The Bay Area's new professional women's hockey team will be called the San Jose Sea Lions, the Professional Women's Hockey League announced Tuesday morning, less than four weeks before the club plays its first home game at SAP Center.
Their first home game is a 4 p.m. matchup with the Minnesota Frost on Saturday, Dec. 5, the league said. They will share the downtown San Jose arena with the NHL's Sharks.
San Jose is one of four expansion teams joining the league this season, and the PWHL revealed all four identities on the same day. The others are the Detroit Clutch, the Hamilton Havoc and the Vegas Vanguards, CBS News reported.
The league, founded in 2023, played its first season the following year and now has 12 teams across the United States and Canada, according to KQED. San Jose is its first team in California.
Why sea lions
In its announcement, the league said the team looked to the bay's wildlife for a name and settled on an animal it described as smart, social and protective of its territory. Chris Jensen, the club's director of business operations and a San Jose native, said in the league's release that building an expansion team "requires strength in the collective."
The name also reaches back to Bay Area baseball. Team officials pointed to the San Francisco Sea Lions, a 1946 club in the West Coast Negro Baseball Association whose roster included Toni Stone, who became the first woman to play regularly in a men's pro league, CBS News and KQED reported.
The logo shows a sea lion rising out of the water inside a circle of waves. Team colors are a sunset orange, two shades of blue and an off-white the club calls sea mist. When the colors were first shown in May, the team said the orange nods to the city flag and the region's old orange groves, according to KQED.