Like many sports which have received the attention of the public due to the exposure they receive at the professional level, hockey has for many years been seen as a “man’s game”. Perhaps hockey, like a few other sports such as football and rugby, has more justification to this title than other sports; after all, it is fairly rough when played at the highest levels, with body checking, fights, and players that look like human skyscrapers.

Still, despite the toughness of the game, there have always been women and girls who ask why they can’t participate in Canada’s most popular sport. Although the answer has always been that they can play hockey, it was not until fairly recently that women’s hockey received any kind of attention from the public, Canadian or not. In fact one could argue that up until the Canadian women’s team took gold in the 1996 Winter Olympics, women’s hockey was a virtual non-entity.

Well, the city of Brampton, in Ontario, certainly stands as proof against this popular misconception. For several decades now, the city has been host to a huge gathering of women’s teams from all around the globe in a three-day tournament. The Brampton Canadettes tournament was started long before Team Canada skated on Olympic ice, with the first tournament held in back in 1967.

As the popularity of women’s hockey and the desire of women to play the sport has grown around the globe, so too has the number of participants in the Canadettes tournament. The Easter tournament has grown steadily in numbers every year, and this year (2008) over 400 teams from Canada, the United States, England, Japan, Russia, Kazakhstan, and other European nations are expected to compete.

The competition itself is not limited to one “league”; there are championships at all levels, from PeeWee to Midget right up to double and triple A, which are scouted by some of the top university and college recruiters. There really is no better place to showcase talent, with the amount of exposure this tournament receives!

So if you are interested in watching a high quality tournament with a long pedigree and some of the highest quality hockey around, check out Brampton over the Easter weekend. And if you play on a women’s team, it might be worth it to check into registering your team!

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