Months of hard work have paid off for the Huntsville Sting’s U13-Black team with them being named the winner of the 2024 Chevrolet Good Deeds Cup.
The competition started in early Jan. and the Sting quickly climbed to the top of the leaderboard. They never looked back.
Sarah Roberts, team manager, told the MyMuskokaNow.com newsroom they did over 1,350 good deeds.
A Facebook page was set up by the team dedicated to documenting each good deed.
The victory means the Sting won $100,000 to donate to their chosen charity Food4Kids Muskoka. It was established in Sept. 2023 to help send students home for the weekend with healthy food.
Sarah Thatcher, executive director of Food4Kids, said they’ve quickly grown from supporting three schools in Huntsville to now looking to expand into Bracebridge and Gravenhurst.
“We’ll be able to feed more kids this year than what we thought was possible,” she continued.
Kristie Shaver, marketing and communications manager, said the girls took the idea and ran with it. “They earned this,” she added.
The organizers of the Good Deeds Cup held a surprise celebration for the team at the Active Living Centre in Huntsville on Saturday morning. The team was told it was just to honour them for doing so well in the competition.
After stepping outside, a bus slowly rolled up to the facility’s front door displaying the team’s name and “your 2024 Chevrolet Good Deeds Cup champions” written on the side.
Once they realized this wasn’t a celebration, but a coronation, the girls’ reactions ranged from ecstatic screaming to joyful giggling, all done with ear-to-ear smiles.
“Everyone was really happy to help us,” said Rosa Morison-Roberts about the community.
“They were grateful to be able to support what we were doing,” added Makayla Goyda.
Al McCaig, general manager of Edmonds Chevrolet in Huntsville, provided a handful of showroom cars, including a slick Corvette Stingray, as part of the parade from the Active Living Centre to the dealership a few minutes away.
“They did an amazing job,” he said of the team. McCaig added he and Danny Brackett, dealer principal, are proud to have supported the Sting.
Roberts did her best to wrangle the team for pictures and to get on the bus but it was a task easier said than done. Between running to their family members to tell them how happy they were to have won, talking amongst themselves, or gawking at the bus, the girls didn’t stay still for more than a few seconds.
However, they were stopped in their tracks when they were told Sarah Nurse, forward for Toronto’s Professional Women’s Hockey League team, had sent them a video.
The team huddled together to hear Nurse call their campaign “incredibly impressive” and invite them to Toronto to tour the Hockey Night in Canada broadcast studio and to take in the Toronto Maple Leafs’ game against the Carolina Hurricanes.
Not long after Nurse’s video ended, the team hopped on the bus and made their way to downtown Toronto.
Roberts hopes the competition has a life-long impact on the girls.
“The big win is that these girls are going to grow up and be stronger community members and more selfless because of this,” she said.
Between that, supporting Food4Kids, and seeing the community come together to do so many good deeds, Roberts said every aspect of the competition has been a win.
“The whole experience has been so special,” she remarked.