There are many players that influenced me throughout my life and many of them I actually grew up around as they were teammates of my dad back when he was playing in Buffalo while I was kid. Brynjar Tusk, Brandon Holmes, Eduard Selich or Alexis Metzler, just to name a few were guys I idolized while taking the first steps on the ice myself, and who I got to actually meet as well after practices and games. Sometimes even friends of my granddad's like Christoph Klose, Joe McKeil and Niclas Wastlund stopped by to say hi and shoot some pucks which was pretty awesome, although I found it kinda hard to imagine how these jovial and sometimes chubby oldtimers once flew over the ice as some of the best players in the leagues history.

But it wasn't until I was older and in my teens that I finally found a player that I didn't just like because I knew them personally, but because I got to watch them myself while in their absolute prime and that pure amount of skill and tenacity just blew me away. And that player was Sophia Bennett, the Sniper from the Los Angeles Panthers. She was another teammate of my dad's but one that I never met in person because at that point, I had already started my own career in junior hockey and didn't live at home anymore. Seeing Bennett made me realize that this was exactly the kind of player I wanted to be: Quick on her skates and with her hands, deadly in front of the net while playing a responsible game defensively and with some sandpaper as well to hold her on in battles along the boards. The fact that I idolized a female player might've been a reason for ridicule among my buddies - but only until they actually saw her play for the first time, at which point most of them were just as impressed as I had been when I first saw her play.