Churchill has a team with true spirit
Last October, the Bulldogs learned about giving back. Now, they’re doing it again
Their generosity boils down to a couple of basic truths: Nobody can eat football sweaters; and facing an unexpected tragedy can teach you what really matters when the next one suddenly arrives.
So, on Tuesday morning, the Sir Winston Churchill Bulldogs Secondary School senior boys football team will donate every penny of the $1,500 it raised through the Hamilton Bulldogs Foundation to Hamilton Food Share, the agency that dispenses critically needed supplies to a dozen city-wide food banks and meal programs.
That money had been earned by selling chuck-a-puck bags to fans during a junior hockey game and had been earmarked to purchase new jerseys for the team and to defray some other costs of running next fall’s football program. The Hamilton Bulldogs will now transfer the funds to Hamilton Food Share on the players’ behalf.
“We have a chance to do something and it would be wrong for us not to do something like this with the money,” 17-year-old linebacker Nick Caswell, one of the team captains, told The Spectator during a Zoom conference call Monday.
Whenever this city thinks of the Churchill Bulldogs, it is usually about the evening of Oct. 10 when, only three days after the murder of 14-year-old fellow student Devan Bracci-Selvey just outside the school building, they played — of their own, unanimous choice — their scheduled game against the Sherwood Saints.
It was a moving and stunningly successful attempt to rally the eastend neighbourhood, temporarily suspend mourning for a focus on local bonding and raise money for Devan’s family. The crowd of well over 2,000 included students and area residents of all ages, football teams from other Hamilton schools and visibly-shaken Hamilton Tiger-Cats players.
According to defensive lineman Liam Harrison, who came up with the idea, that October night was a big part of the decision to redirect the team’s jersey fund toward those who are having trouble getting enough to eat during the COVID-19 crisis. All his teammates, who are in regular contact on Snapchat, quickly bought in.
“I was kind of relating this to the previous events this year,” said the 17-year-old Harrison, son of Bulldogs head coach Kevin Harrison. “It’s good to be helping the community. It’s just a disaster now and we decided we need to do something about this.”
Wide receiver Maleek Pryce, 15, added: “With the murder that happened so close to your school and around you, you kind of realize how fast life can get taken away from you. And, with this pandemic, it shows how precious life can be.”
Caswell explains that the team is giving back to a community “which had our backs” with their overflow support for the October game they steadfastly refused to postpone. The players, he said, are well aware of the needs of their neighbourhood and that the school’s “Nutritious Minds” program provides daily hot meals to a number of students.
Kevin Harrison reiterated his pride in coaching a Bulldogs team which “tugs away at my heart strings, once again.”
Joanne Santucci, the founder and executive-director of Hamilton
Food Share, was touched by the players’ unselfishness, telling The Spectator via email: “I went to Churchill a long time ago and I know it’s a school with a lot of families who don’t have a lot of extra money.
“To think of young guys giving up their football jersey money to help ensure that no one goes hungry makes me teary-eyed. But it doesn’t surprise me because the hearts have always been big in the east end. We thank the team and the coach so very much for this heartfelt donation,” Santucci said.
Churchill defensive co-ordinator Troy Izlakar said: “Our season doesn’t start for months, but I already feel like we’ve won a game,” because of the maturity the players have displayed.
Indeed, the three Bulldogs who spoke to The Spectator recognize and embrace that they’ve been forced to mature more quickly than any teenage cohort could ever anticipate. Like everyone their age, they’ve been physically isolated during what would normally be the most socially active periods of their lives and, potentially for some like Caswell, who is in his final year, through their remaining weeks of high school. This, only five months after stepping forward to crystalize a sense of togetherness for a community mourning a slain high school freshman.
“It kind of feels like this whole year there were a lot of things happening,” Pryce says. “Over and over. It hasn’t really stopped. But, we have a really tight community and I feel that a lot of people have been staying together and helping each other through it.”
Liam Harrison, the young lineman who correctly anticipated that his teammates would forego their new jerseys for something much larger, agrees that, “it’s been a growing-up process, especially with what we did with the community this year.
“It’s been a helluva trip.”