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On Tuesday, Knight was named USA Hockey’s women’s player of the year, after setting the record for most games played by a U.S. Will sponsorship dollars pour in for the next generation of players? How can she play a role in making the sport more inclusive, to live up to the promise that hockey is for everyone? Answers have proved elusive. How can she help make women’s hockey a viable career path? And not just for her and the top handful of players who make the national team. She’s wrestling with fundamental questions, too. It was also in that moment that she realized that she had to find a way to stand out and differentiate herself in order to support herself.
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Take that parking lot story: The moment came right after her training stipend from USA Hockey had been cut as she recovered from hip surgery. But there are more to those stories, details missed. Big dreams, barriers overcome, Knight and her teammates draped in American flags with Olympic gold medals around their necks in 2018 in South Korea. The stories now, a decade on, are well-worn. Her mom on the other end of the phone, telling her it might be time to get a job. Sitting in a Stop & Shop grocery store parking lot two years after her Olympic debut in 2010, watching a kid cleaning up the carts and realizing he had a steadier paycheck than she did. Packing up the family car after her graduation from the University of Wisconsin, driving on her own to Boston, relying on a Dunkin’ Donuts for leftover coffee rolls to eat, the ones that would have been tossed after closing. Playing hockey as a kid with her hair cut so short the other players thought she was a boy. Writing and illustrating a book in second grade called “The Magical Hockey Stick” about a little girl who goes to the Olympics. There are stories you’ve probably heard about Knight. That’s not to say Knight wants to hold back on answering questions she’s made the call to be here, in this moment, to open up and try to fill in all of the details that live outside a pre-packaged video introducing her to a casual Olympic audience every four years. There’s a weight to this conversation, and an awareness of my phone between us on the table, recording the whole time. The restaurant staff has left us to our own devices, not entirely sure why we need the whole room to ourselves.
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I have just survived the drive up from NYC in the infamous Connecticut traffic. She’s in what I would call the casual Hilary standard: joggers, a plain shirt, a hat (this one sports the Red Bull logo, one of her long-term sponsors). It’s a Friday night in Bristol, Conn., and Hilary Knight and I are sitting at a table in a back room of a hotel restaurant, down the road from the ESPN headquarters.