An 11-year-old from Nunavut made its U20 Arctic Winter Games hockey team. It wasn't easy

Like many 11-year-olds faced with a TV camera, Jordyn Machmer lets her dad do most of the talking.

"You have to have a goal, and she had that goal and she did it and she worked hard for it," said David Kilabuk about his daughter, the youngest player on Team Nunavut's U20 female hockey team at the Arctic Winter Games (AWG). 

But when she's on the ice, Jordyn takes charge. 

"There were many hours where she did stuff on her own," Kilabuk said. "And she works out every day on her own, I don't have to tell her to do this or to do that."

It's not easy being a hockey player in Pangnirtung, Nunavut, a community of fewer than 1,500 on Baffin Island.

There is no artificial ice in the community. Every year, Kilabuk builds Jordyn an outdoor rink to practise on, at least until the ice at the community's arena is formed in January. 

"She does a lot of stuff behind our house — shooting — and stickhandling in the house as well."

Jordyn's mom, Sheena Machmer, took her daughter to the AWG tryouts in November 2022 to gain more hockey skills and the knowledge of the game, not expecting her to get chosen.

But she remembers when Jamie Savikataaq, the team's coach, called out the name of the players who made it onto the team. "I thought oh, she didn't make it, but then he said, 'and the baby of the team, Jordyn Machmer!'" 

She said, "I was really kind of shocked and I didn't know what to say or what to feel in the dressing room."

"It was fun," Jordyn told CBC News nearly a month after getting selected for the only female hockey team Nunavut sent to the Games.

Savikataaq had his eye on Jordyn since first seeing her play hockey at Toonik Tyme — the annual spring festival in Iqaluit — in April 2019. She was only eight years old.

When she was 11,