The season of giving is here! One hockey community outside of Edmonton is collaborating with a few charities to help out over the holidays. The Sherwood Park Kings Athletic Club celebrated its seventh annual Kings Day event on December 7.
On this day, all of the Sherwood Park Kings hockey teams come together to play hockey and celebrate being a King. This year, they collaborated with three organizations during the event: the Strathcona Food Bank, Casa House and Payton Kalbfleisch.
Rob Davis, President of the Sherwood Park Kings, says the event serves to celebrate the best parts about their hockey community.
“Hockey hasn’t been portrayed in the best light this last month and for us, hockey does a lot of good. The game is hockey itself, but to me, there are so many more things the game brings. That’s what we wanna celebrate,” says Davis. “We have four pillars in our club. Hockey, education, community and character. The first two are character and community, so we’d like to showcase that and show people exactly what we do.”
There were hockey nets placed inside two connected arenas: the Shell Arena and the Sherwood Park Arena. Fans and people attending the event filled both of the nets with non-perishable food donations for the Strathcona Food Bank.
They set up a donation bin for broken and used hockey sticks sent to Peyton Kalbfleisch. Kalbfleisch suffers from complications of multiple brain cancer surgeries. He uses the sticks to build chairs at the Glenrose Hospital. Each chair takes two hours to make, and building the chairs helps him regain strength in his hand weakened by the surgeries. Each chair sells for $150 and $30 goes to the Glenrose.
Proceeds from raffles during Kings Day went to CASA House, a program that focuses on helping teens with mental illness. Chairperson of the Kings Day committee, Anne Marie Schotte, chose CASA House because of their impact on the struggle with mental health.
“Unfortunately we have a big focus on youth mental health issues, not only in Sherwood Park but across Canada, it seems to be an issue,” says Schotte. “We thought why not support a facility in our community that is helping advocate for mental health issues and working with kids and their families so that they can work towards addressing these issues in the community.”
If you would like to make hockey stick donations, you can contact the Kalbfleischs at (780) 467-8610.
