"Good Things Take Time." Shaiyena Côté's Journey Continues
"The biggest thing is that I still care about the game and I still feel it. I still love it, and that's what I want to do."
Missed Part One? Get caught up here!
Despite the absolute roller coaster of a season, Shaiyena Côté helped Hvidøre win the Danish Championship.
“I was super happy, like ‘oh my goodness, I got a medal, Like this crazy!’” Côté says. “I didn't think that when I signed up to play at the beginning, that I would end up with a championship.” However, even victory was met with mixed emotions. She explains, “After the initial ‘we got our medals, let's jump around and celebrate!’ my teammates ended up going to see all their families who were there. I just stayed.”
Côté paints a picture of the loneliness that many import players can relate to at some point in their careers abroad. “I was in the middle of the ice. Like this is just super sad in the sense that I finally was happy, I achieved something, and I wanted to share that," she says. She FaceTimed her family several timezones over, but nothing matches sharing that moment together in-person with the people you love.
High-achieving athletes like Côté often forget or feel selfish for celebrating personal wins and taking moments to appreciate what they’ve accomplished. It can also be difficult to find silver-linings from challenging seasons of life that feel like they're beating you down. She says, “I think I forget because I'm really hard on myself. I forget to celebrate successes, even if they're little successes. My former boss told me that you can't be so hard on yourself. It can't always be like one hill to climb after another. You have to take some time to actually honor that.”
She heeds her boss’ words and honors that moment with us, “...I'm just proud and what I have come to learn about myself – how much I can handle and how much I can take adversity wise, and that I stuck with it because honestly, there were times that I wasn't going to stick with it. So I'm proud that it all worked out, and I wouldn't change it.”
When asked if the season mirrors her own lifelong tendency to set big goals and achieve them no matter what stands in her way she says, “I think a lot of what I reflect on is simply perseverance…Whether it was bringing my hockey gear with me, finding a team, winning a championship. I'm super proud of the fact that the goals that I set out to do two years before – Okay, I'm gonna go to the university, I'm gonna go to Sweden, I'm going to go play hockey, and the championship was a bonus, but I made all of that happen.”
She continues, “The biggest thing is that I still care about the game and I still feel it. I still love it, and that's what I want to do. I've never felt any other way [about] hockey, like hockey is my one love. It'll always be.”
"Building a relationship and being an inspiration for the Indigenous community is important to me. Being a positive role model for the Indigenous population, but also Indigenous women, is huge.”
Knowing playing hockey won't take her to the ultimate goal in the NHL, Côté started expanding her network into professional hockey right away, including speaking with NHL coaches, working media at three NHL drafts, and connecting with her Indigenous community. She believes building relationships, academic accreditation and an overflowing passion for teaching and learning about the game will be the key to her 40-year career plan.
“It's about relationships,” she says. “It's a way to connect with people, for me on a personal level, like building a relationship and being an inspiration for the indigenous community is important to me…being a positive role model for the Indigenous population, but also Indigenous women, is huge.”
Côté took this a step further, explaining why she’s pursuing opportunities in the NHL rather than in the women’s game. She says, “the NHL is a bigger platform and being able to inspire others because of the publicity it gets. So if I was able to inspire people from my own communities, whether it's young girls, young women, young kids, like whoever you are, or whether it's Indigenous kids, like I would love to be able to inspire any people.”
Growing up without a women’s professional league, Côté had already set her sights on the NHL, saying, “I think I'm very stubborn and I'm very fixed, so I like to stick with the goals that I've set for myself.” There’s a certain level of stubbornness, confidence and assertiveness women needs to succeed in the male-dominated space of professional sports.
"I believe that I have a place there.”
Working her first NHL draft in Vancouver, she was the youngest person, the only woman, and the only person of color in the room. She thinks back, “I walked out. I'm like, ‘Why should I even be here?’ I had this major, major questioning moment of, ‘is this right for me?’ And then I kind of took a step back and thought, “but that's all I want to do.”
Côté states, “At the end of the day, anybody else can think what they want as long as it's to themselves, I don't care. I believe that I have a place there.”
Since that moment, she's worked media at two more NHL drafts since then, the Champions Hockey League finals and covers the AHL Eastern Conference, IIHF World Juniors, and NHL Prospect Camps and Tournaments. And she's not stopping there anytime soon.
When asked what she’s learned and what she wants the readers to know, Côté says, “you come to understand yourself better as a person, and growth happens outside of your comfort zone. So, it's not always perfect, and it's not going to feel good at times, but what will feel good is knowing that you've reached your own definition of success, and that success isn't based on what other people think of you. Success is based on how you feel and how you've reflected on reaching your own goals.”
As for her own goals, she says, “good things take time, I think. And if you're patient enough for it, the opportunities will come.”
With this amount of drive, passion and grit, keep an eye out for Côté’s name – you might just see it on the Stanley Cup one day.
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