“I was terrible,” she said. “I was terrible at lifting the puck, even though I could lift it up until high school.”
Her time was up, as she went on to play for Wisconsin. In 2009, her Badgers won the NCAA Championship. While earning her historical degree, she made up the difference. She first played for the national team at 17 and when she made her Olympics debut in Vancouver in 2010, she was the youngest member on the team at 20 years and 217 days old. (She’s now the oldest and in a six-way tie for most Olympic appearances with four.)
The irony of it all is that a lot people are familiar with me because I shoot. Knight broke the World Championship scoring records in 2021 with her 45th goal. “I remember my coach used to put a Big Gulp on top of the net, and he said, ‘I will buy you a soda if you can hit this drink off.’ But I never was able to get the drink off of the top. “I just wanted it so bad!”
She didn’t let it get her down. It was a challenge for me,” she said. And I wanted to lift it, so I continued doing reps. This just proved to me, at least at my young age, that anything is possible if you set your mind to it and set small goals.