On April 18, before PWHL Montreal’s game against Minnesota, forward Alex Poznikoff had a fan in the crowd offering her a Mars bar in exchange for a puck. Poznikoff threw the puck over the glass, and the fan caught it on the fly.
The fan was Alex’s sister Taylor-Rae, who was watching her sister play professionally live for the first time. Taylor-Rae is a country music singer, so she’s used to being on the other side of the peering eyes.
“It’s a lot less stressful than being the one on the stage,” said Taylor-Rae, laughing. “I am always such a big fan of my sister, and she has been so supportive of me so it’s nice to be able to do the same for her.”
“I was actually really excited for that,” Alex said. “The broadcasts are amazing now but when you get in these buildings, there’s an energy, you can’t describe the energy. Even my brother was here and he was, ‘I was getting emotional just sitting in here listening to the fans.’ So I was just so happy. You always kind of look in the stands, but to see my family there it gives you that heartwarming feeling.”
Taylor-Rae has enjoyed the broadcasts, saying that she stood on the couch and yelled at her TV during games, but nothing was like the experience of being at PWHL games in person, including the sold out Bell Centre.
“You can feel the magnitude of it,” Taylor-Rae said. “We’re all watery eyes. And it’s really special. We haven’t had a league like this to watch her in. So even for her she’s like, ‘most of the family hasn’t seen me play hockey in real life in a couple years,’ especially with COVID and all that it was kind of all over the place. You can feel the weight. I think there’s such an excitement right now. Even to be in the arena [in Verdun] was a cool energy. The energy is huge.”
It goes both ways when the PWHL Montreal player watches her sister perform.
“Honestly, it’s the best,” Alex said. “Nothing makes me more proud as a sister to be watching her on stage performing, doing her thing. And it’s so cool, because all eyes are on her when she’s on stage. I get to be a part of this journey of her grinding through the music industry. And then vice versa, I come [to Montreal] and now I’m in the bubble and she’s watching me. So it’s been really special.”
“Alex and I, we always say hockey and singing go so well together, because my big tour season is in the summer, and hers is in the winter, so we get to be a part of it,” Taylor said. “She’ll be on stage filming, because she films for me in the summer. And I try and get to as many games as I can in the winters.”
Sports and music, country music especially, have long been male dominated. It is not new for women to perform country music or play sports, but it has required a significant shift to see them get more representation on television and country radio. A 2023 study said that out of 29 country radio stations in large markets, they would play female singers back-to-back only 0.5% of the time, on average. Women’s sports represented around 5% of coverage on news and highlight shows as recently as 2019, before almost tripling in 2022, and it continues to rise.
“I feel like the more we do this, especially this year with women’s hockey, and female sports in general, where it is, and women in Country is slowly getting there,” Alex said. “You’re still fighting those uphill battles against what has been mostly male dominant, but it’s super cool to see that these worlds are colliding between the two of us.”
“I think it’s special that we get to do so much of it together,” Taylor-Rae said. “We always said we need our worlds to collide and I feel like this year has been the start of that. Females in country music and females in sport are in a very similar position and it’s taking people to put on a league like this to go, ‘here we go, we’re off to the races.'”
Not only are the sisters dealing with industries that are growing within their own worlds but there are obvious challenges just with making it as individuals. Alex started the season on Montreal’s reserve roster and had to wait her turn to get into a PWHL game. Likewise, Taylor-Rae has had to deal with the ups and downs of being an emerging artist. Both sisters are thankful that they have someone who understands those struggles so close to them.
“I think that’s part of the reason I’m still here doing this,” Alex said. “I’m so happy I stuck with it. At the start of the year, it wasn’t easy. You want to to be on the official roster, but [Taylor-Rae] always said, ‘this is your dream. You have to keep chasing. You have to keep working, and good things will happen.’ If we’re having a bad day, it’s the first one we call and just kind of talks us through, it’ll get better. You need these times to learn. And I think for us, that’s how we’ve just kept building. You have to keep a positive attitude, you get a lot of nos, and especially for country music, there’s so many different routes, and you have those certain people that are like, ‘No, I don’t see it’, but you just need that one person. But without her support, I think this would have been a lot harder.”
“We call each other 18 times a day,” Taylor-Rae said “She has an appreciation for what I deal with. I have appreciation for what she deals with. We know that it’s a roller coaster, and sometimes you wake up, you start the day feeling fresh, and you end the day going ‘what just happened?’ Being able to have an appreciation for that, you definitely understand each other on a different level than somebody who’s in a more regular career. It’s just nice to have somebody that really gets it.”
“This journey for both of us has been very new,” Alex said. “We’ve learned a lot about each other. Every day I get more and more excited. She always has some piece of news that ‘oh, this happened, this happened’. We’ve been each other’s cheerleaders, and I think we’re gonna keep doing that for the rest of our lives.”
As much as the two sisters lean on each other, it’s not easy on their parents.
“I think we caused them a lot of stress,” Taylor-Rae laughs. “We always joke because my brother works with a boat dealership, and so he has that normal job. We always joke, ‘you guys told us to go for our dreams. And you got a singer and a female hockey player.’ I think they love it. I think we just caused them a little bit of stress.”
“We always joke like, ‘Oh watch, like, you’re gonna be playing hockey, I’ll be singing country music. And then now this is what we’re doing for our careers,” Alex said. “It’s almost surreal to think that’s what happened.”
The Poznikoffs grew up in Edmonton, and before moving to Montreal to try to make the PWHL, Alex had always been around home. She played U Sports hockey at the University of Alberta and graduated into the uncertainty that was North American pro women’s hockey before the PWHL. She chose to join the PWHPA and would commute to Calgary to train. Taylor-Rae had to make a decision a little bit sooner than that.
Taylor, who is four years older than Alex, decided hockey wasn’t for her and went into horseback riding and singing. “My parents were not too happy about that,” she says.
When she was 14, Taylor-Rae wanted to perform.
“My dad was like, ‘You know, you’re not too bad. If you want to take a run at it, go for it.’ And they really just let me take the reins. It was one of those things if I ever said, ‘I’m done’, that would have been fine, too. But it’s definitely something that if you don’t want to do it, you shouldn’t because it’s not the easiest path.”
When Taylor was ready for university she decided to take the first real step toward a career in music. She enrolled in Vancouver’s Capilano University to take their Arts and Entertainment Management Program.
“She was like, ‘Well, I think I have to move to Vancouver and learn the industry side of things.’ And the second she said she was moving away, it was like, okay, this is real, we’re doing it,” Alex said. “I would say in high school when she moved away things got real and then we’ve just been full throttle since then.”
Alex admits as the younger sister it was tough to see her sister move away but she understood then and knows now it was what her sister needed to do. Recently, Taylor-Rae took the next step and moved to Nashville, Tennessee full time. Again, there’s a parallel between the sisters. Both of them farther away from home than they had ever been in order to surround themselves with the best.
While Taylor-Rae writes songs and music with other top people in her field, Alex gets to practice daily with some of the best players in the world. Both sisters see how that change impacted the other.
“You’re in it every day,” Alex says. “I always say a lot of good things come at the sacrifice of a lot of what you want to do. You want to stay home, you want to be around family, but both of us had to move away from home and find ourselves in this new world. I come to the rink every day, I get to play with the best players in the world, I get to train with the best players in the world. And then she goes to Nashville, and she’s writing songs with the top songwriters in the world. She’s playing with the best musicians. It’s just every day you’re trying to elevate to try to keep up with your surrounding peers. I think that just within the past year or two it’s been exponential growth. It’s been really fun to see.”
“I think if you want to be the best, you have to put yourself in the mix with the best,” Taylor-Rae said. You look at [Marie-Philip Poulin and Laura Stacey] who have been huge, huge people for Alex. She’s been able to spend a lot of time with them and learn from them and see how they take in a game. and see how they take in practice. She has grown so much as a player. When we watched her play her first game in the league, we looked at each other and we’re like, ‘that’s the best hockey she’s ever played’ even though she had just been practising, but she’s so ready.”
Alex was taken in by Montreal captain Poulin and her fiancée Stacey, and she lives with the pair. She has integrated seamlessly into the group in Montreal and it has taken a bit of a toll in the sibling’s relationship to a certain point.
“It’s funny,” Taylor-Rae said. “She hangs out with some of the girls. Before she was just kind of by herself and homesick and whatever. Now I try to call her and she’s like ‘Excuse me… I’m with my friends. I have to call you later.'”
“They welcomed me into their home and it has been awesome,” Alex said. “It’s been such an easy transition to come from my home in Edmonton and now I have that new home in Montreal with Pou and Stace. They’ve been more than generous with me, so I can’t thank them enough for doing that.”
As Alex is playing in front of sold out crowds and the PWHL playoffs at Place Bell coming up fast, Taylor-Rae’s career is also reaching new heights this year. She will be playing Boots and Hearts, Canada’s biggest country music festival and the second-biggest to Nashville’s huge CMA Fest. But Taylor just announced that she’s playing a show there too.
There is a lot of country music crossover with women’s hockey with many players listing country as their genre of choice. Things got interesting then, when Alex casually mentioned what her sister does.
“Normally like back at home, everyone knew because they grew up with us so it was just the norm and I came here and I’m like, ‘oh, yeah, my sister she’s country singer and they’re like, ‘SHE’S A COUNTRY SINGER?,’ Alex said. “I forget that it’s not normal. So it’s definitely been a reality check of, okay, I guess this isn’t quite the norm. But it’s made me a little more proud that’s for sure.”
Alex, who will be attending Boots and Hearts and helping her sister with social media at the festival already knows there will be some of her Montreal teammates making the trip as well. Taylor-Rae’s dream is to one day play the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, known as the biggest stage in country music. Alex says she can’t wait for the day that she can say she’s headed to Nashville to watch her sister perform on that stage.
She says she knows the team will understand if that day comes, and jokes that given the popularity of country music among her teammates they might need to charter a plane.
With all the talk about the two sisters having their worlds collide, it’s only natural to consider a scenario where Taylor-Rae takes the microphone to sing the national anthem before one of Alex’s games. It doesn’t take long to realize this has been discussed before.
“Singing the anthem is the most terrifying — terrifying — thing ever,” Taylor-Rae said. “Somebody asked Alex, ‘Does your sister know the French anthem?” I’m like, ‘OK, look, I’m not going to put myself out there because I can’t do the French one justice. That’s for sure.”
Taylor-Rae realized quickly when performing her own songs that most people in the audience don’t notice when mistakes are made. She’s had performances where she misses an entire verse of her song only to have people come up to her and say how great it was.
Singing the anthem doesn’t have that same luxury. It doesn’t help that Taylor-Rae has also watched TSN’s compilation of the worst anthem fails.
“She’s like, ‘It’s the one song everyone knows the lyrics to. If you mess the lyrics up everyone in the building knows,'” Alex says, laughing.
The sisters do have an understanding though.
“She’s like if you begged me, I’d do it,” Alex said.
Taylor-Rae almost seems resigned to it.
“I’m sure one day, one day, I’ll do it for her. But just for her. It’s not for me,” she said.
Alex might have an additional negotiating tool and a bit more leverage when it comes to singing the anthem at one of her games. Remember the Mars bar that was promised in exchange for a puck? Well, it never made it the other way.
“She said she’d trade me a Mars bar and then she didn’t trade me the Mars bar!” Alex said.
