Welcome to the sports media podcast. I'm your host, Richard Ditch. My producer is Patrick Antonetti.

One guest on this podcast and someone who's become one of my favorite people in the

larger Canadian sports media, happened to have gotten to know her a little bit. If you are a

hockey fan in the country of Canada, Tara Sloan is a very, very familiar name. Her impressive

resume includes a long running stint on hometown hockey for Rogers.

She's currently a host and contributor for the San Jose Sharks for NBC Sports, California.

She hosts a show on Sirius XM Canada.

And if you want to go even further back, has a pretty amazing music career.

Google Joy Drop, the band, and also has appeared on reality series.

So a very, very interesting resume and background.

Tara's on today because we're going to explore women's sports in Canada because it's a very, very interesting time, particularly with

the Toronto Tempo, beginning play next spring. And with that, I bring in Tara Sloan. Welcome to

the sports media podcast. Hello. Thank you. And thank you for the resume refresher.

You're welcome. Yeah. That's what we do on this podcast. We just read CVs. All right, here's where I want to start. If you're going to do like, like a, speaking of CVs, if we're going to sort of state where we are right now in terms of professional women's sports in Canada, the Toronto Tempo begin play next year in the WMBA, huge, very, very significant moment for women's sports in Canada. The Toronto Tempo begin play next year in the WMBA, huge, very, very significant

moment for women's sports in Canada. The PWHL has teams in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa,

and Vancouver will join. The Northern Super League, again, for the Americans who are listening,

who might not know this, that's a Canadian league founded by a former Canadian

national team member, Diana Matheson. And I would say it's sort of like one level below the

NWSL. So in some ways it's sort of a feeder league for maybe young players who eventually

will play in the NWSL or if they're really,

really gifted, maybe play like in in Europe for some of the great teams there. But these,

this is sort of where things are right now in Canada in terms of the pros. And, you know,

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