The Globe and Mail:

Starting this week, 14-year-old Lexi Peters will be stick handling past men twice her size as she plays in the starting lineup for the Buffalo Sabres. Or the Vancouver Canucks. Or any NHL team the 90-pound left-winger chooses.Because when video game publisher Electronic Arts releases the latest edition of its popular NHL series on Tuesday, Lexi will be the first female in its virtual hockey roster.

The teenager wrote EA at the urging of her father to complain about the lack of a female option in the custom character creation mode. EA agreed, and went a step further: with her family’s permission, Lexi is now the default female character.

The report notes that while NHL is still purely a men’s league, women and girls have been a huge growth market for amateur hockey over the past 20 years – from 5,000 in 1990 to an estimated 100,000 today.