Went to a hockey game and a fundraiser broke out.
If you’re Cochrane’s Levi Jessiman, that’s just the way it happened. Jessiman and his hockey buddies have taken their holiday hockey pickup game to the next level. For the third straight Christmas, the 23-year-old Cochranite’s holiday shinny get together with family and friends is raising funds to purchase toys for kids spending Christmas at Alberta Children’s Hospital in Calgary.
“What happened was a few years ago, we had a situation where we wanted to kind of get together and reconnect as a group of individuals. We had played hockey with each other for so many years in town, post-graduation everybody kind of goes their separate ways,” Jessiman explains. “What we realized is around Christmas time is when all of these people come back home and are reconnecting with their friends and with their family. So it created an opportunity to get everybody together and play some shinny.”
With the opportunity to play some shinny came the chance to raise funds for a Christmas initiative. The group of approximately 70 people was at Cochrane Arena on Dec. 21.
“What that allows us to do is get in contact with one another and create a pool of money. With that pool of money the following day we march into Toys ‘R’ Us, and with whatever money we’ve got we use it to purchase brand-new toys,” Jessiman says. “We go right from Toys ‘R’ Us and take those in and donate them to the Children’s Hospital for their annual toy drive.”
The bulk of the players in Jessiman’s fundraising game are graduates of Cochrane Minor Hockey, with some of the female players having skated with Rocky Mountain Raiders. Several of his pals ended up in the junior ranks in Manitoba, Sasktachewan and Alberta.
Jessiman was a Cochrane Minor Hockey product until joining Edge School Mountaineers at the Midget level. The 2010 Edge graduate connects his desire for starting his hockey fundraising initiative to his time at the school located near Highway 1 west of Calgary.
“We were really taught from a core belief that hockey isn’t the only thing to life. A lot of kids at 16-17 years old don’t understand that. There are a lot more ideologies that go in part with being an adult and one of them is charity,” he relates. “And being able to work a large part of who somebody is being an athlete into a charity organization or charity thinking is kind of a good core to have as a young adult.”
Following the Dec. 21 fundraiser, it was off to the toy store Dec. 22 where $2,710 worth of toys were purchased, filling eight shopping carts before being loaded into pickup trucks for delivery to Children’s Hospital. Jessiman said his group is not affiliated with the hospital, but chose it as an appropriate place to brighten Christmas for the children there. While his group doesn’t get to deliver the toys directly to the kids on the floor, he understands the process.
“We don’t give toys directly to kids. They have an office at the hospital where toys are donated,” he relays. “They check everything – criteria for the types of toys – then they go through a sterilization process before being wrapped to prevent contamination.”
