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Becoming a professional athlete in any sport is extremely, extremely difficult. That's no secret. What's about a hundred times more difficult to do is go pro in a sport only a handful of years after first playing it. Think Joel Embiid, Tim Duncan, and Hakeem Olajuwon picking up basketball in their early teenage years. Jimmy Graham starting football in college. Didier Drogba taking soccer seriously at age 15. It sounds insane, but guys have done it. Forget basketball, football, and soccer though. What would be even more insane is getting a late start in a sport like hockey. Imagine not really skating on ice or something until the age of 13 and then becoming a first-round pick in the NHL just five years later. Surely that's
never been done, right? Well, it hadn't until Jackson Coven came along this year. Born in Miami, Coven moved at a young age to about the very last spot you'd ever anticipate a hockey player to grow up in, the Cayman Islands. Yes, the tropical island home to less than a hundred thousand people located between Mexico, Cuba, and Jamaica is where a future NHLer mastered his craft. And in a place that averages over 300 sunny days per year, of course there wasn't a single sheet of ice on the island. But they did have something else, and it's something that no other island in the entire Caribbean has, a roller hockey rink. You see, Coven's father Patrick actually grew up in Tobago Ontario, so
he was certainly no stranger to the sport of hockey. And after following his wife Nan, who he met at a small school in Michigan, back to her home nation of Grand Cayman, he was more than thrilled to find a small piece of Canada there in the form of the rink. He began playing in the inline hockey league, and of course, like father like son, Jackson did as well, beginning at the age of just three. Now, in Patrick's words, you could tell Jackson had something at a very young age. But as I'm sure is the case when you're judging your son's hockey abilities at a roller rink in the Cayman Islands, his dad didn't quite know just how good he was yet. That was until he played in a travel tournament
in Florida when he was 6 years old and scored 20 goals in a game. From there, this whole hockey thing started become a bit more serious. Kover's parents began sending him to Ontario for summer camps when he was 8 years old where he finally began skating on real ice for the first time in his life. But, even still, it was just for a week or two in the summer, and that'd be the extent of his ice hockey playing for the entire year. And while he did continue playing and dominating on the rollerblades back home in the Caymans, by the time COVID hit and Jackson was 12 years old, hockey was far from the end goal. In fact, it wasn't even really his main passion anymore. It was soccer. And so, by the
time he had outgrown the island and wanted to pursue his athletic endeavors elsewhere, that's the sport he had in mind when he first began attending St. Andrew's College in Aurora, Ontario in 2020. And in his first year there, he wasn't on any hockey teams, just soccer. Yes, that's correct. When COVID hit, Jackson Kover, who's now in the NHL, still wasn't playing organized hockey on ice. But, being surrounded by Canadians, it really was only a matter of time before he picked the stick back up, and at 13 years old, he tried out for the local AA team and made it. Mind you, without even knowing what offsides and
icing were. Because the blades to skates transition is one thing, but let's not forget that the actual rules of inline hockey aren't even close to the same either. But, all of this, in Kover's words, were nothing more than a fun challenge that motivated him to get better. He'd say his friends would make fun of him because he didn't know the rules or where to go when the puck wasn't on his stick. And to him, it was just more and more of an excuse to learn and improve. And it's safe to say he did. In his first year of ice hockey, he led his team in scoring. Then the next year, he made both the local AAA team and the St. Andrew's College team. The same team that's housed NHLers like Robert Thomas and Warren
Foegele. By the time his OHL draft year came around, he was playing on one of the best minor teams in all of hockey, completely holding his own. And at the end of that season, at just 16 years old and three years after he first began routinely skating on ice, he was selected 64th overall by the London Knights. And I'm sure you can tell by now, but he only got better and better. His feet were finally catching up to the stick skills he already had. And although it wouldn't take you more than five seconds to tell that this was a roller hockey player at heart, whatever it was, it was working. He played just
one full season in the OHL for London, and that's all he needed to prove he was the real deal, tallying 55 points in 72 games. In April of 2026, he committed to the same school Gavin McKenna just played at in Penn State. And come NHL draft time, his name had crept all the way up draft boards. It was on June 26th that the Ottawa Senators helped add another chapter to one of the very most insane stories in sports, selecting Jackson Koever in the first round of the NHL draft at 32nd overall. In the span of just five years, he officially went from being a roller hockey player in the Cayman Islands to one of the best 32 hockey prospects in the entire world.
It's truly a story you can't believe. Rarely does any athlete ever transcend a sport in a mere few years and go from learning it to dominating it all as a teenager. And certainly not in a sport like hockey. But if it hasn't become glaringly obvious by now, I don't know how else to tell you that Jackson Koever is different. And he'll undoubtedly be one of the coolest and most interesting stories to follow in all of sports these next few years as he continues to do the unthinkable.
