Wynne Anderson-Lindsay is all leg. The Whitehorse teen is lanky. At 12 she has already been ID’ed as a goalie.

“We can’t teach height,” says Female Mustangs coach Louis Bouchard.

“I can teach you how to move. I can teach you how to skate, but I can’t teach you how to be tall.”

But Anderson-Lindsay is more than just a genetically-gifted goalie. She is the prototype for a new generation of female hockey players coming up through Yukon’s hockey system.

In the late ’80s, Yukon women stunned the B.C. hockey community by winning the Senior AA Championship.

They were given a bye into the Western Hockey tournament.

The women were hockey-savvy and the team would go on to win a handful of medals at the western championships over the years.

The banners are still on display, hanging from the rafters at Takhini Arena.

Cheryl Rivest, Yukon hockey legend, was one of those players of the golden years.

But she didn’t start playing until she was an adult. A figure skater in her youth, Rivest grew up in arenas in Manitoba and southern Ontario before settling in Atlin.

“I distintcly remember my figure skating coach telling me I should go play hockey because I was not going to cut it as a figure skater,” she says.

It wasn’t until she was 20 years old in Whitehorse, that Rivest laced up hockey skates.

In the fall of 1986, while working at a bank in Whitehorse, she spotted a hockey team jacket on one of her customers.

The player, Marilyn Rogers, invited her to play that fall. Rivest learned to skate all over again.

It was “just brutal,” she says. “I was holding myself up on the boards, trying to skate around.”

Over the next couple decades, women’s hockey in the Yukon would see a rise and fall, almost disappearing entirely with moves and pregnancies and other commitments, but still the love of the game and the camaraderie persisted.

Today, a women’s league thrives in Whitehorse. With six teams this season, players of all skills are welcome.

And unlike the golden years, when no farm team existed, there is beginning to be a steady stream of youngsters coming up the ranks.

At the Atom and Peewee levels in Whitehorse Minor Hockey, coach Pat Tobler has been tirelessly advocating for the development of young female hockey players.

 A handful of the 10 or so girls in the Whitehorse Minor Atom house league are on his team. The teams are mixed with girls as the minority among the teams. Many sport pink helmets.

A few years ago, Tobler’s daughter began playing in the league and he saw a troubling trend: “There weren’t too many girls playing hockey,” he says. “They were essentially dropping out when they reached the Peewee age.”

After Anderson-Lindsay’s first year in the Atom league, she took a break.

“I think I just decided that I didn’t want to play with the boys,” she says.

Two seasons ago, Bouchard opened up one of his practice times for a girls-only skate. It allowed new, old and returning players to skate together without the boys.

Whitehorse Minor continued the ice time for the second half of the season and it has continued through to this year, growing as more parents and youth come on board.

“That allowed us to bring all the girls together that were playing and had recently quit as well as girls who wanted to try hockey,” says Tobler.

It allowed the young girls to play together.

“A lot of them are shining,” says Tobler.

This season the momentum has kept going, with an Atom girls team and a Peewee girls team travelling to Outside tournaments.

“The atmosphere around the girls was just incredible,” says Tobler.

This weekend, more than 50 young girls from Yukon, Alaska, northern B.C. and NWT will converge on Whitehorse for a Female Hockey Weekend Jamboree, put on by BC Hockey and Hockey Yukon. It is the first of its kind for girls under 18 in Whitehorse.

“These jamborees are a really fun event,” says Tobler.

And while the Female Mustangs’ numbers are down this year, Bouchard sees a growing pool of talent upon which to draw from in future seasons.

The skaters coming up have improved skills, learning the fundamentals with the likes of Tobler in the house leagues.

They are becoming confident not just on the ice, but outside the rink as well.

These opportunities are allowing skaters such as Anderson-Lindsay to dream of one day wearing the country’s colours in the rink.

Until that day comes, Anderson-Lindsay will be able to cut her teeth coming up through the system that women’s hockey allies are trying to produce here in the Yukon.

And when she decides to hang up her competitive skates one day far into the future, she will be able to do so, knowing she always has a place on the ice with other women in the Whitehorse Women’s Hockey League.