- Paralympic snowboarder Brenna Huckaby found her sport after losing her leg to bone cancer at age 14.
- Huckaby believes sports provide the confidence and mental fortitude to overcome life’s challenges.
- She emphasizes finding happiness in the small, everyday moments of the athletic journey, not just in winning.
- Huckaby became the first Paralympian to appear in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue to represent and inspire others.
If we could ski down a mountain, then when we got home, we were able to conquer everyday life things.
At the time, Brenna Huckaby didn’t fully realize what the idea behind that rehabilitative trip to Utah would mean to her.
She had been diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer, and lost her right leg at 14. To that point, conquering everyday things had meant wearing her prosthetic leg consistently.
But the trip, sponsored by her hospital, which sent Huckaby and kids who lost mobility from osteosarcoma to the slopes, opened up her world.
‘I fell in love with it immediately,’ she tells USA TODAY Sports. ‘It was the first sport that I had found just not only (an) incredible challenge, but also this fear and this knowing that I could do it, and I wanted to do it.’
Huckaby, now 30, became an American Paralympic snowboarder who will once again be competing at the Olympics, this time at Milano Cortina. She won gold and bronze at Beijing in 2022.
Have you ever taken the time to think about what sports, especially your favorite sport, means to you?
We caught up with Huckaby, who would also become the first Paralympian to appear in the Swimsuit Issue of Sports Illustrated and is now a sports mom, about how sports can give us the confidence to take on life’s biggest challenges.
If we set a goal, and we push ourselves, we can reap their benefits at no matter what level we achieve.
YOUTH SPORTS SURVIVAL GUIDE: Pre-order Coach Steve’s upcoming book for young athletes and their parents
Live for the moment: Sports challenge you but also heals you
Huckaby spoke to USA TODAY Sports on behalf of Hershey’s for the “It’s Your Happy Place” campaign. Athletes partnered with the chocolate and candy company to showcase how happiness is not only found in winning, but sweet, everyday moments.
Those moments, she says, ‘don’t have to be big and explosive.’ The small ones can matter the most.
‘I feel like that’s been my main focus the last eight years,’ she says. ‘How can I enjoy the process, enjoy the journey, not just the destination? And I feel like that’s way easier said than done. I’ve learned that taking time to pause, to slow down, to be in the moment, that’s how I have found happiness, presence, gratitude, all the things that make me feel good. It’s been in those tiny moments throughout the day.’
As young athletes (and parents), if we take the time to reflect on what we’re doing as we race to our different sports events, we can improve our awareness. Huckaby’s sport, she says, is mostly mental, and that part of her game helps her push through the excruciatingly physical parts.
‘I feel like I don’t make progress and grow unless I am mentally present and in a good headspace to learn,’ she says. ‘I would say the sooner that you can take moments to reflect on – whether it’s your training in the gym or a practice that you had – what was hard, what was good, what do you want to improve on, and what did it teach you about yourself? When you can start practicing that, it makes the things that you’ve learned so much easier.
‘Then you’re able to see those moments of growth and (be) like, ‘Wow, like I’m so glad that I learned that. And I’m so glad I pushed through that because I’ve got this thing that I’m dealing with at home and I know that I can take the mindsets from sport and apply it here.”
Reflection has helped Huckaby realize she performs her best when she’s calm. She works with a sports psychologist to help her channel her strength to high stakes situations.
‘This is it’: Sports help you get to know who you are
Do you remember the instance where you either discovered your favorite sport or realized it was the one you love most?
Huckaby, who has two older brothers (Jordan and Jeremy), loved to jump around as a little girl. Jeremy, her middle brother, and her parents were really into martial arts, which she tried. Her instructor pulled her parents (Jeff and Kristie) aside and told them, ‘You need to put her in gymnastics.’
‘What I loved the most was learning how to do flips in the gym and that’s what my martial arts teachers would just teach me because that was all I could stay focused for,’ she says. ‘So my parents listened and also they were tired of me doing cartwheels in the house and stuff, and they thought it was a way to save their TV.’
Huckaby’s cancer, which led to the amputation, ended her gymnastics career. But, Huckaby says, she thought about how she loved moving her body and chasing adrenaline.
‘When snowboarding came to me, ‘I was like, this is it,” Huckaby says.
She moved to Utah, about a year after the hospital-led trip with her mom, who worked as a nurse there. The rest of the family stayed at their home in Louisiana, and Kristie moved back home when her daughter graduated high school.
‘It gave me opportunity to just heal from cancer through snowboarding,’ Huckaby says. ‘Sports (is) such a great way to understand life in the way that it challenges you and the way that you intimately get to know who you are.
‘You gain so much confidence in your body and what your body’s capable of. So during cancer, I never really questioned that I could handle it. I put myself in extreme situations through gymnastics training that I knew that I could handle what was to come.
‘I think now as I’ve been doing this at a professional level for so long, I’ve learned, ‘How do I put that more into my everyday life so that I’m not just an athlete?”
Huckaby says she doesn’t so much balance her life, but embraces what’s important to her through every season.
‘He takes care of our kids while I’m away and when I’m training and (is) such a big support, making sure that we win, right?’ she says. ‘It’s a team effort for sure.
‘I’m in the gym in the offseason three to five days a week,’ she says, ‘and I say three to five because we’re human. It’s life, you know? So the ideal, the perfect, is five. The reality is usually three, and during that period, you’re going really hard. And so those off days are really important. And then between snowboard season and gym season, we have two weeks off. We are encouraged to have fun and move our body in ways that feel good, but it doesn’t have to be intense. It’s just, ‘Take time off.’
“And then I usually give myself a fall break. I know that it’s good for my mental health. So usually as Halloween starts rolling around, I’m less intense and then I crank back up (in) November, and then most of December and then (the) holidays, I give myself permission to just chill. Because I know it’s about to get serious after Christmas.
‘It’s (about) finding a rhythm, but I absolutely rest.’
It’s OK to be scared, even if you have put in your work
Lilah and Sloan, Huckaby’s daughters, like skateboarding, wakeboarding, wake surfing and other action sports near their home in Montana.
Lilah, her older daughter, has tried gymnastics and does aerial silks, which Huckaby describes as art-based body movements.
‘We’re active,’ she says. ‘That’s where we’re trying to shine. I don’t ever want them to think anything has just been given to me and easy. Of course, there are moments that it looks easy and it’s because of all the decades of work that I’ve put in on my body and then my mind. And so things look like they come together naturally, but, I love the phrase, ‘An overnight success was not built overnight.’ It was built, you know, a decade before, just quietly working.
‘Like yesterday, I did not want to go to the gym. It was my third day of two-a-days and I was just like, ‘I don’t want to go.’ And they saw that, and I got up and I went.’
But Huckaby also never wants her daughters to think that she’s fearless. She has been scared many times, whether it’s during training, free riding or competing.
“But I’m brave, and I do it anyway, and I do it scared, and I trust my training, and I trust myself, and I hope that they learn to do that for themselves,’ she says.
Huckaby was horrified, she says, when Sports Illustrated approached her to pose for its 2018 swimsuit edition. She thought she wasn’t confident enough to put herself out in the world in that way.
‘Then I just thought about my 14-year-old self who had just lost her leg and was bald at the time and just felt unbeautiful and unworthy, and I remembered that she deserved to be represented in a way that she wanted to, and to be seen as someone who could be beautiful and could be lovable. And so I wanted to give that to her, and I’m so proud of myself for doing that.’
In a similar way, we sometimes have to put ourselves, or our kids, out there for our first big competition. It’s a risk, for sure, but then that rush of adrenaline can come, the one you only get from sports.
‘Bet on yourself,’ Huckaby says, ‘because you’re worth investing in. If you want it, go for it. If you feel like you have what it takes and you love what you’re doing, go out there and give yourself the time to do it and the opportunity to do it because that’s what matters more than when you got into your sport. It’s never too late.’
Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His Coach Steve column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.