Sturgeon Heights steps up

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This article was published 21/10/2021 (1765 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Team managers and football players at Sturgeon Heights Collegiate have joined forces to raise money for cancer research. It’s an effort they hope will turn into a citywide effort from high school students to support charitable causes.

On Friday afternoon, the Huskies football team will be hosting the Garden City Gophers in a Winnipeg High School Football League varsity nine-man game kicking off at 4 p.m.

Funds generated at the gate, in a 50-50 draw and from the canteen will be added to $700 already raised during a recent door-to-door campaign in the community by members of the football team. All proceeds will go to CancerCare Manitoba.

Last month, manager Payton Zubec, a Grade 11 student at Sturgeon Heights, suggested the idea of turning the school’s annual homecoming game into a fundraising effort.

“I’ve always been heavily involved with fundraising for CancerCare because I lost my best friend to cancer,” said Zubec Thursday afternoon. “After watching our first home game of the season, one of our players who had lost his dad was praying at the centre of the field… That immediately just sparked the idea that there shouldn’t have to be any more kids praying to their dads, their dads should be at the game. Cancer shouldn’t take any more lives.”

Head coach Eric Vincent, a French-immersion chemistry and physics teacher at the school, loved the idea of students working for a charitable cause. 

“They came to me with the idea of what if we kind of rebranded our homecoming game as a fundraising game?” he said.

“We generally do a couple of small things that support breast cancer research during the month of October and they said, ‘Well, why don’t we just do a big fundraising campaign that’s tied into our homecoming game?’ “

In 2017, Zubec’s 10-year-old friend Keira Bond was diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer and died only six months later. Before her death, Keira started to raise funds to help others dealing with the disease.

The annual Keira’s Winter Klassic ringette tournament continues to this day.

Memories of her friend remain vivid for Zubec, now a 16-year-old.

“Keira Bond started Keira’s Krusade and it just gave me the idea,” she said of her inspiration.

“Let’s do that. Let’s have the football team do something so I kind of just rolled with the idea for CancerCare. And I know many of the guys on the (football) team have been touched by CancerCare, so therefore we weren’t going to make it a specific cancer, we were just going to make it a huge event.”

And so Zubec, with the help of fellow student managers Neely Morden, Sherris Douglas and Cass Mrozik as well as Huskies football players, went door to door soliciting donations and raised $700 in one night.

The football coaching staff topped that off with another $500 and the team is hoping to raise and other $300 to $800 more at Friday’s game.

In preparation for the game, players had decals commemorating the event added to their helmets. One reads ‘Huskies Wear Pink’ and another is inscribed with the phrase, ‘I’m playing for …” to be personalized by each player.

“The hope is that if we can get the word out a little bit that in the future, maybe every single team in the league can have some type of a fund-raising game every year and see if, as a league, we can raise $50,000 to $60,000 together over the season towards a variety of charities,” said Vincent. 

mike.sawatzky@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @sawa14