Tehran: Iran may seem an unlikely setting for women’s ice hockey, but a fledgling league has seen its young players confront the country’s deeply conservative values and financial obstacles to blaze a trail for the sport.

“The first time I was given a stick, I fell in love with this sport,” said Soheila Khosravi, a member of the Iranian women’s league, which played its inaugural round just three years ago. Khosravi left her family home two years ago to dedicate herself fully to ice hockey in Tehran, where Iran’s only Olympic ice rink is located. “It’s hard to live alone here, but it’s for the love of hockey,” said the 17-year-old athlete from the central province of Isfahan. Many of the players often face difficult odds, from social pressures to logistical and financial challenges in pursuing the sport. The players are required to wear the hijab head covering under their helmets, in keeping with the Islamic dress code mandated after the 1979 Islamic Revolution - though in recent years women in big cities have increasingly flouted the law.  “Hockey is a sport that requires courage and bravery, and you see these two characteristics in Iranian women,” Kaveh Sedghi, a former captain of the men’s national team, told AFP.