Hayden Stine finds inspiration meeting Carson Pickett at record NWSL opener

Hayden Stine came to Denver Summit FC’s first home match and left with something bigger than a souvenir from a scoreless draw. The 9-year-old, who was born without most of her right arm, saw Carson Pickett at Empower Field at Mile High on March 28 and immediately recognized a player who looked like her.

Hayden said she was very excited after finding someone “a lot like me,” a reaction that captured why Pickett’s presence mattered so much in a stadium filled with 63,004 fans. The match, Denver Summit FC’s inaugural home opener in its first NWSL season, ended 0-0 against the Washington Spirit, but for Hayden the night turned on visibility, not the final score. Denver Summit FC said more than 50,000 tickets had already been sold before kickoff, and the final crowd set a new National Women’s Soccer League single-match attendance record.

Pickett brought a rare kind of resonance to that moment. Born without a left forearm and hand, she had already become the first player with a limb difference to appear for the U.S. women’s national team when she played in a 2-0 win over Colombia on June 28, 2022. Pickett has been open about wanting recognition for her game first, not her body, saying, “I didn't want to be known as the girl with one arm that plays soccer. I just wanted to be known for the girl that plays soccer.”

That message landed with unusual force in Denver, where Colorado’s new professional women’s team used its first home game to stage a public debut on a massive scale. The crowd surpassed Bay FC’s previous NWSL attendance record of 40,091, set on August 23, 2025, and gave Denver Summit FC an immediate place in league history. The attendance figure also underscored how much curiosity and appetite existed for women’s soccer in a city that had never hosted this kind of opening-night scene before.

For Hayden, the night was not about records or league milestones. It was about seeing that an athlete with a limb difference could occupy the center of a professional sports stage and belong there. That is the deeper reach of Pickett’s career: not just breaking barriers herself, but expanding the sense of who young players can imagine becoming when they step onto a field.