With Debbie Harrison’s blue PWHL Toronto jersey still in the mail, she resorted to the next-best option.
She went to Fabricland, did some gluing and made a sign. When Toronto’s next home game rolled around, she was ready, standing in her seat by the boards dressed as a purple crayon.
Her sign: “Crayola needs a new colour: PWHL purple.”
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
Two months later, Crayola got the message. This week, the company’s Canadian arm took to Instagram to share a crayon of the day — power play plum, dedicated to Harrison and the Professional Women’s Hockey League.
And while the company has no plans to make the crayon — “it’s a huge process” to add a colour, one company executive said — the post took off, shared even by PWHL board member Billie Jean King, the tennis icon who led a revolution in women’s sports.
“If I ever thought I would hear ‘Debbie’ and ‘all over social media’ in the same sentence in my lifetime, I would have said, ‘Absolutely not,’” Harrison said.
Harrison, 64, is a PWHL superfan. A retired instrumental music teacher and curriculum chair of special education, Harrison lives in Lindsay, Ont. and makes the almost two and a half-hour trek to the Mattamy Athletic Centre in downtown Toronto for every game.
And when the jersey she ordered before the season began on Jan. 1 didn’t arrive for weeks, she kept making outfits — starting with the crayon and followed by a PWHL suit jacket, full body hockey gear, replica referee costume and purple shirt that said, “Eat, sleep, hockey, repeat.”
She even dyed her hair purple for one game.
“I wanted to have my jersey on and be part of the screaming group, you know?” Harrison said. “And when it didn’t arrive, I thought, well, I have to do something.”
Debbie Harrison, a PWHL super fan from Lindsay, Ont., started making outfits when her jersey didn’t arrive in time. Now, she makes one for every game.
She estimates she spends about 20 hours prepping the outfit for every game, making frequent treks to Fabricland in Oshawa and Value Villages in the area. She has big plans for Toronto’s three remaining home games but doesn’t want to ruin the surprise.
Players know her by name and ask for pictures with her.
“She’s the best,” Toronto backup goalie Carly Jackson said earlier this season. “I always get to talk to her and I’m like, you are just so lovely. She just makes everything better.”
Crayola Canada executive Margot Somerville first saw Harrison’s Crayola outfit earlier this week, when a colleague shared it with her.
“I just thought, this is awesome,” said Somerville, Crayola Canada’s director of product, marketing and communications. “We just felt that authentically it was a great nod and a great way to acknowledge all the great things all of these amazing women are doing.”
Harrison has fond memories of using crayons as a kid and purple was her favourite colour. She now lives around the corner from a Crayola building in Lindsay.
For now, power play purple is a one-off. Creating a new colour or renaming an existing one requires research, development and financial analysis, Somerville said, and it doesn’t happen often
“In a perfect world, I’d love for it to be a real crayon. It’s not that easy,” Somerville said. “I don’t think (we’d make one), but never say never, right?”
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