New York’s next generation of female sports stars has already made the pages of Sports Illustrated — for their game, not glam.
Honor Smoke, a 10-year-old wrestler from Erie County, looks fierce and ready to fight on the front page of Sports reIllustrated – the sports mag’s special edition released in February aimed at empowering young female athletes – where she made history as the youngest person ever to appear on its cover.
“I walked onto the mat for the first time three years ago, and now I’m on Sports Illustrated and I won [a state championship title]. It’s crazy how much I have accomplished,” Smoke told The Post during a recent Zoom interview from her family home in Akron, a small village located about 25 miles east of Buffalo.
The fifth-grader – who practices wrestling moves like “the three-quarter Nelson” up to six days a week – was the first girl to join the Akron Youth Wrestling Club when she decided to try the sport on a whim at age 7.
“When I first started, I would never win any of the matches, so I was really determined to win. Once I started winning a lot of the matches, I was like, ‘Oh, I really like this,’ and I wanted to keep doing it,” recalled Smoke, who now aspires to wrestle in the Olympics one day.
“I like wrestling the boys better. It feels better to beat them,” she added.
The tween has pinned her place in the record books, taking home first place in her age and weight bracket in the girl’s division of the New York Wresting Association for Youth State Championship last year, placing third at the USA Wrestling Kids Folkstyle National Championship held in Indiana in January and, most recently, qualifying to represent the Empire State at the USA Wrestling 2025 Western Regional Championships in Utah in May.
Smoke was one of 10 young, female athletes from across the US who were spotlighted in the Sports reIllustrated, which launched in partnership with Dove to take on a tough opponent: body-image pressures driving nearly half of girls out of sports.
New York City came to play — with three cover girls including Pepper Persley, a 14-year-old Harlem basketballer; Julia Dinar, a 13-year-old fencer from Flatbush, Brooklyn, and Liana Chan, a 12-year-old ice hockey player from Pelham Gardens in the Bronx.
“I love basketball. It fulfills me, and it’s taught me so much in terms of my confidence and leadership and teamwork, and those are things I will carry with me throughout my entire life,” said Persley, who played point guard on her K-12 independent school’s varsity team as an eighth-grader this year.
“I love everything the campaign stands for, so being able to be a part of it is so cool,” she told The Post. “And having my pages be alongside these other girls who are so incredible means everything to me.”
Dinar, who started fencing simply “to stay active” during the pandemic, now practices her “parry defense” up to 16 hours a week, for competitions in Ohio, Oregon, New Jersey, and Washington D.C., she said.
“I think I was in shock to see myself in a magazine, but I feel empowered and happy,” said Dinar, who plans to continue fencing into college, or until the sport interferes with her dreams of becoming a pediatrician.
Chan, who is the smallest of all players on her ice hockey team at the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club, was “really happy” being featured in the mag playing a sport she loves, she told The Post.
Three years ago, “the first time I went on the ice, I wasn’t sure how I felt, but over the years, I have developed a love for ice hockey,” said winger Chan.
“I always get really excited to go play…it would be amazing if I could play in college,” the youngster said.
