Free Idea: Broken Sticks For a Cause
October 21st, 2008, 4 Comments »
Since most NHL players switched to graphite sticks, there’s been a bit of a plague of broken sticks. Rarely do I watch a game where at least one stick isn’t broken.
Here’s a simple idea for a charity campaign: every time an NHL player breaks his stick in a game, he donates the value of that stick to a particular charity. Maybe a group of charities get together, and the player can choose the one he wants to support.
How often does a given player break a stick in a game? It feels like there’s, maybe, two broken sticks a game. There’s 40 players in a game, so the odds of breaking a stick are 1 in 20. So does the average player break four sticks a year? If so, that’s $1200 a year. Multiply that by roughly 600 active players, and you get $720,000. Not an insignificant sum.
But the real money would be if they promoted and extended the program into recreational hockey. Maybe beer league players each agree to donate $20 per broken stick. According to Wikipedia, there are a million registered players in North America. That’s a lot of potential cash.
Actually, I take back the ‘player chooses the charity’ model. Using the Nothing But Nets model, I’d pick a very specific charity, something that I could clearly associate with the whole stick thing. Maybe something around planting trees? Of course, 95% of professional players use sticks made out of graphite, not wood, but the gist is there.