Inside MVP Natalie Spooner’s grueling return to the PWHL: ‘I can come back from this’
EXETER, Ont. — Five months after tearing her ACL, the first MVP in the history of the Professional Women’s Hockey League was skating alone in a community rink.
While most PWHL players were gearing up for the 2024-25 season in late October, Natalie Spooner was gliding down the ice and balancing on her surgically repaired knee at the South Huron Recreation Centre — an arena over 30 miles away from her home in London, Ont.
It was repetitive, unglamorous work. It’s also atypical for elite hockey players to be back to the basics one month before their season starts.
But these were among the necessary steps in Spooner’s road back to the Toronto Sceptres lineup, which came to its conclusion on Tuesday night against the Minnesota Frost.
The game — where she played 21 minutes and tallied an assist in a 3-2 overtime win — was the culmination of nine months of relentless work and tedious rehabilitation after her season ended in Game 3 of the 2024 PWHL playoffs.
“It just took a lot of time and a lot of rehab,” Spooner said. “It’s all time-consuming.”
And it wasn’t even the first time in the last two years that Spooner has had to claw her way back to playing.
In April 2023, Spooner made an ambitious return to the Canadian women’s national team only four months after giving birth to her son, Rory.
She played in a few exhibition games with the now-defunct Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association, when the group was still barnstorming before the launch of the PWHL.
But as things ramped up ahead of the 2023 women’s world championships in Brampton, Ont., she could barely open her legs in a skating stride without pain. Because she was still breastfeeding Rory, who was born Dec. 6, 2022, Spooner couldn’t do much to adequately manage the pain.
“I wouldn’t say I played how I normally would,” she said.
Spooner played in all seven games for Team Canada, scoring two goals and six points as Canada lost in the gold medal game to Team USA. But after the tournament, she took a full six months away from the rink to recover.
The pubic bone injury she was dealing with postpartum largely required rest to fully heal. But even that was sometimes difficult.
“I couldn’t lie down and be comfortable, I couldn’t sit and be comfortable and I couldn’t walk because then it made it worse,” she said. “To be honest, through that rehab, there were times where I wondered, ‘Am I not going to make it back?’”
Spooner did make it back to the ice in October 2023, one month after she was selected in the fourth round of the inaugural PWHL draft by the Toronto Sceptres. She took part in the team’s November training camp, but took some extra days off to rest, and mostly was in a no-contact jersey. “I would go end-to-end in scrimmages and everyone just parted the seas,” Spooner said.
She only played around seven minutes in one preseason game, just to “give it a spin.” But it was all part of a careful plan to ensure Spooner was ready to play when the season started in January 2024.
And on Jan. 1, when Toronto faced off against New York in the first PWHL game ever, Spooner was in the lineup. A few days later, she scored the Toronto franchise’s first goal in its first win.
Toronto started the 2024 season slow, going 1-4 out of the gate, and Spooner admits it took her around five games to feel good on the ice. After that initial stretch, Spooner scored 18 goals and 25 points in 19 regular-season games for Toronto.
She was the most dominant forward in the league and a critical driver of Toronto’s offense. Spooner scored 29 percent of Toronto’s goals and nobody in the league scored more game-winning goals (5), first goals (5) or insurance goals to put a game out of reach (4) than Spooner.
On the season, she led the PWHL in goals (20) and points (27), and eventually was named league MVP and Forward of the Year.
“I don’t know if any other player will have a season like that again,” said Toronto captain Blayre Turnbull.
Spooner’s only goal heading into the season was to get back and play. She didn’t have any goal totals in mind — she doesn’t really set goals that way to begin with — or dreams of winning any individual hardware. She did have a bit of a chip on her shoulder, though.
“It’s weird, you become pregnant and people think your career is over,” Spooner said. “I felt like I was a little brushed off.”
Spooner was among the first high-profile players to regain her place on Team Canada – and now in the PWHL – post-pregnancy. Her close friend Meghan Mikkelson returned to the Canadian national team only a few months postpartum in 2016. Minnesota Frost captain Kendall Coyne Schofield starred in the PWHL’s inaugural season only six months after giving birth to her son, Drew.
By the postseason, everybody knew what Spooner was capable of. She scored the first-ever PWHL playoff goal in Toronto’s opening game against Minnesota, which the team won 4-2. But in Game 3, she took a hit along the boards, crawled off the ice and did not return to the game.
“I knew something was wrong before the hit,” Spooner said. “It all happened so fast, but my leg coming towards the boards already felt like it was going … When I saw her (Minnesota forward Grace Zumwinkle) coming, I was like, I literally just have to fall because my leg is loose.
“I think it was super fluky. I don’t know if I was stuck in a rut, but I don’t feel like there was any big moment that made it happen.”
After the game, Spooner thought maybe she had just tweaked something. There wasn’t that much pain, and the swelling was minor. But an MRI confirmed that Spooner had torn her ACL; she would miss the rest of the season. Without Spooner, Toronto only scored one goal in two playoff games, and lost the series to Minnesota — the eventual champions.
“I was devastated because we were doing so well as a team and we were in the playoffs,” she said. “But at the same time in my head, I was like, ‘I should have confidence in this because I literally rehabbed all last summer.’
“I was able to come back from that. I can come back from this.”
The first month post-operation was a bit of a shock for Spooner.
It’s one thing to know that you’re about to have reconstructive knee surgery. It’s another to feel it.
“Oh my God, they just blew up my knee,” she thought at the time. “I broke my jaw before, had a baby, but (the surgery) was a shock to me, to be like: ‘What is going on?’”
In those early days, Spooner mostly focused on managing swelling and regaining basic range of motion. To get her knee to bend, she would lie down with her foot on the wall and try to slide it down, bending the knee as far as it could go. Eventually, she worked on fully straightening her leg, putting a weight on her knee to push it down.
“That was probably the ickiest part,” she said.
After three months, Spooner finally fully extended her leg. And as her recovery progressed, she added more strength into her physiotherapy routine. By early September, she was back in her skates.
On the ice, Spooner took baby steps and worked on fundamentals with skate coach Kathy McLlwain.
“The first day we just skated around the ice like public skating,” said McLlwain, who works with the OHL’s Windsor Spitfires and NHLers such as Jared McCann. “Sometimes I had to pull back the reins because she’s so determined.”
By late October, Spooner was doing squats and single-leg strength moves on her surgically repaired knee. She was doing physio and Pilates and could do just about everything on the ice with McLlwain other than full-speed accelerations and stops. In November, she reported to Sceptres training camp, mostly skating before or after full team practices with defender Megan Carter, who also started the season on long-term injured reserve.
As Spooner progressed in the gym, she leveled up in her skates, eventually getting on the ice five times per week, skating full-speed and doing skills sessions.
“It’s just repetition,” Spooner said. “It’s so different from other injuries I’ve had where it’s just resting, or maybe taking a day off. Here you don’t need a day off, you just need more reps.”
The Sceptres, and Spooner’s medical team, made it a point to not rush her return. Everyone wanted the MVP back, but it was more important for Spooner to return safely, fully healthy and with low risk of re-injury. There’s a lot coming up in the next year, too, with the 2025 women’s world championships in April and the 2026 Milan Olympics, which a healthy Spooner should be a fixture in — as she has been for 3 Olympics and 10 worlds.
And as lengthy a process as it was, Spooner said ACL rehab was easier in many ways than her comeback after childbirth.
“People can tell me, ‘If you do this exercise, it’s going to make your knee better,’ and you see a nice progression week after week,” she explained. “But post-pregnancy, there were so many unknowns, and taking time off and resting, and wondering how much you can push it.
“That was more difficult for me because it affected my daily life, too. Whereas this, once I could walk again and move, I wouldn’t say it affected me as a person. At the three-month mark I could’ve gone on as a regular person and just lived a regular life if I was not a high-performance athlete.”
By Jan. 20, Spooner was cleared for contact and returned to full team practices. She traveled with the Sceptres for away games in Minnesota and Montreal to get back in the swing of a pro hockey season. But without being cleared to play, the most Spooner could do was keep the energy up around the team – as she’s known to do. Head coach Troy Ryan said the bus was much louder than usual with Spooner around. And Turnbull said Spooner “changed the energy in the room.”
“She’s just someone that’s always positive and laughing and telling jokes,” Turnbull said. “It’s been great to have her back.”
Last week, while the PWHL was on a week-long international break, Spooner passed some final tests in the gym and after some discussions with her medical team, was officially cleared to return for Tuesday night’s game against Minnesota.
“Can’t write it any better,” Spooner said with a laugh. “Got hurt against them — seems like the right time, I guess.”
Spooner’s return does actually come at an important time for the Toronto Sceptres.
The team worked its way into a playoff spot after sitting last in the league standings for most of the first half of the season. And on Monday, No. 1 centre Sarah Nurse was put on long-term injured reserve, opening up a massive hole at the top of the lineup.
Toronto doesn’t need Spooner to be a franchise savior like she was last season. Even asking that of her would be unfair, given the time she’s missed.
Nine months is enough time to make it back into the lineup. But it’s not enough (realistically) to come back and dominate.
“I’m not going to come back and be like, woohoo and drive the puck wide and beat someone and feel great,” Spooner said frankly. “It’s going to feel different, and I’m going to have to work every single day to get back to where I want to be.”
The rehab process isn’t over for Spooner, and she said after the game she has a lot to work on still. She hopes to get up to speed in five games like her last comeback. But Spooner also knows she might not feel 100 percent until the summer, or even heading into next season. And she’s made peace with that.
“You never really know, you just have to go through it,” Spooner said. “You can’t get down on yourself when you’re not performing how you want to perform.
“You just have to give yourself grace.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
NHL, Women's Hockey
2025 The Athletic Media Company
