Laila Edwards: Golden Girl
We met Laila Edwards before the gold medal. Before Milan. Before the headlines. In Wisconsin, with her family around her and Dominique’s camera rolling, we saw the making of a champion who would go on to help deliver Olympic history.
By Sid S-H
Photography by Dominique Powers
There is a photograph from Laila Edwards’ 22nd birthday party in Wisconsin where she is cutting her cake, mid-laugh, surrounded by friends, family and sponsors who believe in her. For a moment she looks precisely her age. Not the first Black woman to play Olympic ice hockey for the United States. Not the Red Bull athlete. Not the woman juggling it all while simultaneously completing a social work degree between national championships. Just a 22-year-old at a celebration, with people who were in her corner long before the rest of the world worked out what it was watching.
Red Bull had brought that evening together and, kindly invited Glorious into the room. That was how our friend and photographer Dominique Powers found herself in Wisconsin in January, winter coat over her arm and camera in hand. Across two days she photographed Laila on the ice, watched her play for the Wisconsin Badgers and then stepped into the birthday party, getting to know the family and friends for whom Milano Cortina was still weeks away.
We waited to publish because this was never a preview piece. We needed the story to finish. On 19 February 2026, it did, in spectacular fashion, with a gold medal and global headlines.
The call from Team USA Hockey had come just before Dominique arrived in Wisconsin. Laila took it in the video room, having waited through the whole morning. “We had a schedule of when we were going to get called, so mine was at 1.10pm Central, and I was just waiting all day,” she said. “We had practice, so I just hung around. After that, I went into our video room. I took the call from my general manager and she told me I made it. I walked out of the video room and a lot of my teammates were splashing me with water congratulating me. It was really wholesome!” She laughs at the memory.
Long before that phone rang, Laila’s direction had been set back in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. As a child she idolised Hilary Knight, the forward who became the face of women’s hockey in the United States, wore Knight’s number 21 in youth hockey and watched the 2018 PyeongChang Games as a 14-year-old with a very specific ambition forming. “I remember thinking, that’s got to be one of the best feelings, I want that,” she tells Glorious. “I knew I wanted, and still want, to represent my country at the greatest level at one of the greatest sporting events.”
By the time she was leading Division I in goals, she was already thinking several steps ahead, and in 2024 she approached USA Hockey’s player development consultant Ellen Weinberg-Hughes with a proposal to move from forward to defence. It was not sentimental. It was a calculation about versatility and roster depth. Head coach John Wroblewski later admitted it had not been part of their initial thinking. At 6’1”, Laila adapted quickly and the switch strengthened her Olympic case.
Around that same period, Red Bull signed Laila, bringing her into the fold and into their Athlete Performance Centre in Los Angeles, where fellow Red Bull athlete Hilary Knight was also part of the programme. “Red Bull has done tremendous things for me. I’m so grateful for Red Bull through and through. There’s so many resources!” At the APC she trained alongside athletes she had grown up watching. “I got to meet Zeb Powell. Maddie Mastro. A really, really long list of other really cool athletes. It was a very simple thing for them. But for me, I was starstruck. I was fangirling a little bit!” Laila excitedly tells us at her party. “They treat us all the same, no matter our following, no matter our success. And it’s just really special.”
sacrifices
So how did the quiet girl from Cleveland Heights start sharing Olympic ice with her idol and making global headlines? It turns out none of that happened by accident. Elite sport loves the myth of the one-off, the outlier who appears from nowhere and does it all alone. Laila’s story refuses that. It is crowded and noisy, built on people who drove her to rinks in the dark and kept saying yes when everything around them said hockey was not for families like theirs.
Her father Robert, who competed in Division I baseball at Cleveland State University, put all five of his children on skates. Figure skating came first to build edge work and balance, then hockey. By eight Laila was travelling to out-of-state tournaments, playing on boys’ teams, often the only girl on the roster. At 13 she left Cleveland Heights for Bishop Kearney High School in Rochester, New York, where she finished with 147 goals and 266 assists in 287 games. Wisconsin followed. Two NCAA national titles. A Bob Allen Women’s Player of the Year Award. A junior season leading all of Division I in goals. None of it came free. “My parents both had to make a lot of sacrifices,” she says. “We didn’t grow up with a lot of money and hockey is really expensive. They made their sacrifices and got me here today.”
“When I saw them starting down here and going up, up, up,” Aunt Vanessa Duckworth gestures upwards movements with her hand between forkfuls of birthday cake at the party, “they just kept getting better and better! And then to see both of them at the same university, oh yeah, it warms my heart. It does. It warms my heart!”
The “they” Vanessa is referring to is Chayla, Laila’s sister and fellow Wisconsin Badger. The pair left Cleveland Heights separately as teenagers and found each other again sharing a roster and a national title. “It was hard at first because you know siblings, you have this rivalry, you have all this angst built up towards each other sometimes,” Chayla says. “But once we worked through getting to know each other again and being with each other for months in a row, we eased into it. We won a national championship together. That’s something so special that I will cherish forever. Watching her accomplish everything with so much grace, poise, and compassion – that’s been the same since we were kids.”
opportunitY
Brittany, their eldest sister, sees that same quality. “Everything she’s accomplished is amazing. She wears so many hats, I’m blown away,” she says. “Laila is carrying our whole family at just 22 years old. Selfless.” Bobby, their brother who plays club hockey, laughs as he adds to his sisters’ observations. “I was playing club hockey in college, which is like not that important, but she was into it like it was the NHL – always tracking my games. She had her own stuff going on, but she’s still locked in on everybody else.”
That same selflessness looped back as family and Cleveland Heights rallied for her. The Edwards family launched a GoFundMe to get fourteen people to Milano Cortina, setting a $50,000 target. NFL brothers Travis and Jason Kelce, both Cleveland Heights natives, gave it the biggest boost with $10,000. They’d first highlighted Laila on their New Heights podcast in 2023, when she became the first Black woman to play for the U.S. women’s senior national team. She messaged to thank them, fully expecting silence. Travis replied. They’d stayed in touch since.
“Larry Nance wearing my jersey, the Kelce brothers shouting me out,” Laila tells us in awe, still visibly overwhelmed by the accumulation of it all. “It’s just wow! That’s all I have to say. Wow! I’m so grateful, and I just hope to keep making everyone proud.” The campaign raised more than $60,000, getting ten family members and four friends to Milan, among them Laila’s 91-year-old maternal grandmother Ernestine Gray, who had to sort out a passport before she could even consider a plane ticket.
In Milan, the whole family, donning her jerseys, started making headlines of their own. Laila’s mother Charone documented her match day fits on TikTok, acquiring a cult following who kept coming back for her pregame fit checks in USA merchandise, number 10 jersey earrings and, as she put it, “pants from the Mart, Walmart that is.” Laila and the real MVP, 91 year old Ernastine created their own headline making ritual too. Ernestine would wait in the stands until she was certain Laila had spotted her, then allow herself a small wave back. Also going wild in the stands were Jason Kelce, alongside his wife Kylie, former collegiate field hockey player and host of the Not Gonna Lie podcast. Tom Brady could even be seen cheering on Team USA at the final.
The arena had already been loud all week. By the time the gold medal game arrived, it felt combustible.
What unfolded felt scripted by the gods of the game itself – a perfect collision of past and future. Hilary Knight, in her fifth and final Olympics, closed out an era she’d defined. Laila, in her first, stepped into the light. Team USA had dominated the tournament, but Canada dug deep in the gold medal match, clinging to a 1-0 lead as the clock ticked down mercilessly. With just two minutes remaining, Laila – planted on the blue line – wound up and ripped one. A clean frozen-rope shot that Knight deflected past the keeper to tie it. The player who’d grown up idolising her, wearing her number 21 in youth leagues, had just assisted her hero’s last Olympic goal. Overtime arrived. Megan Keller buried the winner. 2-1.
community
The stands erupted. Charone hugged Ernestine, tears streaming, the whole family a knot of joy and disbelief. Half a world away, a packed Cleveland Heights community centre lost its collective mind too. Team USA had just taken gold.
“I mean I want hockey to go well, to go great obviously,” Laila told us back in January, “but more importantly I want to make an impact on people. Being a role model. Representation. All of that. That’s really what I want to achieve.”
Laila’s family, teammates, sponsors and Cleveland Heights had always seen her as a role model, but on 19th February, inside Santagiulia Arena, the rest of the world did too.
As the flags rose in Milan, a new generation of girls watched from living rooms and ice rinks around the globe, just as Laila once watched Hilary Knight, imagining what that stage might feel like.
A 22-year-old Black woman stood there with gold around her neck.
And somewhere, another fourteen-year-old was watching.
Big thanks to Laila and her family, Red Bull and of course to to Dominique Powers.
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