Professional athlete and co-founder of Empower Hockey, Kimberly Newell shares how new experiences help her grow, what's key to managing the inherent pressures of competitive sport at the highest level and the importance of female role models
Kimberly Newell began ice skating at the age of two. “My dad grew up in Canada and played ice hockey growing up, and told my mum, who is Chinese, ‘Our kids don’t have to be good at hockey, but to be Canadian they have to at least play.”
Newell started out in public skating arenas and for as long as she can remember skating and hockey have been part of her life. Later, after watching a goalie training session, she became transfixed with playing in goal. “There was something about the gear and the movement and it was so different from being a player. It captivated me,” she says.
Newell started asking her parents for goalie gear—the pads, the stick, the gloves—but they weren’t keen. “They thought that being a goalie [came with] so much pressure. If you make a mistake, that’s a goal. Make a mistake as a player and maybe no one notices, but as a goalie, everyone’s going to notice. But I kept pestering them and eventually they gave in.”
Were her parents’ ideas of the associated pressure with the position the reality? “There’s definitely a lot of pressure,” says Newell. “I give a lot of credit to my dad for coaching me through that. As you get to higher levels, it’s not so much the technical side or the physical side, it’s really the mental game that separates players.”
“Every time you let in one goal, that’s one mistake,” continues Newell. “A lot of goalies will get down on themselves and beat themselves up: ‘Oh, I should have saved that and then maybe my team would have won’. A bit of it was learning how to zone in on the moment. I had this mantra where I said to myself: ‘Just focus on the next shot. Don’t worry about the score. Don’t worry about the goal that went in.’ All you are focused on is the next shot, because that’s all you can really control and that’s all you can do.”
Newell played ice hockey to a high level both prior to and during her time at Princeton University, but when she graduated with a degree in economics and finance she went to work at a bank, leaving ice hockey behind her—or so she thought. “When I worked in finance for those couple of years, I didn’t expect to come back to hockey. I thought that was it and this is my career now. And then there was this swerve and now I’m playing professional hockey.”
That swerve came when Newell received a phone call asking if she would like to play goalie in China’s first women’s professional hockey team, which would go on to compete at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
“A big part of my decision to make that big change—to leave finance, [when] I had been working towards that career—was based around my family and really wanting to reconnect with my Chinese heritage,” says Newell, who had also been studying Mandarin at university to be able to communicate with her family in China.
