Team Canada's Sarah Nurse makes history as 'NHL 23' cover athlete
Canadian women's hockey star Sarah Nurse has done an immense amount of winning on the ice, and now she can chalk up another giant W off of it.
Sharing 'NHL 23' cover athlete honours with Anaheim Ducks rookie sensation Trevor Zegras, Nurse will become the first woman to ever grace the front of the mega-popular video game franchise.
The 27-year-old from Hamilton, Ont., has been a fixture with the Canadian national team since 2015, making her debut at the 4 Nations Cup that year before capturing an Olympic silver in 2018, a world championship title in 2021 and capping a thrilling 2022 run with gold in Beijing.
In a recent interview with ESPN's Greg Wyshynski, Nurse acknowledged how much becoming the first female cover athlete of such a prestigious franchise means to her and what it says about how far the women's game has come in recent years.
"It's such a huge honour to be the first woman on the cover of NHL 23. It's something that I never even thought was in the realm of possibilities," she said.
"I never even dreamed of being on it. And so I think that it's huge and I think that it just speaks for where women's hockey is right now. The visibility and the value that people see in women's hockey."
Nurse also knows how impactful this could be for the younger generation of hockey-loving girls — and boys — going forward.
"It's definitely huge. And I think about myself, you know, as a young kid, wanting to play NHL and I never ever thought that I could be in the game or that a woman would be in the game," she told Wyshynski.
"So I think that for me, it would've been game-changing. And for young girls, I hope that it's game-changing and that they can see themselves in professional hockey because of a video game like this. But again, I also hope that for the little boys, they also see women in sports as normal. That it's not something that's a one-off that happens every once in a while."
NHL 23 will be released in mid-October and will boast playable IIHF women's teams, which the game began implementing via an NHL 22 expansion pack last December — the first time women were featured in the EA NHL franchise.
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