FOOTBALL TEAM SCRAMBLES AFTER $17K IN GEAR STOLEN
Donors lend helping hand as Giants organize bottle drive, online fundraiser
One day, about six weeks ago, the president of the North Gloucester Giants walked into the football club’s field house on Donald Street.
Everything was wrong. The door, first of all, was open. Garbage cans were overturned. Trash was strewn all over the floor. The showers were running and a flood was underway. And it got worse.
An inspection of the equipment room found dozens of brand new helmets and shoulder pads were missing and whole sets of team jerseys had disappeared. Coach “bags” — a basic but essential kit with footballs, pylons and such — were gone. Tallied up, about $17,000 in equipment was missing, and the season’s start was only weeks away.
“I thought that we’d end up folding,” said Geoff Woodhouse, 40, once a Giants player, now the volunteer head of the organization. “I really did. I thought the season would be lost.”
North Gloucester, which has some 230 kids in the program, draws from some economically disadvantaged areas, which is a fancy way of saying if there’s 360 bucks in the house, it may not be going to register Junior in football. A good portion of the players need to be subsidized, Woodhouse explained, with programs like Jumpstart. Others pay $20 a week. Still others are quietly “covered.” So, what to do? After taking a deep breath, the Giants organization decided to fight back. A GoFundMe page was started, as was a massive bottle drive, but $17,000 is a lot of money, a dime at a time. (A corner of the field house, at the moment, is bursting with empty bottles and cans.)
“At the beginning, we tried to do it on our own. We realized very quickly there was no way,” Woodhouse said.
But when the word goes out on social and mainstream media, magic sometimes happens, especially when the plot pits plucky kids against vandals robbing them of the opportunity and benefit of sport — a Cinderella story with cleats.
Money trickled in, in 10s and 20s. There was some radio coverage, some Facebook buzz. A collegiate baseball team in Sandford, Fla., for heaven’s sake, began raising money at its games. A business or two stepped forward, none more important than Mattamy Homes, which has offered to pay for much of the stolen equipment. The new equipment is now on order and the season, to start in August, appears to have been saved.
“Amazing,” is Woodhouse’s reaction. “(Mattamy) offered everything and asked for nothing.”
(Mattamy vice-president Ray Charron called the offer “a good fit” for the home-builder, wellknown philanthropists and a frequent contributor to amateur sports in Ottawa.)
Football is an expensive game to outfit and North Gloucester provides all the equipment freeof-charge. An adult-sized Riddell helmet can easily cost $230 and the Giants lost dozens of them. For this season, it had bought 60 sets of new shoulder pads, said Woodhouse, mostly for the older boys. “I think we had six left.”
The Giants, meanwhile, continue to deal with the city of Ottawa over the condition of the building, set back from Donald near the Rideau-Rockcliffe Resource Centre. Two years ago, said Woodhouse, there was a major flood in the basement, so bad that stored equipment was damaged.
He led me down the stairs, where a musty smell could be detected halfway down. The basement was wet again this year, leading to questions about safety and mould buildup.
And, curiously, the police were not contacted about the theft, which seems unwise. (What if the equipment, for instance, were recovered or found abandoned?) Woodhouse was under the impression the city was looking after that and doing its own internal review.
Not so. “The City did not contact police about the theft. The City advised the Club to contact police since they are the owners of the equipment and have the required information to report their loss,” reads an email response attributed to Dan Chenier, general manager of recreation.
But didn’t someone break into their building? “The City does not have information on when the incident reported by the club might have happened,” the response continues. “The City does not have details on the incident, including means of entry.”
In any case, this is not really a crime story, but a tale more edifying: strangers huddling, in the spirit of sport, to leave no kid behind.