The Grand Forks Pee Wee rep hockey team is on the fundraising trail to raise money for the team and an upcoming tournament.
The rep team needs to raise funds in the range of $12,000 to cover the costs of a provincial tournament, says Terry Corley, treasurer of Grand Forks Minor Hockey and a parent involved in the team.
“We are going to be doing some more fundraising but I don’t know for sure what we plan on doing next,” Corley says.
He says the team has done a few bottle drives, as well as sold chocolates, household things and “all kinds of things.”
The cost of the trip is down to motel rooms and fuel.
“We have to go to Chetwynd, which Google (maps) says is 13.9 hours and we’re trying to pair up everybody to cut costs that way.”
To try and cover costs, he says they have been looking at many options.
“We applied for some grant money through (the City) for it and they said they’d give us some money too to offset the costs, but like I say, almost $12,000 so we need to raise some money.”
Corley says he doesn’t know what the total is right now.
“Our bottle drive on Saturday was just under $800, our previous one was just under $800, so we made some money, but we have a ways to go yet,” he says.
He says that other than the coach and manager, the parents are the ones who help the team to function.
“We’re just all parents, I mean the coaches coach and we have a manager and the rest of the parents are doing whatever is asked of us.”
One of the parents wrote the city to ask for the funds they have now offered.
Corley, meanwhile, is trying to get sponsorship from some of the businesses in town.
He says that the team doesn’t have enough players to accommodate sickness or injury.
“There’s only the twelve kids, ten skaters and then two goalies… we’re just barely making a team,” he says but adds that they are making the small team work through perseverance. “They’re dedicated that way, they work hard.”
The team does a mixture of training.
“Two days a week they’re doing dryland and two days of practice.”
The provincials are the week of March 20.