Charge’s Carla MacLeod navigates desire to coach with need for cancer treatment

Carla MacLeod says it won’t be easy reconciling her desire to coach hockey with her need for breast cancer treatment.

As coach of both the PWHL’s Ottawa Charge and the Czech women’s team, she’s accustomed to shepherding others in hockey more than needing a helping hand herself.

“The problem is the priority is my teams and the second one is myself,” MacLeod said Monday from Ottawa.

“That’s been the hardest part of this diagnosis and sort of figuring out what are the solutions because I just absolutely love what I do.

“The fear of missing out is real because you’re just so passionate about it.”

The 43-year-old Calgarian, who told both her Charge and Czech players of her diagnosis less than 24 hours earlier, felt the hockey community has her back in her quest to both take care of herself and her hockey responsibilities.

“It’s been a breathtaking 24 hours,” MacLeod said. “To be able to bring this news forward and share it with people, I just couldn’t have predicted the overwhelming feeling of gratitude I have. It’s just been a flood of love and kindness from every realm.”

She won’t be behind the Charge’s bench Tuesday when the Minnesota Frost are in Ottawa for a rematch of Walter Cup combatants.

MacLeod will be in Calgary, where she lives in the off-season, to consult with an oncology team about a treatment plan that could allow her to continue coaching both the Charge in their third season, and the Czech women through to the Olympic Games in February.

“My treatment will be a combination of medication and radiation,” MacLeod said. “I just don’t know sort of the variables in particular to radiation, what that will look like.”

She wants to re-join the Charge for Thursday’s game in Toronto against the Sceptres.

“Whatever I learn from my medical team while I’m in Calgary will determine if I have to miss more games upcoming,” MacLeod said.

She preferred to wait until after the initial rush of reaction to her going public, and until after she has a concrete plan, to discuss details about her diagnosis.

But she hopes her diagnosis gets the attention of women who think they’re too young to get breast cancer, or believe they won’t get it because their families don’t have a history of breast cancer.

“Nobody in my family has breast cancer,” MacLeod said. “It’s just recently the government’s moved it to starting mammograms at 40 instead of 50.

“There’s always this sort of understanding of a young woman that ‘I didn’t need to worry about it because nobody in my family had it and I’m young.’

“The early-detection component, it’s just so critical. It was tough news to get, but I had the right prognosis to know we would be able to devise a plan to help me out and get me to a good spot.”

MacLeod, an Olympic gold medallist in women’s hockey for Canada in both 2006 and 2010, was hired as the Charge’s first coach before the PWHL’s inaugural season.

MacLeod also navigated Czechia to its first women’s world championship medal in 2022 and repeated the bronze medal in 2023.

Czechia will compete in a second Olympic Games, and in the Pool A bracket with Canada and the United States for the first time, after placing seventh in Beijing in 2022. Czechia’s first game is Feb. 5 against the U.S.

“I have to sometimes just pause myself and recognize that it’s OK to be vulnerable,” MacLeod said. “How blessed I am to be surrounded by so many incredible people, that if I need to step away, I know these groups are in great, great hands.

“That’s what allows me to sleep at night is recognizing that, you know, I’m a small part of the machine that is Ottawa Charge and that is Czech women’s national hockey.

“I love being there and I want to be there, but if I’m not there for certain moments, there’s great people that’ll move the team along.”

Former PWHL goaltender Erica Howe, who was among the founding players of the league and a former goalie for Canada, was diagnosed with breast cancer at 32 and had successful treatment.

When the NHL’s Hockey Fights Cancer month concluded Sunday, former Canadian women’s hockey team coach and NHL player Kevin Dineen said in a post on X he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer “a few months ago.”

Dineen coached the Canadian women to Olympic gold in 2014 in Sochi, Russia, where MacLeod was an assistant coach of Japan.

“For Kevin, that’s just very tough news and all my love to him of course in his battle,” MacLeod said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 1, 2025.