As part of the Blackburn (senior) Hawks’ commitment to supporting and developing junior players, the Hawks’ hosted a Junior Day on March 10th. The Day was conceived of primarily as a community awareness event. Hawks’ publicity officer Alan Amos worked tirelessly to publicise the event and to raise awareness of our programmes amongst young people in Blackburn with Darwen. Especially important for us, Alan visited schools and youth clubs to talk to young people about Junior Ice Hockey. We will be taking this work forward as we continue to develop our relationship with the council.
The event drew about 500 people to the match and we were really pleased with the level of support shown by junior players and families. Particular thanks go to the young helpers (especially Nathan Dove), mascots and announcers at the game (especially Abbie Rawcliffe), as well as the under-14 and under-12 players who participated in an on-ice demonstration between periods.
The arena was very supportive of the event, issuing free tickets to schools and youth organisations, and helping us with our preparations. Thanks go to the arena staff, the Wilding family who organised and printed our fantastic new roller banners and who provided ‘Jo the Ice Hockey player’—a mannequin wearing hockey kit to show to interested young people. Thanks also to Nathan Massey for updating our website to coincide with the day. We are grateful to all the parents who took time to put up posters advertising the Day in their area, this was a real Club effort!
Fundraising at the event included a bucket collection, which raised £114.60, the selling of Club merchandise and used kit (you will now see a lot of our young players wearing full used Hawks or Eagles kit for practice) which raised £72.00 and an extremely popular sweets table, which raised £87.60. In addition, four luxury gift baskets were raffled for Mother’s Day and raised £120.20.
Perhaps even more importantly, however, our information table drew a lot of interest, our players acting as very capable ‘Club Ambassadors’, and we signed up 23 young people interested in at- tending Taster Sessions. The success of the event, and the work put into publicising it, has also paid off in a significant rise in young people attending our development sessions on Monday evenings.