Karissa Donkin

Karissa Donkin focuses her reporting on women’s professional hockey and Olympic hockey, combining game coverage with a close look at how leagues, teams and players navigate structural change in their sport. She is a reporter with CBC Sports who regularly covers the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL), women’s hockey more broadly and major international tournaments. Her work is defined by a willingness to move beyond scores and standings to explain decisions, systems and histories that shape the game.

PWHL and women’s hockey

Donkin is one of CBC Sports’ primary voices on the PWHL and contemporary women’s hockey. She covers the league as both a competition and a labour and business project, writing about its draft, player movement and the gradual professionalisation of the women’s game. Her reporting on the PWHL draft breaks down how each team looks after selections, highlighting roster construction, positional depth and competitive balance rather than treating the event as a simple list of picks. In game-focused pieces on PWHL playoffs, she emphasises details such as the tight margins in Walter Cup series and how tactical adjustments, goaltending and special teams shape close contests.[anchor]

She also treats the PWHL as part of a longer story about the fight for a sustainable professional league in women’s hockey.

Outside daily coverage, she has authored a book on the league and the players who pushed for its creation, documenting the years of organising, the era of the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association and the eventual launch of the PWHL. In interviews about that project, she describes drawing on more than a decade of reporting experience to reconstruct the recent history of women’s hockey and to centre players’ perspectives on work, pay and visibility.

This combination of live coverage and long-form history makes her a consistent reference point on how the women’s professional game reached its current moment.

Olympic hockey and national teams

Olympic hockey and national team programs are a second core strand of Donkin’s work. She covers both women’s and men’s national teams, tracking everything from roster decisions to training schedules and tournament disruptions. In her analysis of a Canadian men’s Olympic roster that brings together a teenage star with established names such as Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid, she examines how generational talent, experience and chemistry interact in high-stakes international play.

Her writing on the Canadian women’s national team traces how their path to the Olympics begins with compressed training windows and late-start programs, exploring what that means for preparation and performance.

Donkin’s reporting on Olympic game management shows the same structural focus she brings to the PWHL. In a piece on the decision to postpone a prominent women’s Olympic hockey game, she reconstructs the process behind the delay, laying out the roles of organisers, safety considerations and competitive implications rather than treating it as an isolated scheduling quirk. Her coverage of a men’s gold-medal final where Canada appeared on course for a title before a dramatic swing examines turning points, individual performances and tactical choices, but also situates the result within the broader arc of the tournament. Across these stories, she uses specific games to show how national team plans, tournament formats and officiating standards influence outcomes.

Multi-sport Olympic coverage

Although hockey is central, Donkin’s Olympic reporting extends to other sports and disciplines. She has contributed wrap-up coverage of the Summer Games that surveys Canadian results from the pool to the track and beyond, drawing connections between individual performances, medal totals and longer-term trends in high-performance sport. In those pieces, she moves quickly across events while still isolating key storylines, such as breakout athletes, record-setting swims or relay teams that reflect years of program investment.

External profiles note that her role with CBC Sports includes covering Olympic and Paralympic sports beyond hockey, indicating a broader familiarity with multi-sport environments and the logistics of major Games. Her professional biography and public commentary also state that she has worked on both Summer and Winter Olympics for the CBC’s digital platforms. This range allows her to situate hockey stories within the wider Olympic context, referencing scheduling pressures, broadcast priorities and athlete support structures that cut across sports.

Business, labour and investigative depth

One of the distinguishing features of Donkin’s work is a sustained interest in the business and labour side of sport.

She has written on PWHL player salaries, parsing data released by the players’ association to show how compensation varies across teams and what it reveals about the league’s economic model. In coverage and commentary on women’s sports more generally, she stresses that on-field product has proven compelling and lucrative while pay and working conditions have lagged, explicitly flagging low salaries as a central issue.

Her stories often explain contractual structures, minimum salary rules and revenue-sharing mechanisms in accessible terms, connecting them to daily realities for players.

This focus is underpinned by a background in investigative reporting at the CBC, where she spent years handling complex stories for news programs before moving into sports.

Profiles and interviews portray her as someone accustomed to sifting through documents, interviewing sources over difficult subjects and building narratives that link individual experiences to systemic problems. She brings that approach into women’s hockey and Olympic coverage, using investigative habits to deepen features on league formation, athlete pay and historical gaps in recognition.

Taken together, her body of work marks her as a sports reporter whose defining strengths are structural insight, labour awareness and a long view of how women’s hockey and Olympic sport are evolving.