all six PWHL markets to meet with players and try to understand a bit more about each team’s day-to-day routine.
She saw where players train and attended a game at each arena, all to help give her perspective on the day-to-day working life for PWHL athletes.
It’s all part of the former elite baseball player’s plan to improve communication and empower players, who launched the league in 2023 with an eight-year collective bargaining agreement in hand.
“This has been an amazing ride for so many of them and it’s such an impressive movement that these players have been a central part in,” Underwood said in an interview with CBC Sports. “Helping advocate for them and be their collective voice is really exciting for me.”
Underwood played both volleyball and baseball at a high level, captaining the University of North Carolina’s volleyball team and spending 17 years on the USA Baseball national team. After her playing career ended, she helped coach that same team to a Women’s Baseball World Cup silver medal in 2024.
She also understands the corporate side of sports, having advised sports organizations and players’ associations, including the NFLPA, WNBAPA and MLBPA, to name a few.
Now, she’s taken the reins of the association representing players in the PWHL, just as the league is considering expanding by as many as two teams as early as next season.
Underwood’s job is to make sure players are always at the forefront of decisions like that.
Expansion will create more jobs across the league and is a sign of the PWHL’s success. But it could also mean an expansion draft, which could upend players’ lives.
And as players wait for news about expansion, uncertainty weighs on them.
“They need to feel comfortable coming to me and saying, hey, this uncertainty around expansion, for example, is putting us in a tough spot because our landlord just came and said we’ve got two weeks to tell them before renewing our lease or not, and we don’t want to renew it for a long term if there’s a potential for expansion and for expansion trades,” Underwood said.
“Those are real world issues and that’s what I deal with on a day-to-day basis, which is meaningful work.”
Underwood replaces Burke
Underwood takes over from veteran NHL executive Brian Burke, who had agreed to a two-year term with the players’ association when the league launched.
His no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is approach was exactly what the association needed when it launched, according to Liz Knox, a retired goaltender who negotiated the collective bargaining agreement with the league and now serves on the association’s executive as its secretary.
In his interview for the job, Knox said Burke wanted the next hire, whether it was to work with him or to follow in his footsteps, to be a woman and preferably a woman of colour.
Underwood’s resume blew the association’s executive away, but Knox said it was getting to talk to her and hearing the passion in her voice that convinced them she was the person they were looking for.
WATCH | Underwood on some of the top issues she aims to tackle with PWHLPA:
A month into the job, Malaika Underwood has been getting to know players and hearing their concerns.
“[She] just has such a wealth of knowledge of definitely players’ associations, but especially her experience in women’s players’ associations I think was a valuable asset to us,” Knox said. “Being a retired professional athlete herself, she also understands what it’s like to be in their shoes. It was just a match made in heaven.”
While he’s stepped away from his post at the helm, Underwood said Burke has offered her advice any time she needs it.
“From day one, it was imperative that the union find long-term leadership capable of sustaining and building on what the players have fought to create,” Burke said in a press release announcing Underwood’s hire. “Malaika Underwood is that leader. Her vision, expertise, and commitment to players make her the perfect choice.”
Addressing reserve player system
When Knox was a goaltender in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League, many of the issues players dealt with were expressed in the locker room to each other. They felt there weren’t many avenues to advocate for change.
Now, players can do that through their union, something that may be a brand new idea to a 22-year-old player fresh out of college.
In addition to the uncertainty around expansion, the reserve player system has been one of the top issues on Underwood’s list.
She said many players feel the league has outgrown the reserve list. Each team can have three reserve players, who earn only about $15,000 US per year when they’re not an active roster player. They also aren’t entitled to the same benefits under the collective bargaining agreement, including the housing stipend.
“But the expectations are still very high of a reserve player to be ready to play, to participate in team activities,” Underwood said. “So just making sure that from our perspective, as long as there is that spot on a roster, we’re doing what we can within the CBA to take care of them.”
It’s the kind of issue that’s come up as the league has made it through the better part of two seasons, working with a collective bargaining agreement signed months before the first puck dropped.
“We did our best to kind of imagine every scenario,” Knox said.
“But the reality is once you put it into practice, you start to see the areas of opportunity. So I think the reserve pool was a fix for year one, but I definitely think that there’s room to expand those roster sizes or certainly down the road have some sort of pipeline that offers a little bit more to the players who are still developing.”
Raising the bar
The collective bargaining agreement is in place until July 31, 2031. By then, the league could look radically different.
The number of teams is certain to grow, and by 2031, the league may have secured the national U.S. television rights deal it covets. But the collective bargaining agreement signed back in 2023 doesn’t spell out revenue sharing for players from a deal like that.
Nor will the players at the bottom of the salary scale see significant salary increases in the current agreement. The minimum salary was set at $35,000 in the first season and increases by three per cent in each year of the deal.
But the agreement helped the players set a bar, one that was higher and more ingrained than anything professional female hockey players had ever experienced, and one that Underwood is now tasked with continuing to raise. That includes discussions around increasing salaries.
“It may not happen right away, but we’ll always be strategically moving in that direction,” she said.
“There will be an opportunity, if not before, when we renegotiate at the end of this term around the collective bargaining agreement…to make that one of our asks, one of our demands, one of our priorities.”
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If the agreement gets re-opened before 2031, it’ll be because both sides want something, Underwood said.
Beyond helping players navigate the current agreement, her job is to always be ready if it does open up early.
“I am always thinking about what are the things, minimum salary and other issues, that are priorities for the players that should we have the opportunity, these are the things that we’re going to bring to the table that we’re immediately going to want to change.”
As players continue to grow in the league, there’s also “an active conversation” around having more transparency around players’ salaries, which is something players and their agents may find helpful when negotiating contracts.
The league and players’ association previously agreed not to reveal specific player salaries.
“I think that there is potential for that,” Underwood said. “Ultimately, it will be up to the players to decide if that’s something that they do inevitably want to disclose. There were reasons early on that they didn’t want to do it, but it has come up in my team meetings and conversations.”
