How a 9-year-old girl found a confidence-changing role model in Denver soccer star Carson Pickett: “It fills me with hope”

Denver — In their home opener last month at Mile High Stadium, the brand-new Denver Summit FC women’s soccer team of the NWSL went scoreless. But for one girl in attendance, it was a huge win, because she found a role model.

“I want to be a professional soccer player when I grow up,” Hayden Stine, 9, told CBS News of meeting Summit star Carson Pickett. “And she was able to do that. And it really fills me with hope that I’m able to as well.”

Stine was born without most of her right arm. So when she went to that game and saw Pickett, a player just like her, Hayden said she saw something in herself.

“Role models make you feel like you can do anything – just like them,” Hayden said.

Since that meeting, Hayden’s “confidence has skyrocketed” her mother, Christina Hayden, disclosed.

“At school, on the soccer field, it’s through the roof,” Christina said.  

The family said meeting Pickett was truly life-altering. And yet, Pickett says the meeting almost never happened.

“I didn’t want to be known as the girl with one arm that plays soccer,” Pickett told CBS News. “I just wanted to be known for the girl that plays soccer.”

For years, Pickett says she hid her arm in pictures and avoided even talking about her limb difference. That was until one day, when she says her mother told her she was missing an opportunity, and a purpose. 

Pickett later wrote on social media, “Finding out that the journey is a lot less about myself and a lot more about the hearts I can touch along the way.”

Now, Pickett says she’s taken the “complete opposite” approach.

“I want to meet all the kids, all the families, all the adults,” Pickett said. “I want to meet everyone that I can.”

In fact, Pickett has now so embraced the role of role model, that this week she surprised Hayden at her team’s soccer practice.

Pickett plans to stay in touch, and maybe help Hayden find her purpose too, because when it comes to role models, it takes one to be one.

On being a role model herself one day, Hayden says: “Yes, I am up for it.”