An "Alberta Clipper" is a storm system which usually brings arctic winds to New England, leaving its denizens chilled to the bone.

Call Brita Lind the "Regina Clipper." Her usual trademark is to fly past defensemen with the ferocity of an arctic breeze, leaving opposing goalies helpless.

Helpless enough to make the Regina, Saskatchewan native the top scorer on the Harvard women's hockey team with 11 goals and 13 assists for 24 points.

While the junior is enjoying great success at Harvard now, she began her hockey career at a very early age.

Lind was born in Calgary, Alberta, but her family moved to Regina when she was three. Even then she was learning to skate.

"My parents would take us out on the lake," Lind says. "You wouldn't technically be [skating] the whole time; you'd fall down."

Lind followed the lead of her brothers in playing hockey until she joined a community league.

"I was the only girl of 300 in the league, and when I first started I had my hair cut short just like all the guys so the coach didn't know I was a girl for the first three weeks," says Lind. "But then when he saw I could skate and everything it was too late for him to do anything about it."

But in grade school, Lind chose to drop hockey and play ringette, a derivative of hockey predominatly played by school-age Canadian girls.

In ringette, players use bladeless sticks to shoot a 6-in. soft rubber ring into a regulation hockey goal. There is no offside rule in effect, but there are restrictions on the movements of the players. The defensemen and forwards cannot cross their side of the center-ice red line. But the center is allowed to go into both halves of the rink, so she must be able to defend the other center and also beat the other center into the offensive zone. The speedy Lind, not surprisingly, played center.

When it came time for Lind to choose colleges, she was initially going to apply to a pair of Canadian schools, Queen's College in Ontario and the University of British Columbia. But her brother Howie--then at Harvard Business School--told Lind about the women's hockey team at Harvard.

So Lind applied, took her SAT tests, and got accepted.

"I was definitely excited about it," Lind says. "My dad just asked how much it cost."

Coming to Harvard meant having to pack a regular hockey stick and a puck in her luggage for the first time since fourth grade.

"I was a little bit afraid of changing to hockey after all those years," Lind says. "I just figured that if you can skate you can do anything."