JERSEY DAY FOR HUMBOLDT
THOUSANDS VOW TO EMBRACE JERSEY DAY ACROSS CANADA
Schools, sports teams and businesses among many to don jerseys today
When office co-ordinator Jill Batten dons her 2010 Sidney Crosby Team Canada jersey today, she’ll be honouring more than just the 16 people who perished in a Saskatchewan highway crash.
She’ll be thinking about a 16-year-old classmate who died in a hunting accident when Batten was a high school student in Grand Bank, N.L., and three other young acquaintances who died in two separate highway accidents roughly 10 years later.
Batten, now 38, says she can’t help but think of her own childhood tragedies as she mourns last week’s horrific accident near Tisdale involving the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team, which also injured 13 people.
It’s a big reason she’s heeding the call of a group of British Columbia hockey moms to wear a jersey as a show of solidarity with victims’ families and the tight-knit Prairie community of Humboldt, Sask.
Batten says she’s even rallied her entire Dartmouth, N.S., office to wear jerseys today, as well as donate to an online crowdfunding campaign for the victims’ families.
“I just know what people experience and go through — how hard it can be to get over it. Well, not get over it, but deal with it,” says Batten.
Thousands of Canadians have pledged online to take part in the so-called Jersey Day, which encourages people to wear a sports jersey, hockey or otherwise.
That includes commitments from schools, sports teams, and businesses big and small — Tim Hortons, Boston Pizza, the southern Ontario transport agency Metrolinx, the Toronto Transit Commission and grocery giant Sobeys Inc., among them.
The University of Lethbridge and Lethbridge College, as well as several school districts, are among those organizations and businesses locally who have pledged to participate and are encouraging others to do the same. Jersey Day organizer Jennifer Pinch wants Humboldt to know it’s not alone. She’s asking anyone who wears a jersey to photograph themselves and post it on social media with #jerseysforhumboldt. And Pinch expects to see photos from around the world, pointing to global attention to the Facebook plea: “We have (support from) people in Holland, England, China, Australia, Hawaii and all across the United States,” Pinch says from Langley, B.C. A Sobeys Inc. spokeswoman says the company encouraged some 125,000 employees in offices, stores and distribution centres across the country to take part, including staff at Sobeys, IGA, Safeway, Thrifty Foods, Foodland, FreshCo and Lawtons Drugs. “This will be a show right across the entire company for support. If people don’t have jerseys we’re also encouraging them to wear green ribbon,” says Cynthia Thompson, adding that staff can opt out if they choose.
But southern Ontario’s Halton school board was among those to refrain from issuing a directive to staff, students or parents, saying “young, young children” might react differently to a sea of jerseys.
Board spokeswoman Marnie Denton says staff and students can decide for themselves.
“There’s been some students that are afraid to get on their school bus, afraid to go on field trips on buses and things like that. So we want to be sensitive to all those concerns,” says Denton, adding that the board has acknowledged the tragedy in other ways, including lowered flags.
The heartfelt campaign is among several spontaneous gestures that have exploded into national movements in recent days. They include the fast-rising GoFundMe fundraiser, a campaign to put hockey sticks on front porches, and a spike in organ donation pledges.
Psychologist and grief expert Stephen Fleming, a professor emeritus in psychology at York University, sees them as part of the healing process, in which trauma can be alleviated by “creating meaningful ritual.”
When faced with senseless tragedy, these acts can help pull sufferers out of suffocating grief to see larger lessons that may be at hand, he says.
“As soon as I heard about the hockey sticks at the front door I was compelled to do that. Compelled. I went down and got my hockey sticks and brought them to the front door. That was meaningful to me in the face of helplessness,” says Fleming, whose private practice is based in Mississauga and Brampton, Ont.
“When I heard about the GoFundMe (campaign), boom, I had to do that. That was meaningful to me.”