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Even before she takes the ice in Milan at her first Olympic Games, Laila Edwards—the wunderkind of American women’s hockey—has racked up a staggering list of accomplishments. The 22-year old from Cleveland Heights, Ohio has already won two collegiate championships during her still-going, ever-dominant stint at the University of Wisconsin, with her eyes on a third this spring. She secured a gold medal with Team USA at the 2025 Women’s World Championships. And when she laces up her skates today for the stars and stripes’ opening game against Czechia, she will become the first Black woman to ever represent USA Hockey at the Olympics.
Beyond the rink, however, Edwards is still a prototypical young person, regularly posting dancing videos to TikTok and planting her flag in the great pop-star wars. “I’m listening to a lot of Lorde,” Edwards told GQ, noting that she saw the Kiwi hitmaker in concert last fall. “I love ‘Current Affairs,’ ‘David,’ ‘Favourite Daughter,’ ‘What Was That?,’ ‘Man of the Year.’ I could go on.”
Much like her beloved queen of pulsating, introspective bangers, Edwards’ preternatural talent also gave her an early introduction to fame, worldwide attention, and people anointing her as the next great one. Edwards has a nose for the goal and a physical frame that makes it hard for opponents to stop her. (At six-foot-one, she is the tallest player on the American roster.) In 2024, as a 20-year-old, she became the youngest player to ever be named MVP of the World Championships, thanks to six goals in seven games. A year later, she led the NCAA in goals and scored a hat trick to send Wisconsin to the national championship game. At the conclusion of the college season this March, Edwards will enter her name in the Professional Women’s Hockey League draft, where she promises to be one of the top picks and immediate faces of the fledgling league. At every step of her sporting life, she has met the burden of expectations head on, carried the weight of her country’s hockey dreams, and deftly navigated the racial challenges that have come her way, all while continuing to get better and better at her craft.
On a recent video call from the Wisconsin hockey facility, Edwards, who turned 22 less than two weeks ago, plainly acknowledged that she has already achieved much more success than the average member of Gen Z. “I look at my resume and I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s kind of a lot,’” she said. “I’m hoping to continue to grow it.”
The main growth opportunity—and one of the lone unfilled spaces on her resume—is an Olympic gold medal. Since women’s hockey was added to the Winter Olympics in 1998, Canada has captured the grand prize at five of the seven Games, including most recently in 2022. While the Americans’ march to the silver medal was unfolding over those two weeks in Beijing, Edwards was still in high school, preparing for the under-18 championships that ultimately caused her to skip graduation. At that U-18 showcase, she ended up netting four goals and dishing four assists, finishing as the USA’s leading scorer and MVP of the tournament. However, Canada left with the gold, adding yet another log to the fire on hockey’s fiercest, century-old rivalry.
That outcome—missing major teenage milestones to chase a puck all around the world, running roughshod over prestigious tournaments where she was typically the best player, and constantly butting heads with the Canadians’ well-decorated teams—was a defining trope of Edwards’ youth. While she had to chop her graduation from the schedule, she was able to make it to prom, a last hurrah before packing up and heading to Wisconsin, where she instantly became a star. Edwards was an instrumental piece of the Badgers’ 2023 national title squad, racking up five points in four NCAA tournament games as a highly advanced freshman. Winning that trophy in her first year of college (at a school that started recruiting her at 13, no less) is one of many examples of Edwards trading a conventional upbringing for the pursuit of greatness—and having it instantly pay off.
“I don’t think anything about my childhood was normal,” she said. “I would miss the whole weekend. I couldn’t hang out with my friends at school. That was a pretty common theme. I was like, ‘Okay, this is how it’s going to be. It’s not normal and it sucks, but these are sacrifices that I’m making to do the sport I love.’”
As a young Black girl playing hockey, Edwards found herself in many spaces where the sport she loved did not necessarily show that same love in return. As a self-described tomboy who opted for a more androgynous look during elementary and middle school, Edwards often competed with and against the boys, leaving her subject to a lot of unwanted speculation. “Just little stupid comments from other players or jealous people,” she said. “Sometimes I’d overhear them say, like, ‘Is that a girl or a boy?’ I’d just ignore it.”
Things weren’t always so easy to brush off, though. Edwards says she never had a single Black teammate growing up besides her older sister, Chayla, who she overlapped with for a year at Wisconsin. Showing up to a game, practice, or weekend tournament and being the only Black face was not uncommon. Neither were people reminding her of that. “The looks I would get in the rink, I could just tell: ‘What are you doing here?’” Edwards recalled. “One time my mom came to one of my games, and the people at the front desk were like, ‘Oh, the basketball courts are that way.’ Just microaggressions. Sometimes in boys hockey, I was called the N-word. Things like that just made me feel isolated and kind of alone.”
Edwards’ father, Robert, also grew up playing hockey before becoming a college baseball player, and Laila credits him with most of her on-ice education, which also included training in figure skating and speed skating. Her hockey IQ was furthered by a position switch at the World Championships in 2025, when, a year after her unprecedented MVP run through the tournament at forward, Edwards was moved to defense to better accommodate the rest of the roster. The dampened individual results—half as many points—gave way to the cherished team result: a gold medal that prevented Canada from repeating as champs. The plan is for Edwards to patrol the blue line again at these Olympics rather than playing forward, giving her a chance to show off her nuanced, well-rounded hockey vision.
“I see the ice completely differently. I’m able to take things that I learned at forward and apply it,” she said, noting that, as a forward, there were certain types of passes she hated receiving from her defense. “[Switching positions] also just taught me a lot about myself, my ability to adapt to certain situations, and succeed in different areas.” The Olympics, of course, present a brand new, hyper-scrutinized situation. Edwards anticipates that the nerves will come from a desire to taste gold, rather than from pure stage fright, and also emphasizes that she will not slow down on her social media posting, wanting to document her Italian voyage as much as possible for her and her legion of followers.
As per usual, Edwards’ chill attitude about her whirlwind life belies the fact that she was born during the George W. Bush administration. For most zoomers, being thrust into the global spotlight, as Edwards will in Milan, might seem terrifying. But for Team USA’s newest star, it’s all just another day at the rink. “It’s what I signed up for,” she said, shrugging. “So it’s nothing crazy.”