Hayden Stine came to a Denver Summit FC home opener last month with one hope: to see Carson Pickett, the pro soccer player she had already started to admire. The 9-year-old, who was born without most of her right arm, met Pickett at Mile High Stadium after the NWSL team's scoreless debut in front of its home crowd.
For Hayden, the meeting landed exactly where it mattered. She told CBS News she wants to be a professional soccer player when she grows up, and said seeing Pickett do it filled her with hope that she can too. “Role models make you feel like you can do anything – just like them,” she said.
Her mother, Christina Hayden, said the effect has been impossible to miss. Since meeting Pickett, she said Hayden’s confidence has “skyrocketed” and is now “through the roof” at school and on the soccer field. The visit came this week when Pickett surprised Hayden at her team's soccer practice, turning a brief stadium introduction into a moment the family will not forget.
The connection resonates because Pickett once tried to keep the focus off her own limb difference. Years earlier, she said, she hid her arm in pictures and avoided talking about it because she did not want to be known as “the girl with one arm that plays soccer.” What she wanted instead was to be known as “the girl that plays soccer,” and her mother eventually told her she was missing an opportunity and a purpose.
Pickett has said that message changed how she sees her own career. She wrote on social media that she learned “the journey is a lot less about myself and a lot more about the hearts I can touch along the way.” Now she says she wants to meet “all the kids, all the families, all the adults” and “everyone that I can.”
For Hayden, that lesson is already taking hold. Asked whether she would be up for serving as a role model one day, she said yes. For now, the child who left a scoreless home opener with a new hero is carrying a simpler belief into her own games: she can do it too.
