Camil Blanchet’s big impact on a small campus

 (Photo courtesy of Bowdoin Athletics)

 

Bowdoin senior forward Camil Blanchet has a lot on his plate while at school. He played every men’s hockey game this season for the Polar Bears, and had been playing lacrosse as well.

Statistically speaking, Blanchet’s contributions have been modest on the ice. He tallied 32 points over 85 games, and only broke double-digit points in one season with 13 as a sophomore. After that same year, he left the lacrosse team, having appeared in a mere nine games and scooped up nine ground balls.

But besides the rigors of playing a sport and being a full-time student, Blanchet has been very active doing charity work in his community. That constant overtime presence has had a can’t-miss impact. To that point, Blanchet is one of five finalists for the 2018 Hockey Humanitarian Award.

Name a Bowdoin-sanctioned service project, and chances are Blanchet has taken part. His leadership qualities have manifested themselves through his liaising role between the campus’ community-service office and his peers. He has allies with the Polar Bears football team to raise funds for cancer research. And he enlisted hockey roster-sized group of volunteers for a multi-charity half-marathon (Race the Runway) and a leadership training program (Breaking the Bubble).

The McKeen Common Good Center sees Blanchet’s shadow at a rate that rivals any classroom or athletic facility on campus. McKeen helps students connect with the community of Brunswick, Maine, and encourages them to volunteer and help the relationship between the school and the town.

Blanchet was drawn to this aspect of the Bowdoin experience when he was a candidate for admission. And now that all of his competitive athletic endeavors are behind him, community involvement will join his studies as the one aspect that will fill every week of his tenure there.

Pucks and Recreation recently got the chance to speak with Blanchet about his charity work.

How and when did you first hear about the McKeen Common Good Center?

In my application to Bowdoin, one of the essays explained the history of the McKeen Center and what they currently do. One of the first big events of the school year isn’t a football game, it’s Common Good Day. This is a day when over 500 students, faculty and staff participate in community-building activities around the greater Brunswick area one Saturday afternoon. That was my first direct interaction with the McKeen Center.

What was the fundraiser you worked on with the football team?

The football team was selling neon-pink long-sleeve shirts in a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. A group of representatives from the Breaking the Bubble initiative wanted to expand the fundraiser and have our respective teammates participate. It was pretty easy to order more shirts. The football team raised the majority of the final donation. Getting other teams involved and supporting the fundraiser was a cool thing to see.

 (Photo courtesy of Bowdoin Athletics)

 

Can you describe the Breaking the Bubble initiative and who all you have been working with there?

Breaking a Bubble is an attempt to connect the various work that athletic teams do throughout the year with the work that the McKeen Center does. The McKeen Center has developed strong relationships with the greater Brunswick community, and has resources to support students working with the community in any capacity. It only makes sense to connect teams with the plethora of resources and experience that the McKeen Center provides.

How did you get involved with Race the Runway?

I heard about Race the Runway through the McKeen Center. It was a featured event that requested race-day volunteers. I thought it was a good opportunity for the team to give back to a community that is so supportive of us at the hockey rink. I reached out to a Race the Runway representative who works at Mid Coast Hospital and told her about our interest. It worked out to be a beautiful Saturday in the spring.

How did you hear about all of these events? Was it difficult to initially get involved with them at a smaller school (roughly 1,800 students enrolled) like Bowdoin?

It was never hard to hear about the various events that are happening. There is a school-wide email listing the week’s events, posters and, most importantly, word of mouth. As a student here, you always hear about events that are going on. It’s really about how much time you have and what you want to do.

Have you taken any courses offered by the Center?

As part of starting Breaking the Bubble, all of the student-representatives went through a formal training process with the McKeen Center. This leadership training covered the basics, like how to access different resources on campus to things like how to effectively lead a trip and ensure participants are realizing the value of their work.

Through the McKeen Center, have you ever considered going abroad on a service trip?

I have certainly considered it, but I also knew that it wasn’t likely. With hockey taking up Thanksgiving, winter and possibly March break every year, the only possible time for a service trip was in the summer. I volunteered in Rwanda at the Rwanda Biomedical Center the summer after my sophomore year, so I have had a similar type experience.

What are the best aspects of the McKeen Center?

I’m always impressed by the McKeen Center staff and how approachable they are. The people who work here, both staff and students, are always receptive to new ideas and willing to help. They are very responsive to what students want to do. Rather than create their own agenda, they support what the student has a passion for. Another amazing aspect about the McKeen Center is the breadth of programs that they offer.

For a school as small as Bowdoin, it is incredible to have the types of community engagement opportunities that we do.

- Zach Green

Lauren Spring: ‘Hope is a really powerful tool’

 Photos courtesy of OSU Athletics

 



Lauren Spring did one better than obey an admonishing adage. Even in the context of helping those in need, she did not peer down at her beneficiaries. On the contrary, she literally looked up to them.

She did this in the midst of fitting children for much-needed footwear. She did this while rinsing the feet that had long lacked sturdy shoes, if any shoes.

Together with 10 of her fellow Ohio State student-athletes, she took these steps to ensure cozier and confident steps for impoverished Ecuadorian youth. By her estimate, the Buckeyes brought and distributed 800 pairs over a five-day visit last May. (In a diary on the OSU athletics website, one of her project colleagues, fencer Natalie Falkowski, counted 857.)

Being the Buckeyes’ lone hockey representative in a conglomeration of 10 athletic teams, Spring was naturally primed for humble takeaways.

“Seeing how just a small gesture…can put such a smile on a young child’s face just really puts things in perspective,” she offered last week in a phone chat with Pucks and Recreation.

A senior forward for the Buckeye women, Spring bears the portfolio of a depth contributor on the ice. She just finished the regular season 10th on the team with 11 points on the year. Or, to put that another way, she is one of 10 OSU skaters to have cracked the double-digit point plateau.

Patience paying off is another motif transcending her two worlds. As an underclassman, she witnessed back-to-back coaching changes as Nate Handrahan and Jenny Potter were dismissed in successive years. Her third Buckeye bench boss, Nadine Muzzerall, took the team through growing pains in a sub-.500 2016-17 campaign.

But the program has accelerated its resurgence this winter to the tune of a 21-9-4 regular-season record. An at-large bid to the NCAA tournament or an automatic bid via the WCHA playoff crown — all of which would be program firsts — are tantalizing possibilities.

Meanwhile, Spring is up for individual hardware as one of five finalists for the 2018 Hockey Humanitarian Award. As the first OSU women’s player to achieve this status since Jody Heywood in 2008, she has drawn national publicity through her extra-mile mentality in community service.

“There are times where you’ve had a long day or had a long week,” she conceded. “With school and our sports, we have a lot on our plate. But I think it’s important to suck it up sometimes and get out there and help others. It can teach you a lot about yourself, and you always walk away feeling like you made a difference in someone’s life.”

The HHA’s official press release made a passing reference to Meals on Wheels as one of Spring’s initiatives with her fellow pucksters. But the Buckeyes’ annual multi-sport, international journey on behalf of Soles4Souls is the meat of her candidacy.

Whether that pushes her above her four fellow finalists will become apparent April 6 at the Men’s Frozen Four. First things first, assuming Muzzerall’s squad stays on its trajectory, it will nab one or more March milestones between the boards. If it does, those achievements for Spring and her senior classmates will lend an element of symmetry to her 2017-18 academic year.

 

OSU’s community service all-stars

If each school year or hockey season begins once its predecessor ends, then the start of last summer set a tone for a line of long-awaited gratification in Spring’s OSU swan song. Of joining the school’s Soles4Souls alliance, she said she “had been interested in doing something…for a while now.”

Born in the successive wakes of the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, the Tennessee-based Soles4Souls equips underprivileged domestic and global communities. It accepts monetary donations as well as shipments of new or used footwear, the latter of which is repurposed.

But Spring craved the charity’s most personal option for involvement. She could not help but catch wind of OSU’s constant commitment to the cause, as then-teammate Alex LaMere went to Costa Rica for it in 2015. Another batch of Buckeyes represented the organization in a journey to Jamaica following her sophomore year. Later that summer, one more selected group made the same mission to Bolivia.

With Ecuador, the fourth time was Spring’s time this past May.

“I was super grateful I was one of those that got chosen,” she said.

Besides Spring, the 2017 Ecuador excursion included two football players plus one apiece from women’s basketball, women’s fencing, men’s gymnastics, men’s soccer, women’s soccer, men’s swimming and women’s volleyball. It was an oft-overlooked form of diversity she had long wanted to explore.

“That was close to my other favorite part of the trip,” she said. “We do our best to reach out and get involved with other student-athletes, to get out of our comfort zone.”

Barely two weeks removed from the academic year, Spring and her new OSU teammates gelled through an enhanced road trip. On May 11, they connected through Atlanta, where they had four hours of bonding in the busiest airport on Earth.

Once they set down their final leg and returned to ground transportation, the scenery solidified their motivation. The potential in the Ecuadorian people was evident enough, but so was the shortage of prerequisite needs. Through rides as long as four hours each way to each spot on the itinerary, the scenery seldom changed.

“Ecuador as a whole was all in poverty,” Spring recalled. “To see that constantly was really eye-opening."

Stepping outside to meet the locals at a given journey’s end was a more heartening revelation. On the group’s first day of service, Spring made a new kind of forward troika with the aforementioned fencer Falkowski and All-Midwest midfielder Nikki Walts. With each child’s shoe size established, they dug for matches in their inventory.

“It was hard work,” she offered, “but it was the most rewarding hard work that anybody could ever do.”

The subsequent work-play pattern was, most naturally, anything but foreign either. Once their young hosts were properly equipped, the Buckeyes engaged them in basketball, soccer and volleyball.

For Spring, originally from Kelowna, B.C., the lack of blades and frozen water to put them to was a second-nature sacrifice. This mission was bigger than the game that has defined her upbringing and participation in OSU athletics. But more recent developments have illuminated the chances of bringing winter sports to Ecuador and vice versa.

Getting the wheels rolling

Back in her study-skate vortex nine months after her mission, Spring absorbed a timely and intriguing revelation. With cross-country skier Klaus Jungbluth in Pyeongchang, Ecuador has its first native child in the Winter Olympics.

“I did not know that,” Spring admitted when the subject came up last week. “That’s very, very cool.”

Not so surprisingly, Jungbluth is a comprehensive cosmopolitan. Through his various athletic and professional journeys, he has become fluent in Czech, English, German, Italian and Norwegian.

But even in his Hispanophone homeland, Jungbluth has resorted to roller skis for sustained training. He often does the same in Australia, where he is still working toward a degree in sports science.

Having spearheaded the prerequisite establishment of an Ecuadorian skiing federation and passed the trial, Jungbluth is serious about solidifying a foundation. Prior to the Games, he told Australia’s ABC News, “I think what I’ve tried to do here is to set an example that if you want to achieve a goal, even if it’s difficult or its very far away, you just have to keep trying. That’s an example I want to set for my family, and my kids, but also for the people pursuing a sport in Ecuador.”

Could more roller skis and their ice-skating alternative cousin thus be in the country’s future? Spring knows that the necessary “pride” is there, and added that Jungbluth’s groundbreaker “speaks volumes for that individual.”

And while no stand-ins for skates, pucks or twigs entered the equation on her Ecuadorian expedition, her presence may resonate. It certainly does not hurt that staffers from the Nashville Predators also paid a Soles4Souls visit there in 2017.

Regardless, the mere word of Jungbluth’s travails through Europe, Australia and Asia could widen several avenues for his young countrypeople. The new soles from without will allow one to exert the newly inspired soul within.

And if Spring, as part of the assortment of athletic visitors from yet another land, can add more to those tangible and intangible necessities, she will take even an uncredited tertiary assist on the play.

“Hope is a really powerful tool,” she said. “With athletes from all different sports going there, it gives people a lot of hope. It can be extremely powerful, it could definitely be a motivator for a lot of those children. You would hope for that for sure.”

Spring intends to stay in Columbus and pursue a career as a physical education teacher. But she is not relinquishing her takeaways or connections from her coveted Soles4Souls stint.

“In the big picture, all children are the same,” she said. “Whenever I have the opportunity to help a kid grow and learn and become successful, whether it’s a small thing like they figure out how to tie their shoes that day or to jump a little bit higher, I take it.

“That’s the kind of impact any educator wants to have on their students. I think we did that while we were in Ecuador.”

Selfless service characterizes Sidney Peters

(Photo by Eric Miller/Gopher Athletics)

 

During the winter months, college hockey players rarely have enough time to sleep. With rigorous academic work, a long season and extracurricular endeavors, they must balance multiple responsibilities.

The offseason provides more opportunities for players to explore interests outside hockey. For Minnesota women’s goaltender Sidney Peters, this has amounted to countless miles traveled and countless hours of community service.

With some of the places those miles have taken her, Peters has seen the meaning of resourcefulness in a more profound light.

In the 2016 offseason, Peters worked in the Hospital Bernard Mev’s, Haiti’s only critical-care and trauma hospital as well as its only newborn and pediatric intensive care unit. She spent eight days in this hospital assisting with stabilizing and treating patients. She splinted broken bones, dressed wounds, performed CPR and learned how to suture.

“This was my first trip outside the country related to my interest in medicine,” she told Pucks and Recreation. “This trip put me in a different mindset to learn and serve others. It helped me appreciate the resources and opportunities that the United States can afford.

“Sometimes we can take for granted what we have. In Haiti, they don’t have the same finances to meet their healthcare needs. There were four beds and one wheelchair in this whole hospital. I also had to think twice about using something like gauze because you never knew who would come into the hospital next.

“We had to make do with what we had. It was heartbreaking at times to see the lack of money or resources that Haiti did not have.”

For her part in healing those physical and emotional wounds, Peters is now formally on appreciation’s receiving end. Recently, the 2018 Hockey Humanitarian Awardcommittee narrowed its list of finalists to five. Peters was among the remaining contenders for the prize presented to college hockey’s “finest citizen” for leadership in community service.

“It is a huge honor to be a top-five finalist for this award,” she said. “This award is pretty special because it recognizes people outside hockey and shows that we are not just athletes. A big part of my life is volunteering, and it is a special feeling to be considered one of the top five finalists for this honor.”

Since the Illinois native arrived in Minneapolis in 2013, she has devoted herself to serving others. That impulse shows in her major in kinesiology and her hopes of attending medical school and later working in the Air Force. 

“I love learning about the human body because there is always more to learn,” she said. “I love working with people and building relationships with them."

This passion sparked Peters’ involvement as a campus EMT. In 2015, she joined the rapid-response team that volunteers to support the university on weekends when its facilities host collegiate or professional sports, concerts, conventions and graduations.

Less than a year later, her work as an EMT led her on a trip with Project Medishare. The American nonprofit strives to support and improve healthcare services in Haiti by donating human resources, technology and medical supplies.

Upon returning from her trip, Peters learned many lessons that she incorporate into her future career goals. 

“My trip to Haiti was powerful, terrifying, and wonderful all at once because I had the chance to serve people who were even more uncomfortable and scared than I was,” she said in a Gophers release. “It takes courage not to run the other way when you encounter the pressure of being responsible for someone else's life, but it is the best feeling in the world knowing that you were there to take care of them when they couldn't take care of themselves.”

Since then, Peters has recommitted herself to getting involved in healthcare to serve people. Meanwhile, she has spent the last two hockey seasons getting rewarded for her equal devotion on the ice.

As a fifth-year senior, Peters is already a two-time national champion. She has appeared in 75 games with a career record of 49-14-6. After serving as current Buffalo Beauts netminder Amanda Leveille’s backup, she led the Gophers to a 2017 Frozen Four berth.

Even with that much demand from the Gophers, Peters does not limit her on-ice energy to competition. Back home in Chicago, she volunteers as a goalie coach with Hockey Ministries International. This organization offers camps combining a love of Christ and a love of hockey.

In Minnesota, Peters volunteers with HopeKids, Special Olympics Minnesota and the University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital, among many other organizations. Of those experiences, she fondly remembers the first in particular.

“HopeKids is an organization that supports kids with life-threatening illnesses,” she explained to Pucks and Rec.

“There is an event held each year called Hope Day, which is a big event at the football stadium. It is a highlight of the year because we play games with the kids. I am grateful for days like these because it shows that you can choose joy in the midst of adversity. This day and my other service experiences have changed my perspective on a lot of things.”

With two regular-season games left on Minnesota’s slate, then another high-expectation playoff run, Peters’ transition to med school is imminent. But her love for service remains as strong as ever, due in part to her strong spiritual life.

“I think my faith in God has taught me the value of love and serving others,” she reflected. “It is so important to get involved in your community. We have been given a lot, and I hope that I can continue to spread love and way that I can.”

- John Morton