Sometimes you just can’t dodge helping out others.
Holy Trinity Academy started its month-long dodgeball tournament this month with the proceeds are going towards the Cristo Rey Orphanage in San Juan, Costa Rica.
“The dodgeball tournament has been going on at school for a while now,” said student organizer Mack Pickering. “And Mr. (Peter) James asked me to help out a few years ago. That kind of evolved into me taking over the whole thing.”
Pickering has got the dodgeball bug in his bloodstream. His brother, Billy, was a dodgeball aficionado at the University of Alberta.
“He ran the league up there and he ended up donating a bunch of dodgeballs to Christ the Redeemer schools,” Pickering said. “He had a huge influence on me. I went up to visit and he said, ‘Hey there’s a drop-in game on. Do you want to play.’
“There I was, 12-years-old and I was playing against these university guys. It’s a big thing there.”
In 2011, Mack and Billy played in a volleyball tournament which set a Guinness World Record with 2,012 players at the U of A. Billy was one of the organizers.
With the coaxing from HTA teacher Les Giraudier, who has been organizing HTA student-mission trips to Costa Rica for years, Mack Pickering began taking funds for the dodgeball program to raise funds for the Costa Rican orphanage. The tournament has raised funds for the orphanage for the past four years.
The Grade 12 student went to the orphanage last Easter.
“I really didn’t know what to expect,” Pickering said. “I come from a pretty good-standing in life. I went down there and I had a much, much, greater appreciation of what I have after seeing what these people go through just to get little things.”
Pickering and the other HTA students would do odd jobs such as sweeping floors, cleaning pens, and, possibly most importantly, interacting with the children and the staff.
“They didn’t have a whole lot, but they were some of the happiest people I’ve ever met,” Pickering said. “The kids would come along and they would want to play tag, but they all spoke Spanish. Mrs. (Stephanie) Krueger and Javier Romeo from the Dawgs came along and they spoke Spanish.
“They’d tell us they want to play tag. It was really cool.”
However, while the HTA students got to come home to the comforts of life in the Foothills area, there still wasn’t much for the youth at the orphanage.
What better way to raise funds than winging a ball at your friends?
“A lot of the guys didn’t sign up (for dodgeball) last because they didn’t have the money at the time,” Pickering said. “I told them don’t worry about it and I signed them up.”
You don’t argue with an offensive centre/defensive lineman on the Holy Trinity Academy Knights.
“The day of the games, I walked into the change rooms and said: ‘Hey you got any money, it’s going to a good cause an orphanage in Costa Rica.’ I caught ‘em off guard. It worked pretty well.”
The dodgeball tournament raised approximately $500 for the orphanage in 2014.
It doesn’t sound like much, but it goes a long ways in Costa Rica,” he said.
They get started again this week with the tournament, which will involve students of various strengths and sizes.
“Dodgeball is something you always loved when you were a kid,” Pickering said. “Everybody likes to play it. You get the small, quick guys at the front, dodging balls and shagging balls to give them to the big guys at the back.”
He’s not too sure how his team will do.
“We don’t have a lot of divers on our team, just big jock football players who just throw hard,” he said with a smile. “We probably won’t do that well.”
The winners will be the children at the orphanage. Holy Trinity Academy programs has donated more than $100,000 to the Works of the Holy Spirit program over the past 10 years..
