By Kate Shefte
The Seattle Times
(TNS)
She’s launching a second Professional Women’s Hockey League team, but Seattle Torrent general manager Meghan Turner has been much more involved in the assembly this time around.
When college teammate and friend Danielle Marmer was selecting and signing the members of the inaugural PWHL Boston team, Turner had to be informed by weekly snail mail. Turner was at Army basic training in Fort Jackson, S.C., being broken down and built back up.
Turner was 29 years old, surrounded by 18-year-olds. That came with a downside—she’d built a life of her own already and was used to a certain level of autonomy. Basic training, famously, isn’t big on that.
There was nothing particularly poignant in her update letter, Marmer recalled. She shared that she had just signed three big free agents—Hilary Knight, Megan Keller and Aerin Frankel. She wrote about the excitement of this great and rapid experiment, a true professional women’s league finally materializing.
After weeks of feeling isolated while surrounded by people, Turner said Marmer’s letter took her out of her “own little world” filled with obstacle courses, repelling, marching and field exercises. One, at that point, with no release date.
“I think I cried when I got it, because it’s a difficult experience, and it’s really negative. It’s the soldierization process,” Turner said.
Turner wasn’t technically on board with PWHL Boston when she left for South Carolina, but the offer had been floated. Marmer had to be patient, with a piece of advice stuck in her head.
“When I was leaving the (NHL’s Boston) Bruins, the advice that I got was, ‘Who in this do you trust with your life, and can you bring that person with you?’” she said. “And I knew Meghan was the answer to that question.”
They played hockey at Quinnipiac while Turner was earning her bachelor’s degree and MBA in four years. Marmer called her the smartest person in the locker room, someone she admired and was maybe even a little jealous of. Turner was ahead of her in the lineup and pushed her to be better.
Turner played in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League and the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association while working long hours at multinational accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Marmer lived with Turner and her wife in Boston for about seven months while working in scouting and player development for the Bruins.
Marmer kept odd hours, often returning from games around midnight. Turner was still up and working, but happy to pivot to talk of prospects and highlights.
“She didn’t love the (PwC) job, but she was good at it and worked hard, and had worked her way up that rank pretty quickly,” Marmer said. “She loved that sort of distraction.
“She understood how to run an organization. She had a skill set that I that I didn’t have, but understood the hockey piece of it too, which you need. So she was literally the perfect person to do this (PWHL launch) with.”
Turner was already looking at a big life change. Many members of her family joined the military, including all three of her brothers.
“I was kind of looking for something that I felt was missing,” Turner said. “I had always kind of floated joining the National Guard, and I was done playing hockey, so I kind of looked in the mirror. I said, ‘OK, if I’m 65 and I look back, am I gonna regret not doing it?’ And the overwhelming answer was yes. So I dove in and did it.”
Marmer became the general manager of PWHL Boston and lobbed another consideration at Turner a week before she left for basic training, asking her Quinnipiac teammate to team up again. Turner couldn’t commit yet for obvious reasons. She’d be gone for about three months. The league was evolving quickly and a job wasn’t guaranteed.
“When she came back online, I talked to her that first day, and she was like, ‘I want to do this.’” Marmer said. “It was a really exciting moment, and gave me a lot of confidence going into this.”
They helped guide Boston to a runner-up finish its first season. After the PWHL’s second year, Fleet assistant GM Turner was tabbed to lead one of the league’s first two expansion franchises, at Marmer’s recommendation.
Turner is still an active member of the Army National Guard. She prefers to compartmentalize during drill weekends, then it’s back to her day job. Basic training helped teach her how to guide a diverse group.
Her dual careers present the “best of both worlds.”
“I feel like I’m fulfilling a dream in one way, with the hockey side, and also feel like a big identity piece (is there) for me, with the military side,” Turner said.
“I like to be busy. I don’t do well sitting still.”
There was a full-circle moment when Turner lured Knight—left unprotected by Boston in the expansion process—to Seattle. She was one of Marmer’s first signings, then one of Turner’s. The Fleet captain is now the Torrent captain.
What’s a player swap between friends, right? Not quite.
“It stung maybe more, that this was somebody I built this with, and she knew these players so well,” Marmer said. “It wasn’t that there was any like insider info that she had … it was just that if you were in our organization, you like the same players, and you cared about the same people, and you knew their personalities.
And so it wasn’t a surprise to me, why she picked the player she picked. But she knew equally how much it would it would hurt me to take those players.
“She was doing her job, and she did a phenomenal job in that. I don’t hold it against her at all, but it definitely wasn’t relieving.”
The PWHL’s third season launches Friday for the Torrent and Sunday for the Fleet. The teams’ respective GMs congratulated each other on the first day of their respective training camps last week and gave updates, all over text—no postage necessary.
“It’s kind of funny to go back to feeling a bit competitive with her,” Marmer said. We both care about each other. We both want the other to be successful. We both really want to win.”
______
© 2025 The Seattle Times. Visit www.seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency LLC.
Thanks for reading CPA Practice Advisor!
Subscribe Already registered? Log In
Need more information? Read the FAQs
