By Paul Brunskole

The Buffalo State men’s hockey team held a morning practice on Oct. 15 then traveled to Uncle Bob’s Self Storage in Williamsville to help with Hurricane Katrina relief.

The team was on hand to help sort clothes and pieces of furniture so it can be stored for families who will be relocating to the Western New York area as a result of Katrina. There were 25 members from the hockey team to help out, and were able to turn a job which would have taken all day into a few hours.

First year head coach Nick Carriere has taken this upon himself to help out in the community, to help bring unity to the team.

“Volunteer work and community service is a big part of being any kind of organization on campus,” said Carriere. “We’re an athletics team, and we end up spending a lot of time together as a team. We’re pretty fortunate to be blessed with some of the skills and the ability to be able to come to school and play a sport.”

The group in which the team helped out was WNY Katrina Housing. Mark and Mary Heick are executive producers of the program, and have been collecting clothing and furniture donations for the past month.

Carriere says this will not be the only event in which they help out, as he intends to give back to the community more as the season goes on.

“We’re going to be doing things throughout the year whether it’s youth hockey – helping out with some of those practices, or putting together a big Christmas tree downtown a little later on,” said Carriere. “Whenever we are contacted with things like that, we have time for that especially before our season starts. So when you see something like that  happen, you realize that  having some extra guys to be able to do that can really impact a couple of peoples lives.”

Contact Paul Brunskole at BrunPJ08@mail.buffalostate.edu