Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Right to Play
I remembered thinking about this one in September after Kali posted a message about the NHL eco-challenge but never getting around to posting it. I had read many articles about NHLer Andrew Ference and his personal quest to make the world a better place through his fame (in a relative sense, not compared to other players) and financial resources. Here is a clip of him on "The Hour" with George Strombolopolous http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bvfSqKxzXk as you can see he's rocking a Right to Play shirt in the video and is a beauty talking about his broken leg. Point is, that he is a very positive role model to show to your students. Back to the start of the post, Right to Play is an organization which attempts to spread sport (or play) to disadvantaged populations around the world. They started as an Olympic organization but continued to grow. Now they boast an incredibly impressive athlete list (Gretzky, Thornton, Ference, Malholtra, Reghier just from memory in the NHL), and are becoming a very large and influential group in the world. As someone who considers himself an athelete, I tend to latch on to things such as this and think that many students will be able to find inspiration in right to play or andrew ference's story.
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just to take cam's intro to "right to play" a little further, they did indeed begin as a group of olympic athletes, canadian olympic athletes at that.
however, all is not well in the "right to play" universe, as they are banned from the upcoming olympics, and, according to the i.o.c., all future olympics, despite the i.o.c. claiming "one of the goals of the Olympic movement is to build a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practised without discrimination of any kind."
the article with the link i'll try to include does not suss out the reason for the ban, but it has to do with sponsors. g.m. i believe sponsors the olympics, but "right to play's" major sponsor is a different car manufacturer. what was that about "educatining youth through sport...without discrimination of any kind"? well, i guess they weren't being hypocritical actually, as they are certainly teaching youth an important lesson about values.
it's too bad, because "right to play" does amazing work, are recognized, organized and active in a lot of communities. here's the link:
http://vancouver.24hrs.ca/News/2009/01/21/8104121.html
and the link to RTP:
http://rtpca.convio.net/site/PageServer?pagename=canada
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