Sophie Jovanovic thrives under pressure in the crease; lives for the rush of stopping the puck.

“I love it,” she says once she’s off the ice, steam emitting from her face as the cold air mixes with the heat she has generated practising.

Perhaps it’s the ability to keep calm when pucks fly at her with great speed that’s moored her through the unexpected media whirlwind that landed as the teen was studying for her Grade 11 accounting, math, and chemistry exams.

The cause? The Brantford Bulldogs selected her with one of their three picks in the U-18 OHL draft last month.

It makes Jovanovic the first woman chosen in such a draft.

It’s common to see girls playing on boys’ hockey teams at younger ages. But when bodychecking comes into play — once players are around 14 — female players tend to transition onto girls’ teams, said Marlboros general manager Dave Nicoletti.

If Jovanovic makes the team after training camp in August, she will be the first woman to play in the OHL. (Another goaltender, Taya Currie, came close to playing in the OHL when she was picked by the Sarnia Sting in the 2021 U-16 draft, but she didn’t make the team).

But while the pick garnered considerable buzz for Jovanovic — and the Brantford Bulldogs — people who’ve worked with her are adamant it’s anything but a publicity stunt.

In her four years playing Triple-A with the boys in the Toronto Marlboros Hockey Club, Jovanovic was statistically one of the top goalies, said Nicoletti. (She also had stints with the Toronto Red Wings and most recently, the Toronto Nationals, also Triple-A boys teams).

“This isn’t a publicity thing. This is a hockey player — regardless of gender — who is on a trajectory that can play at the next level, that can support — and can ultimately improve — a team,” he added.

Furthermore, Jovanovic has already committed to University of Wisconsin, the top-ranked National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division 1 women’s hockey team.

“From my view, she was the best goalie available,” Bulldogs general manager Spencer Hyman told The Spectator.

The fact that she’s a girl didn’t factor in.

“It doesn’t matter their race, gender, ethnicity, we want the best hockey player,” he said. 

The Brantford Bulldogs had a standout season, taking The Hamilton Spectator Trophy as the OHL regular season champions.

Plus, the city has committed to building a permanent home for the team — a $152-million, 5,342-seat sports and entertainment centre.

The Bulldogs approach next season down two goaltenders — Ryerson Leenders and David Egorov were traded — but Maksim Corovic remains following a rookie season, and the team has signed Swedish player Vilmer Salén Forsberg, Hyman said.

At training camp, U-16 and U-18 draft picks will gather with veteran players for scrimmages and evaluation. The staff will cut the roster down from there and move into pre-season. 

“Sophie’s got every opportunity to make it into the next phase of our camp and our team and we’re really excited to see what she’s got,” Hyman said.

Hockey has always been part of Jovanovic’s life. Her mother, Stephanie Cyr, remembers sitting in the arena stands, baby Sophie bundled into her bucket seat, while her older brother Matthew Jovanovic, now a defenceman at Rensselaer Polytech Institute, would play.

By age four, Jovanovic was joining her brother in games on a small backyard rink. “I wanted to be just like (him). He was such a role model for me,” she said.

After about a year in the sport, she fell in love with goaltending — something that initially concerned her mom.

For one, Jovanovic was a figure skater — and a good one — and Cyr didn’t want to see those skills go to waste. Plus, she feared the solitary aspect of the position would be tough on her daughter.

“It’s almost like you’re on your own island a little bit,” she said. “As much as you’re part of a team, you’re on your own in the net.”

But on senior kindergarten graduation, Jovanovic and her dad walked in the door armed with pint-sized goalie equipment, and Cyr remembers thinking, “I guess that’s that.”

Cyr says in the beginning, her daughter was not necessarily a “great goalie.” The admission elicits what sounds like a surprised “thanks Mom” from Jovanovic. 

But any skills she initially lacked, she mastered with her dogged determination.

“From the beginning, she really wanted to get better,” Cyr said.

As a player, she was “far more detailed, far more driven, and far more focused on what she needed to do to perform” than other players — which perhaps gave her an edge as a girl on the boy side, Nicoletti said.

“She always wanted to outperform. She always wanted to be the reason for the victory, not for the loss,” he added.

And it turns out Cyr’s early fears about the pressure were unfounded.

She has a “water off a duck’s back” approach when anything goes wrong in a game.

“(If) goals go in, she just finds a way to reset and compete,” said Cory Athaide, one of Jovanovic’s longtime coaches at Belitski Elite Goaltending.

Despite the high-pressure position, Jovanovic has managed to navigate “outside noise,” the emotions of the position, and find “the joy behind the struggle of the game and the perseverance of the game,” Athaide added.

And while there’s “clearly” an awareness she’s a female playing male hockey, “the second you put your mask down and you go to work and you go to battle, it’s you versus you, to be quite honest,” he said.

There’s a solitary aspect to goaltending which inherently sets them apart from the team. “They have a different warm-up and they have a different mindset,” said Nationals head coach Brett Punchard.

“I guess it’s like a starting pitcher in baseball. They’re kind of left alone because they need to focus on what they need to do,” he said.

Aside from that, Jovanovic’s teammates — many who grew up playing with or against her — have been accepting, Nicoletti said. 

She has her own change room, but joins the main dressing room 15 minutes before the game — once everyone is ready — for the pre-game talk. She also returns for intermission and postgame speeches, before returning to her dressing room to change. Ensuring there’s a similar plan in place should Jovanovic play for the Bulldogs is something management is prepared for, Hyman said. 

It’s a shift from 34 years ago, when Manon Rhéaume cracked the glass ceiling.

The goalie, who went on to be the first — and so far only — woman to join an NHL team, never saw another girl playing at her level growing up in Quebec.

“I was always the only one,” she said.

Like Jovanovic, Rhéaume’s only agenda was to play at the highest level she could and be challenged in the sport — but she frequently faced pushback from team brass or her teammates’ parents.

It wasn’t that people were inherently “against” a woman playing — it was more a fear of the unknown, she said.

“People were scared to take that risk of giving me a chance.”

Rhéaume’s glad to see things are changing and women getting more opportunities to play “because they’re great and they deserve it and they’re playing well,” she said.

Plus, the formation of the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) in 2023 opens a new pathway to women in the game.

When Rhéaume — who was named GM of the Detroit PWHL team in May — watched as Taylor Heise was the first woman drafted to the league, she had tears in her eyes.

As incredible as it was to break barriers, she mourned the opportunity, “to be somewhere in the stands and have my name called out and be drafted in a women’s league like this and just be treated like a hockey player,” she said.

As the only woman in a men’s league, she was acutely aware of the responsibility she held.

If she got hurt, it would be perceived as because she was a woman. If she didn’t play well, it would be because she was “not good enough” to be playing with the men, Rhéaume said.

Even in recent years as Jovanovic developed as a player, there was still a feeling that being “good enough to make Team Canada” was the one real opportunity for a woman in the sport, she said.

And while that remains a goal, Jovanovic also hopes to one day make the PWHL.

“That would be amazing,” she said. “That would be a dream come true.”

In the meantime, amid a rigorous training schedule, the athlete is doing her best to be a regular teenager.

Going to a café with friends. Reading a good book. Baking a loaf of banana bread. “Little things like that.”