Sacred Heart Bowling Team's Donation Warms More Than Just Hearts

The Buffalo Academy of the Sacred Heart, a high school rooted in Franciscan values, emphasizes the importance of service in all aspects of our lives, including athletics. Each SHA sports team plans and participates in some sort of service project.

This year, the bowling team decided to focus our service project on helping the patients at Roswell Park. When we first started brainstorming ideas for our service project, we began thinking of local organizations that we wanted to help. Since many team members have had their lives affected by cancer in some way, we thought it would be fitting to center our service project around Roswell Park. The team thought that donating hats and socks would be beneficial to the patients, especially since it was beginning to get colder in Buffalo.

Now that we had an idea of what we wanted to do for our service project, we began coming up with ideas of how to execute this plan. We set up collection boxes at our school so other students could get involved in our project. Students donated hats, socks, scarves and even gloves. We also had a bake sale at school to raise money. We then used our bake sale funds to purchase more hats. In total, we amassed over 30 hats, 20 pairs of socks, eight scarves and three pairs of gloves. 

Our coach's daughter works at Roswell Park, so we coordinated a day to meet with her, drop off our donations, and take a quick tour of the chemotherapy infusion center. Throughout this project, we learned that the patients and staff at Roswell Park are very appreciative of donations all year round. Even though we donated warm gear during the wintertime, we learned that the hats and socks can be used no matter the season. It meant a lot to the SHA bowling team to be able to help patients that are battling the same disease that has affected many of our friends and family members.