At HEROS, our sense of community means everything to us.
And when we talk about community, we don’t just mean the players and coaches that are on the ice each week. The HEROS community includes loving families, diehard fans, generous donors, and other hockey teams that all want to see HEROS and SuperHEROS find their unique vision of success.
The 2014 East York Bulldogs are a recent addition to the HEROS community, supporting HEROS throughout this past season by raising close to $6000 for their local HEROS chapter, surpassing their fundraising goal and ensuring six more HEROS have everything they need to play, learn, and grow next season!
“It means a lot to be able to help out,” said Daniel Johnston, Coach of the 2014 East York Bulldogs discussing the importance of fundraising. “It’s nice to be able to turn around and pay it back.”
As many hockey parents know, fundraising is an essential part of many minor hockey seasons, and generally is done to help cover the cost of things like tournaments, team swag, and ice time. Coach Daniel understands this as well as anyone, and at the start of the season, was looking for sponsors to ensure his team had the best season possible.
“When I was doing my fundraising for East York,” said Coach Daniel, “I was reaching out to a few of the companies that I work with in my business. One of the companies that I work with was interested in taking one of our higher-level sponsorship positions, which is when you get your name on the sponsor bar on the jerseys.”
But, as Coach Daniel explains, this sponsorship came with a catch.
This particular sponsor didn’t want any of the traditional recognition that comes with supporting a minor hockey team. Instead, they wanted the East York Bulldogs to find a charity to support using their sponsorship recognition.
After some research on local charities, Coach Daniel found HEROS and instantly recognized it was a perfect fit.
“I reached out and I got in touch with HEROS and explained what we were doing,” said Daniel. “Everyone was interested.”
While the work HEROS was doing was important to the team, Coach Daniel went on to say that it was the community aspect that really stood out to him, “I really liked that HEROS works with local kids here in Toronto. I thought it was nice that the [East York] kids were able to have a local attachment to what they were doing and knew their fundraising was doing important things in their community.”
The team, made up of an incredible group of nine and ten-year-olds, was determined to make an impact from the very start of the season. So, to help them raise funds, they created a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign and leaned on their families, friends, schools, and neighbours to support them throughout the season, proving that big things can happen when everyone works together.
For most people, that would be enough. They’ve done their good deed and supported hockey players in their community – truthfully, HEROS can’t ask for much more. But for Daniel and his team, raising money wasn’t their only goal. They wanted to help create awareness of HEROS throughout Toronto and teach the East York players that what they were doing this season was much bigger than hockey.
“We ended up taking the money that was donated from the sponsor and using the #BiggerThanHockey HEROS hashtag, put that on the back of our jerseys and started working with HEROS from there.”, said Daniel.
The season culminated in a skills competition inspired by the NHL All-Star weekend. Keeping with the theme of #BiggerThanHockey, the competition was intended to be a celebration of a season’s worth of hard work, giving the players and their families a chance to relax and really focus on what hockey is all about – having fun and building friendships with your teammates.
It was an amazing day and players enjoyed their time navigating an obstacle course, testing their shot accuracy, and even finding out who the fastest skater on the team was, with a little help from Toronto Police Service members and their speed radar.
We can’t thank the East York Bulldogs players, coaching staff, and families enough for their support this year. The HEROS community has become bigger and stronger with this addition of incredible people and organizations that have come together to support our players. We are so grateful to have made friends with this East York Bulldogs team and the East York Hockey Organization as a whole and can’t wait to see what next season has in store.
“We’re going to continue working with HEROS. I’m continuing to coach the team. We’ll be doing the same skills competition again, and we’ll also be looking at other ways throughout the year to get involved,” said Daniel.
“This is the kind of initiative that we were very happy to be a part of.”
If you or your team would like to support HEROS in your community, reach out to us at info@heroshockey.com!