10-Year-Old PHENOM Is The FUTURE Of Women's Hockey!

Her main team is the top team in the New Jersey Devil's Youth Organization. Maya is athletic, strong and fast. She's the only girl in a boys team. She's very, very hard to work with. She loves to push herself and push the other players around her. I'm Maya. I'm 10 and I play hockey. When I first started playing hockey, I was three and a half years old. She saw her older brother play hockey and wanted to do the same. She's a good player, fast skater. Sometimes it's hard for her, but she always just sticks with the best and she makes the right choices. And she always saves my button net. Maya's on several different teams. They play AAA and AA teams, which is the highest levels that you can play at this age. Only 12% of hockey players are girls, which is better because it used to be a lot less, but girls hockey should grow more. So then it's not considered just a men's sport. Today we ran through basic skills progression of edge work, inside edges, outside edges. Typical stuff we do on a morning lesson like this, make sure we're just maintaining and building our skating skills. Watch the goalie. I mean, if you're coming in slow, you're going to give him a lot of time to adjust to what you're doing. If he's really far out of the net, you're going to want to get him to drop down and make a fake. If not, if he's backing up too early, because maybe coming with some speed, then you can just pick a corner on him. Her ability to use her body and follow instruction is pretty exceptional for a young athlete. She's tough, but she has a lot of courage as well. That feeling when you put the puck at the back of the net is the best. I'm at X Hockey Performance and I'm about to shoot some pucks and have a workout. When you do your leg workouts, it helps you with your speed. You dig deeper into the ice because your legs are more powerful. Dryland helps me because my shots become more powerful and it's harder for goalies to stop. It's very important for hockey players to be athletes as well. And you can develop into an athlete if all you do is train one sport. For her to be an athlete, she needs to work on speed, explosiveness, strength, flexibility, agility, all those types of things which are best developed in a gym. Almost anything to do with the legs and upper body strength is really key to playing hockey. I'm proving myself to myself because I keep wanting to beat my old records and keep improving. I just love the game, so those are the two things that keep me most motivated. Here I have a trophy that I won in the tournament and I scored a goal in overtime. And this one I just won with some of the boys on my boys team on a three-on-three tournament. This one is one I got in 2017 and I won the tournament with the Rockets boys AAA team. A few people that inspire me are Amanda Kessel, Hillary Knight, and Kaylee Hutchinson. They're just super inspirational to me because they've gotten so high in level and it's just really cool to see how girls are continuing to elevate the game. My proudest medal is this big one over here because I scored the bar down goal in overtime and I felt like, oh I did so well because I scored this bar down goal, I helped my team. That's one of the best feelings I could feel. So I have soccer, hockey, figure skating, horseback riding, gymnastics. This is a picture of my boys team this season. That's me right over here. I love about figure skating how graceful you are. The difference with figure skating is that you feel like you've only got like one shot. This is your one competition you've been training the entire season for these one and a half minutes. And then with hockey it's like I gotta space out my timing. It's not just one minute, it's an entire game. It's 45 minutes of working hard. I have to keep going, I have to keep pushing. Arms up, go. Free leg in front. Maya, free leg in front. Kick, little kick. One and two. Push one, two. One, two. Good, okay. Turn backward. The figure skating focus for more technical skating. Ages, power, like more balance. Forward, backward. It's easy to turn. I think it's very, very helpful to hockey skaters. On teams I've been with, I know that sometimes kids get mad when they do lose. They try to do like penalties if we're losing by a lot. And figure skating, like the high intensity helps me keep my calm and keep pushing hard, which helps me think of myself as a hard worker. Yes, keep straight. Figure skating is more edges. Everybody that knows anything about like the skating world, they'll tell you that figure skaters are the best skaters. They're better than hockey players in terms of the actual skating. Cross, loop, hold. One more time. And so with edge work and stuff like that, it's very good for her to do figure skating. It complements hockey. Up, hold. Better. She's very, very good performer. On practice time, she's like a little bit more concentrate and focus for jumps, but when she's competing, she's very smile and more arms, choreography, and she's perform for audience. She will do competitions once, maybe once or twice a year. She's getting ready for one right now. When I suit up to do hockey, I feel like I'm a warrior. But when I get on the ice and get my figure skates on, I feel like a princess. I guess that makes me a warrior princess. Maya has a decent Instagram presence, six, seven thousand followers, and started doing that to kind of follow her progress three, four years ago. It's a hockey community on Instagram, all ages and girls and boys. So as the account grew, we started getting more direct messages from girls or their parents, her age or younger, just saying that we really love your progress. You're an inspiration. Keep kicking butt, playing with the boys. That's really encouraging to see. It's just really cool to see how they're all influenced by me playing hockey and sharing my love for the sport. My goals in the sport is to keep elevating my levels and be the best player I can be. Maybe one day get into a good prep school with good education and good hockey. I think the biggest challenges is to keep going through hard times because in hockey, you can get injured pretty easily. It's like a lot of people back out when they do get injured, like, oh, this sport is too dangerous. Oh, but if you keep going, you can get really good. I mean, I'd like to see her go as far as she wants to go. I mean, she's started off very strong. She's still very young. She can take it as far as she wants to. She like practices a lot. You can tell she's working hard. It's amazing, really. I mean, I really look up to her. She has a lot of qualities that she has developed on her own and not qualities that necessarily somebody's coached her or given her. She's very brave, very outgoing, and works very hard. She inspires me when I look at how she plays and how hard she works. Nobody's off means to me, like, you have to keep working hard. You have to keep proving yourself that you can be the best. You have to keep working hard no matter what. Just keep going, keep pushing. I am rolling. Whenever you're ready. That was great.