My first impression of PWHL Seattle’s general manager Meghan Turner was that she’s a whip smart, confident leader who prioritizes culture and fit in the way she’s building Seattle’s first-ever professional women’s hockey team. Tessa Bonhomme called Turner “a brilliant hockey mind who’s gonna be a problem.”

I am still relatively new to hockey myself, but the job of general manager seemed pretty straightforward: build a successful organization by winning trophies and making money. Turner’s duty as an expansion team general manager, though, is to build that team and culture from nothing.

Turner used an analogy to explain the intricacy of her job to me, which is not as cut and dried as I had assumed. “I’m a big puzzle nerd, and so that’s how I view it. How do I, as a GM, find the right pieces that complement each other to work in concert together?” As a fellow puzzle nerd, her explanation helped me make sense of what she has been up to for the past few months, and the task ahead as we inch our way toward PWHL Seattle’s inaugural season, which officially starts Nov. 21.

A winding road back to hockey

Turner’s route to PWHL general manager was circuitous, but it helps give perspective to how she views the ‘puzzle’ before her. She jokingly gives both blame and credit to Boston Fleet general manager Danielle Marmer for where she’s ended up. Marmer and Turner grew up playing against each other, since Turner is from New Hampshire, and Marmer was in Vermont. The pair then played together for four years at Quinnipiac University, where Turner graduated with a BS and an MBA.

After graduation, Turner got a consulting job at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Boston. On top of working 55 hours per week at PwC, she played professional hockey, first in the CWHL and later the PWHPA. She told the Boston Globe that she’d often leave her house at 7 a.m., work all day, head to practice, get back home at 10 and work some more. Eventually it came time for Turner to hang up the skates.

“I pretty much decided that I was gonna move forward in my consulting career, and that’s what the next 30 years of my life would be,” Turner said. She was happy and loved her job and coworkers, and she had signed up for service in the Army National Guard. When the PWHL was announced, Turner was excited but didn’t expect to be involved. During our conversation she laughed at her past naivete. “You make a decision, and life just throws a total curve ball at you.”

This particular curve ball was thrown by her old friend Marmer, who had also moved to Boston to work in player development and scouting for the Bruins. The week before Turner was set to ship off to basic training, Marmer, who had been offered a job as PWHL Boston’s inaugural GM, asked Turner to come with her. Though Turner described her decision as “a leap,” she felt supported in her transition. From her family, from Marmer, and from her colleagues at PwC who pushed her out the door, telling her, “You’ve got to do this. This is like a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

Does she regret her decision to return to hockey? “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” she said.

Turner worked two years for the Boston Fleet as assistant general manager. When expansion was announced, league executives asked the current GMs, including Marmer, if there was anyone they would recommend to lead the two new teams. Marmer told the Boston Globe that in her mind, Turner was not only the obvious choice, but the only choice. “They were like ‘Great, glad you said that, because we were going to talk to her anyway.’ ”

Building the puzzle

Now that we have the context, we can get back into how Turner has approached building the puzzle that is PWHL Seattle. She starts, as many of us do, by looking at the picture on the box. For her, this means deciding on an image of how a successful PWHL team looks. Unlike the inaugural six PWHL general managers, who built their teams with no real knowledge of what the league would become, Turner has the benefit of looking back at the past two years of the league.

With hindsight, she sees that picture clearly. Turner was not shy to admit that it looks a lot like back-to-back league champions, the Minnesota Frost. “There’s a lot to pull from in terms of what they’ve done in [both] seasons. They weren’t the clear front-runner, but they got hot at the right times, and they pushed through playoffs. They had speed, and they had endurance and stamina, and some of the things that they do more tactically on the ice to spread teams out and make it difficult for teams to play against them.”

The picture of a successful team is a championship-winning team, yes, but Turner knows that isn’t the whole story. “Beyond that, for me, it’s making sure that we are building a good culture.” For Turner, it’s not just the results that make a successful team, but it’s also how they get there. “I want to win in a way where I feel good about us winning and feel like we are jelling as a group. That means a lot to me, too, just to make sure that the culture is good, and players want to come to Seattle and they want to stay in Seattle.”

From our discussion, the image that the finished puzzle will show became clear: Turner is planning on building a winning team with a great culture.

So how does she go about figuring out which pieces will fit? “Hockey’s a unique sport,” Turner said. “You really need your full roster to play their parts. You can’t just rely on a few good players, you need everyone to step up and fill in the capacity that they’re put in to fill.”

Drafting and signing to create a team from scratch

Turner had three main opportunities to find the right pieces for her puzzle: the initial/exclusive signing window, the expansion draft, and the entry draft.

“The initial signing window was interesting,” Turner said. “I was confident going into it, and I knew the players… But it was a really fast pace, and I knew it was going to be, but I maybe underestimated just how competitive it was.”

After a “crazy” Day 1, Turner felt more confident moving forward with the rest of the process and felt she knew what to expect. And why wouldn’t she be confident? The first player she signed to PWHL Seattle was Hilary Knight, one of the greatest hockey players ever. She then rounded out the window by signing the maximum five players and was praised for her work during the window.

For Turner, the initial signing period was about getting her core pieces together, and then she went about building around them, making sure the additional pieces were a good fit with the foundation she had started. She went into draft day with multiple different strategies, prepared to “play off of what Cara [Gardner Morey] is doing in Vancouver, in literally five minutes or so in the moment.” She was happy with the plan they ended up using, and with the outcome, telling me that her team crafted the roster in the way that she had hoped.

Then, in the entry draft, unlike the NHL conventional wisdom of drafting the best prospect available, Turner said she and her staff “drafted with specific needs in mind,” and felt good about where they ended up. They pulled some surprising moves, like drafting a goalie in the second round, but the plan was the same. They selected “who we thought was the best available and also fit what we needed.”

When asked if there was a consistent thread that tied all her selections together, Turner said: “The first one that pops into my head is just competitiveness, and then maturity.” They looked for athletes who are willing to learn and grow and fill different roles. Turner thinks that she has that with her current roster. “A lot of the personalities from my perspective are just gritty and competitive. They want to win every single day, and they’re going to push each other.”

Some hiccups still expected

Turner knows the road to success will not be smooth 100 percent of the time.

“It’s difficult when you put a player that’s been on the top line their whole life and try to retrofit them into maybe a third- or fourth-line role and vice versa, so sometimes you have to ask players to kind of reinvent themselves and then help them with that process. So to me, It’s a big puzzle, and all the pieces fit together. And in many different ways, just finding the right way that fits and understanding that there’s no one way that that’s going to work.”

It seems, then, that hockey is a bit different from a puzzle in some key ways. For one, you can change the pieces slightly to fit what you need. You can also find a different solution and end up with a different picture than what you thought you were building. This type of flexibility is crucial for a team that has never played together.

Throughout our interview, Turner showed that she has the keen eye and instincts of a great leader, but at the end, her answers showed a bit of her heart. With her experience in two other failed leagues, I had to ask her what made the PWHL different. “Oh gosh,” she told me, smiling, “It’s everything about it, I guess.” She described the PWHL as “leveled up.” Players, investors, leadership, the people behind the scenes who don’t get the credit they deserve, are all 100 percent in… They didn’t dip their toes in. It was, ‘We’re doing this, and we’re going to make it good.'”

Turner is no stranger to Seattle. She told Daily Faceoff, “My wife lived out there for a year after college, and then her twin sister joined her after college. Her sister ended up staying there for about nine years. So, we would go out there a lot to visit. So, it’s still kind of a secondary home base for my sister-in-law, who I’m really close to. It’s cool to kind of go back in a different capacity.”

The PWHL expansion cemented Seattle’s status as a big player in women’s sports. There’s no doubt that Turner is committed to making this team a part of the city.

“I really want to make this great for Seattle. I say it all the time… how excited [the fans] are, and I am genuinely so excited to bring the women’s side of the sport to Seattle. And I am really excited to meet people and meet fans and be out in the community. So I’m just excited to see everyone, I’m excited to meet everyone, Excited to be at [Climate Pledge Arena], see the fans and everything, so I’m just very excited. And it comes from a genuine desire to make Seattle the best market for our league and obviously hoist a championship trophy at the end of the year.”

Her excitement was infectious and made us Sound Of Hockey feel ready to run through a wall. It’s clear that Turner is ready to lead Seattle into a bright future.

When asked about Turner moving on, her friend and former boss Danielle Marmer told the Boston Globe “she’s going to have something really special in Seattle.” And I agree.