TRICK SHOT CHALLENGE
Trick-shot challenge shines a spotlight on Flames executive’s fundraising efforts
Flames exec Chris Snow raises funds for ALS
Wednesday came and went. For Calgary Flames assistant general manager Chris Snow, it was a massive milestone.
It was on June 17, 2019, that Snow’s greatest fear was confirmed — he, like several family members before him, had been diagnosed with a deadly disease.
“The doctor looked at me and said, ‘This is the early stage of ALS,’” Snow recalled. “I asked him, ‘How long do I have?’ And he said, ‘I would say a year.’”
One year. The start of a potentially crippling countdown. ALS attacks the communications between the brain and muscles, robbing a person of their ability to walk, talk, eat and even breathe.
June 17, 2020, came and went. Snow is as busy as ever with the Flames, key to contract negotiations and statistical analysis and a valued perspective in hockey ops and pre-draft meetings.
The proud husband and father is still chasing his two kids — son Cohen and daughter Willa — around. In fact, he helped coach Cohen’s novice team this past winter.
He recently fired a hockey puck through two open windows — driver and passenger side — of a 2000 Nissan Pathfinder and nailed a 43-yard field goal. More on both in a minute.
As his wife, Kelsie, put it, he is living with ALS.
Chris has now become an ambassador of sorts, the inspiration for the #Trickshot4snowy initiative and a beacon of hope for many. The 38-year-old is enrolled in a clinical trial and for several months, there had been no change beyond the initial symptoms in his right arm. (He has since learned to complete everyday tasks without the use of his dominant hand, and the Flames’ equipment staff has sewn a special glove so he can stickhandle and shoot when on the ice.)
In mid-may, Kelsie revealed on her must-read blog that they had noticed a slight droop on the right side of his smile, a sign this aggressive form of ALS — the disease that claimed his father, two paternal uncles and a cousin — might not have been stopped in its tracks by the new treatment.
“It’s a day that I’ve thought about for a long time, a day that when I was diagnosed, I didn’t know if I would see,” Snow said of Wednesday’s significance. “As the months have gone by ... it was a day that I looked forward to with the thought I could be exactly the same as I was the day that I was diagnosed, and how much of a miracle that would be and how much that would sort of alleviate the emotional worry that I always have, to some degree, about how I’m going to be and how this will progress.
“With the development that I’ve seen, in terms of a change in a facial muscle or two and how that’s affected my smile, it’s introduced some worry about whether this is progressing in some way, so that’s maybe diminished a little bit the feeling I might have had that, ‘Wow, we’ve left this thing almost in our path. We’ve stopped this entirely.’
“So it’s a balance of that last concern but also just real appreciation. The reality is nobody in my family has had a story like mine with this disease, and I have the opportunity to have so much more time. My hope is that time is measured in decades, not years, but I will remind myself (Wednesday) and every day after that this time was in no way guaranteed to me.”
Snow was busy Wednesday on Zoom interviews with 2020 NHL Draft prospects. In the late afternoon, the team — including a few players, plus coaches, management and other staff — surprised him with a drive-by party to mark the occasion.
He also booted a 43-yard field goal, his second addition to #Trickshot4snowy, a (very cool) awareness and fundraising campaign launched last week by Calgary Sports & Entertainment and the Flames Foundation.
The steps are simple — film a trick shot, post online, get the hashtag correct and challenge two others to come up with their own. Donations are also encouraged at calgaryflames.com or snowystrong.ca.
It’s already created quite a buzz on social media. The hope is that it could be a next coming of the Ice Bucket Challenge.
That’s why Snow, on an overcast afternoon, was trying to fling pucks through the windows of that Pathfinder — volunteered by his neighbours Jason and Amanda Thompson — in the parking lot at West Hillhurst arena.
“It’s windy, the puck is just sailing … You’re thinking, ‘I’m never going to do this.’ ”
He did.
“I thought it was a good range, until Tre came back and put one from a couple hundred feet in,” he quipped.
Ah yes, Flames general manager Brad Treliving carried two buckets of pucks and three sticks up to the top of the 200 level at the Saddledome and fired from the corner to the net at the opposite end of the rink.
After sinking that shot, he turned to the camera and deadpanned, “It’s an easy game, guys.” His co-workers, however, noticed a few strays on the ice in the far corner.
“Everybody is giving me a hard time, saying ‘Oh, you probably had a whole bunch of takes,’” Treliving said. “Honestly, it was certainly under 10. I’m going to say six to eight. And when I say takes, the first handful, those are warm-up shots, right? I mean, everybody goes to the range before you step up to the first tee,
Nobody in my family has had a story like mine with this disease, and I have the opportunity to have so much more time.
right? So I don’t even count the first couple.”
The first couple didn’t clear an unexpected obstacle anyway.
“Looking at that shot, a lot of people would think the distance to the ice is the difficult thing,” Treliving said.
“It’s really two parts. The distance to the ice, yeah, that’s difficult. But it’s also not hitting the lights. Because you’re up so high, and you have to put some juice on it and raise it, and there are lights right there. So my first couple, it’s not that I didn’t get to the ice. They just didn’t get underneath the lights.
“So then I had to switch up the weapon. I will tell you, in terms of transparency, I brought a Dube, a Gio and a Monahan. The Dube just didn’t cut it. So why not grab the 30-goal-scorer’s stick, right? So I moved over to the Monahan, and that got it done.”
Treliving’s trick, while impressive, was one-upped — or 10-upped — by club captain Mark Giordano and four teammates, a social distance stunner that was filmed during a Phase 2 smallgroup skate.
Giordano passed a puck to Michael Stone, who used his right skate blade to pop it up and batted it to Mark Jankowski. Stone missed his target, but Jankowski managed to keep the sequence going with a soccer-style header.
With that puck still airborne, Matthew Phillips tapped it twice and swatted it to Dillon Dube, who batted it to Giordano for the finish.
Giordano connects on a wild swing, sizzling the puck — about eight seconds after it had last touched ice — off the post for a goal.
(Word is, their initial idea was to rip a shot from ice level into a net on the concourse, sort of a reverse-treliving, but they eventually audibled.)
“They did tell me that was not Take 1,” Treliving said. “But that’s pretty creative coming up with that and then doing it, and I think it was double-post and in.”
Added Snow: “It’s been fun to ask people, ‘How many takes? Like our players … You have some people saying, ‘Too many, don’t ask.’”
The #Trickshot4snowy campaign is also crossing borders and spanning other sports.
Both Chris and Kelsie Snow are former baseball writers, which prompted ESPN’S Jeff Passan to get involved.
Passan chucked a football through a basketball hoop from across the street at his home, then walked it off with a tape measure, revealing it was a 100foot heave.
He posted the video for his 457,000 followers on Twitter, but the exposure was really cranked up when Sportscenter host Scott Van Pelt spotlighted Passan’s long-distance dedication in his Best Thing I Saw Today segment on Tuesday’s show.
The star power continues to stack up. On Thursday evening, Chicago Cubs top exec Theo Epstein responded to Snow’s challenge, splitting the uprights with a 50-yard kick.
“People are being sooooo creative. It’s just such a lighthearted, fresh and fun thing,” said Candice Goudie, executive director of the Flames Foundation, earlier this week.
“And it’s been so cool to see who has participated, too. It’s awesome that Elliotte Friedman has a video up. It’s great that George Canyon participated while he was camping … Gio’s was so cool. It’s been so neat just to see what’s next.”
This isn’t a competition, but perhaps the most heartwarming entries yet came from Snow’s own kids.
Cohen, 8, drained a basketball shot from a second-floor bedroom window.
Five-year-old Willa bounced a ping-pong ball across the dining room and into a bucket.
In both cases, the gleeful reactions of the entire family are goosebumps-worthy.
Back in 2014, the Ice Bucket Challenge raised upwards of
$100 million.
Perhaps, #Trickshot4snowy could be another game-changer for ALS research.
“Ultimately, we’re having fun with the shot part of it, but it’s about trying to find a cure for this disease that has affected our close friend and colleague,” Treliving said. “This disease now has arrived in our family and in our home, so now you deal with it. You deal with it by banding together, and it’s easy to support because of what we think of
Chris and Kelsie and how close we are to them.
“And then seeing how they’ve dealt with it, how open and how public they have been every step of the way, you can’t help but be inspired by them.”
That was echoed by Goudie, who reported the Flames Foundation has raised more than $150,000 earmarked for ALS since the Snows shared news of the diagnosis in December in a letter written by Kelsie. (Her blog updates at kelsiesnowwrites. com, which also detail her own recovery from a stroke in March 2018, will put a smile on your face and tears in your eyes, sometimes in the same sentence.)
“Chris is just the nicest guy,” Goudie said.
“He is so genuine and he treats everybody like they’re someone, and he’s always smiling and always happy and to go through this with the positivity that he has, it’s just remarkable. And Kelsie is the same. Their family is so genuine and kind and thoughtful, so that connects people to them automatically.
“And then the way that they’ve been open and have been sharing their journey, it’s been raw and emotional and uplifting and informative. They’ve been very vocal about the need for funding for research, and they’re telling their story first-hand as far as what those dollars do.”
Indeed, Snow can vouch for the value of these sorts of fundraising efforts. Wednesday came and went, in part, because of them.