Thank you everyone for the birthday wishes. I got exactly what I wanted for my birthday; some excellent time with my kids and to something fantastic for someone else. Allow me to explain: As some of you know, Im a volunteer hockey coach on both of my kids teams this year. The mandate for the year was simple; statistically speaking, nobody here is going to make it to the NHL so lets just have a really good time, learn some self-confidence, learn some skills, be a part of a team, and gain a life-long love for the game of hockey! I have to say that we accomplished those missions and more... but there was still something missing. I wanted the memories of the team environment to be warm ones... and I wanted to raise the bar for all of the coaches to follow me so I concocted a little plan. With the help of my team manager, Nicole Kraljic and a friend from a great non-profit organization called NeighbourLink we set out to find a young player that we could dress for success. The criteria I gave her was simple: the player could be male or female, be from a working poor family, hockey could not be a burden for the family, and the lucky kid had to really want to play the game. Well Cynthia came up big for us and found us a little boy that was very deserving of our charity cause. The story was a touching one (Im not going to put it here but if you want to read it I can forward it over in a PM). Our adopted player is a high-energy little boy named Deon and he couldnt be happier to play hockey! Our players got to work fundraising. Some did chores, some took bottles in, all worked very very hard. As a team, we came up with just shy of $680.00! Last night, on my birthday, we took young Deon over to see our friends at Professional Skate Service in Marda Loop and proceeded to get him dressed in all new hockey gear so that he can play next season! ProSkate even stepped this awesomeness up one notch further by matching our funds raised dollar for dollar! Tomorrow we are getting up early and heading to Springbank rink for 7:45am to take our new little friend out for a skate for our last practice of the year and it is going to be awesome! Weve made a little boy that might have otherwise not been able to play hockey very very happy! Best. Birthday. Ever!
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 05:16:43 +0000
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