Brock men's hockey first Coach4Food practice a big success

The Brock University men's hockey team held their first minor hockey practice as part of the Coach4Food program. Brock Head Coach Murray Nystrom, along with Assistant Coach Mike MacDonald and players Kody Blois, Josh Schram and Daniel Tanel ran the practice for the Niagara Falls Atom AE Canucks who raised 455 pounds of food for Project Share.

"It is great to continue our partnership with the Niagara IceDogs," said Brock University Director of Athletics Robert Hilson. "The IceDogs and Badgers are important role models to youth within the Niagara Region. We are proud to be part of the Coach4Food initiative for the second straight year. It allows our student-athletes to take part and give back to the community." 

The Coach4Food program was started by Tom Hedican in North Bay in 2005 and has grown from raising 1,000 pounds of food the first year to an amazing 108,000 pounds of food in their last efforts. 

The way the Coach4Food program works is the IceDogs and Badgers work with local minor hockey teams to help collect food and cash donations to go to local food banks.  In return the IceDogs and Badgers are working together to help provide some great incentives for minor hockey teams to participate. 

The Brock Badgers and head coach Murray Nystrom will come out and help run a practice for each any team that participates in the Coach4Food initiative. 

This initiative is for all minor hockey teams across the Niagara Region and what we feel is a key part of this program is that all the food and money donated to the program will stay with the local food bank in the donating team's area.  For example, if a team in St. Catharines donates; the donation stays in St. Catharines, if a team in Niagara Falls donates; the donation stays in Niagara Falls, etc.  By doing this, we are helping spread the donations throughout the region and hopefully helping as many people as possible. 

To participate in this program, each player from participating teams is encouraged to collect food and/or money donations and then bring those donations to their local food bank.  Once there, the food bank will weigh their donation (financial donations are $1=1.5 lbs.) and then fill out a form confirming your donation.  The forms will then be totaled up and to determine the top donating teams.

The initiative kicked off Thursday, November 15th and donations will be accepted for the program until Friday, December 21st. We feel that this is a great initiative that we are proud to be a part of and we look forward to hopefully growing on last year's total of 8,000 lbs. raised! We have heard nothing but great things about last year's program and we hope that this program can continue to help bring needed support to food banks throughout the Niagara Region.