Danielle Marmer, Meghan Turner go from friends to rival GMs

“I think those three months were great for me to kind of come to terms with making a pivot that I had not anticipated,” Turner said. “It was one of the things that really got me through a difficult experience down at basic training.”

A letter from Marmer arrived at a crucial time. In it, Marmer detailed for Turner all the decisions she had made in her first few months with the PWHL: staff hirings, the first few player signings and draft decisions, and the identity she wanted to create for her team.

“Joining the army at the ripe age of 29 is not an easy experience,” Turner said. “You’re used to your autonomy. And when she sent that to me, I was like, ‘This is amazing. I’m so excited.’ It reminded me of a world in which I had some freedom.”

Marmer’s goal in writing the letter wasn’t necessarily to convince her friend to make a career change, though that was part of it. Mainly, she wanted someone to share in her excitement about the future of women’s hockey.

“I didn’t know at the time how important [the letter] was to her,” Marmer said. “I would have written her more if I had known.”

After three months of mulling it over, Turner returned from basic training ready to take the leap.

She talked it through with her wife, Alexis, and left her stable job at PwC to become Marmer’s assistant general manager with PWHL Boston (now the Boston Fleet), a position she held through the league’s first two seasons while remaining an active member of the Army National Guard.

When the league announced it would expand to Seattle and Vancouver, PWHL executives asked Marmer and the five other general managers if there was anyone they would recommend to take the reins for the new teams. In Marmer’s mind, Turner was not only the obvious choice, but the only choice.

“They were like ‘Great, glad you said that, because we were going to talk to her anyway,’ ” Marmer said.

Within weeks, Turner was named the inaugural GM of PWHL Seattle — a step Marmer said felt inevitable after playing and working with Turner for the better part of a decade.

“I couldn’t be more excited for her,” Marmer said. “She’s going to do a phenomenal job. She’s incredibly bright, she’s organized, she’s a great leader. She’s culture driven. She’s going to have something really special in Seattle.”

For years, when a young Marmer got in the car after youth hockey games and tryouts, she and her father broke down her performance before the conversation inevitably turned to his favorite player to watch: No. 12 on the New Hampshire team, Meghan Turner.

Marmer couldn’t fault her father for that. Turner, with quiet confidence and undeniable skill, was the young Marmer’s favorite player to watch, too.

Turner was one of the best players in her age group in New Hampshire, and Marmer was performing similarly in Vermont, so their paths crossed regularly on the youth hockey circuit. They each attended top boarding schools — Marmer at Loomis Chaffee in Connecticut and Turner at Philips Exeter in New Hampshire — before their paths crossed again at Quinnipiac University.

The pair became fast friends.

“Meghan became such a great hockey player because she believed in herself in a different way than I did,” Marmer said. “The thought of embarrassing herself wasn’t something that stopped her from trying to be great.”

Turner worked her way up to play on the top line and served as an assistant captain for the Bobcats. She earned her B.A. and M.B.A. in four years, then began a career in consulting.

On top of working 55 hours per week at PwC, Turner played professional hockey, first for the CWHL’s Worcester Blades and later the PWHPA. She’d often leave her house at 7 a.m., work a full day before heading to practice, then return home around 10 p.m. and keep working until late into the night.

But after a few years, the game started getting faster, her responsibilities at work and with her family grew, and Turner couldn’t keep up. She hung up her skates in 2022.

Around the same time, Marmer, who had just taken a job in scouting and player development for the Bruins, came to live with Turner and her wife. The timing was serendipitous, and the pair picked up right where they had left off at Quinnipiac — staying up late into the night to talk about the game they both loved.

“I was happy to be talking hockey again, and it was cool to be a bit of a fly on the wall and learn from her how the player development world works in the NHL,” Turner said.

Those conversations were equally enlightening for Marmer.

“I always thought in those moments, ‘You should be doing this,’ ” Marmer said.

That thought lingered in the back of Marmer’s mind throughout the year she worked with the Bruins, and in 2023, while she weighed the decision to jump ship to an upstart league, a mentor within the Bruins organization posed a question:

It’s a tough job, and you can’t go at it alone, so who are you going to take with you who you trust with your life?

“Meghan’s name immediately popped into my head,” she said. “There was no other option.”

Emma Healy can be reached at emma.healy@globe.com or on X @ByEmmaHealy.