Crush Tackles Hunger food drive.

Our school nickname is Warriors, but an unofficial nickname for our teams is Orange Crush, hence the “Crush” Tackles Hunger name.

For the past 10 years (rough estimate) we have done this food drive.  It is organized by our players and the “Spaghetti Moms” which is a group of parents who support our players throughout the season.  They hold spaghetti dinners every Thursday evening, organize the end of the season banquet and generally do anything else they can to support our team. (This year we had 8-10 help out for only 1-2 hours each.  Most years we have 15-20 for 3-4 hours each.)

Under normal circumstances we send 4-5 of our players dressed in their jerseys to the elementary school.  They go into the classrooms and talk about being on a team and stress the importance of helping out others.  They then present two challenges to the kids, who can wear the most Orange and Black on a spirit day, and more importantly what building can collect the most food for our local food bank.  We leave tubs in all of our buildings and kids, parents and other community members can donate food.  After a week we have a few more players go back to the elementary school, thank the kids, collect the food and deliver it to the food bank.

This year we had to adjust how we did it.  The visits couldn’t be as “hands on” as normal, but the kids still seemed to have a good time and we did collect a lot of food for the food bank.

I was happy to share this information, but the real credit for doing this each year goes to the players, their parents and some of the elementary office staff who really help make Crush Tackles Hunger a success each year.