<\/p>\n
Charone Gray-Edwards, Laila Edwards\u2019 mom, cheered on her daughter during today\u2019s women\u2019s ice hockey game \u2014 and she made it to Milan through a donation from Travis Kelce.<\/p>\n
Laila Edwards, center, the first Black woman to suit up for Team USA women’s Olympic hockey, with her parents, Charone Gray-Edwards, left, and Robert Edwards, right, in her childhood home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, in 2025.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Sue Ogrocki \/ AP file<\/span><\/p>\n Laila Edwards, an Ohio native, started a GoFundMe to get her family to Italy for her Olympic debut, and one large donation brought her family to the Milan Cortina Games.<\/p>\n \u201cSo we have a mutual friend of [the Kelce brothers], and he called me and he said, \u2018Hey, did you get a large donation?\u2019\u00a0And I said, \u2018We did, anonymous.\u2019 And he said, \u2018Well, that was Travis,\u2019\u201d Gray-Edwards told NBC News correspondent Stephanie Gosk.<\/p>\n Today, in a red, white and blue hat that her daughter will easily be able to find in the crowd, Gray-Edwards watched her daughter step out onto the ice as the first Black woman to represent the U.S. in Olympic hockey.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m ecstatic, I\u2019m overwhelmed, I\u2019m excited for her, and I\u2019m really proud,\u201d Gray-Edwards said.<\/p>\n While Gray-Edwards is celebrating her daughter\u2019s historic journey to the Olympics, she doesn\u2019t want people to lose sight of Laila\u2019s skill.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s an awesome hockey player, so I don\u2019t want people to forget that part. But yes, it is a milestone. It\u2019s an accomplishment that she\u2019s the first Black woman, and we\u2019re excited about that,\u201d Gray-Edwards said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Charone Gray-Edwards, Laila Edwards\u2019 mom, cheered on her daughter during today\u2019s women\u2019s ice hockey game \u2014 and she made it to Milan through a donation from Travis Kelce. Laila Edwards, center, the first Black woman to suit up for Team USA women’s Olympic hockey, with her parents, Charone Gray-Edwards, left, and Robert Edwards, right, in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4409,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[3934,3935,3933,3936,3937,697,3931,1498,3932],"class_list":{"0":"post-4408","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upcoming-games","8":"tag-curling","9":"tag-defeats","10":"tag-hockey","11":"tag-norway","12":"tag-switzerland","13":"tag-team","14":"tag-usa","15":"tag-wins","16":"tag-womens"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}