Pucks and Palettes: Painting Party Benefits Mount Greylock HockeyBy Stephen Dravis, iBerkshires.com Sports
07:15PM / Wednesday, August 05, 2015 | |
 LANESBOROUGH, Mass. — Pretty flowers may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about a hockey team.
But the Mount Greylock Hockey Booster Club will be thinking brushes, not blades, when it holds its first major summer fund-raiser on Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. at Skyline Country Club.
The boosters are teaming up with Williamstown-based Progressive Palette for a painting party to help defray the cost of Mount Greylock student-athletes’ participation on the Wahconah cooperative team team this winter.
“Moms never have a chance to get out, and because we have to sit and freeze our buts off throughout the football season and hockey season, I thought this would be fun,” club spokesperson Tammy Seaman said.
Seaman’s son, Cole, is one of five players from the Mount Greylock district planning to participate in the Wahconah program this year. The others are senior Jack Milne, junior Kyle Bazonski and sophomores Hobie MacWhinnie and Ben McColgan. McColgan is a home schooler who lives in the district but has played youth hockey with the Mount Greylock contingent and is a part of their family.
Last winter, the Mount Greylock Regional School Committee was forced to make a number of cuts to the junior-senior high school’s budget, including the loss of coop teams with Wahconah for hockey and St. Joseph for swimming.
The hockey parents went to Mount Greylock Athletic Director Lindsey von Holtz and Principal Mary MacDonald to see whether they could fund-raise to provide Mount Greylock’s financial support of the cooperative team.
“Some people just wanted to write a check to Mount Greylock, but the hockey people said, we’re going to do fund-raising,” Seaman said.
Von Holtz calculated that each family would need to contribute $500 to the cause. That is in addition to the $250 per player fund-raising commitment for all families in the coop team, regardless of school, Seaman said.
“But if we went to find a program somewhere else, like in Albany, it would probably cost $2,500 per kid plus travel,” she pointed out.
The effort has been welcomed by the administration at Wahconah, which is committed to continuing to offer the team, Seaman said.
And MacDonald at Mount Greylock also has pitched in, helping to write a grant request to the school’s SEE Fund (Sustaining Excellence in Education) for financial support of both the hockey and swimming teams. That request resulted in a $2,400 SEE Fund Contribution to support both programs.
In addition to the Thursday painting party, the hockey families will be in Cummington later this month to park cars a the Cummington Fair in return for a donation from the fair.
The partnership with The Progressive Palette came about because Seaman had heard good things about the business’ fund-raising parties.
Attendees at Thursday night’s gathering will be painting “Gardener’s Delight,” a bright and cheerful depiction of a variety of flowers under a bright blue sky. The $40 admission includes all supplies and instruction to create your own painting to bring home; a portion of the admission fee goes to the entity hosting the event, in this case the Mount Greylock hockey boosters.
At least one other area sports team has decided the painting parties are good way to raise funds. The Progressive Palette will host an event for the Lee High School golf team on Wednesday, Sept. 2, at Greenock Country Club in Lee.
The Mount Greylock hockey party already had about 25 people signed up as of Tuesday afternoon, Seaman said. It likely will be the first of several fund-raisers the parents will hold to keep their team on the ice.
“We’re just fund-raising right now for the budget for the regular season,” she said. “If we go to Western Mass, which we’d love, we’d have to do more fund-raising.”
Find out more about The Progressive Palette here. To donate to the Mount Greylock hockey team, send a check payable to the school to 1781 Cold Spring Road, Williamstown, MA; put “hockey” in the memo line. Or email Seaman at tseamand@aol.com.
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