When Shoyo Hinata was in Japan he played volleyball. He started in middle school and played until the end of high school. He was a pretty good middle blocker and they even made an animated documentary about his playing days. What drew him to the game of hockey ? When going home from the national tournament of volleyball he caught a game of hockey on TV. He saw the IIHF Japan team win a gold medal and he was really inspired. He found that skating fast and scoring goals was really cool. So he quits his volleyball team and started to play hockey. At first it was difficult because he hardly knew how to skate. But he was scoring goals and it was enough to be noticed by the Colorado Raptors. 


Shoyo still looks up to the Japan team that won the gold. He hopes that one day he will be good enough to inspire others to start to play the sport.