TFKO Celebrates Successful Season Thanks to Incredible Community Support

TFKO is celebrating our most successful skating season yet. January to March saw us skating on the ODR near Franco Ouest five days every week – and twice on Wednesdays!  We also had indoor sessions for Frederick Banting students in Stittsville. Our Franco Ouest program took off so well that we decided to extend the season with two additional outings in April, to the John G. Mlacak Arena (City of Ottawa).  Tuesday, April 8 saw 33 students in attendance, and a record-breaking 44 showed up for our grand finale on April 15.  We even had brand new skaters coming out to give it a try on our very last day.

An essential element of our program is that each skater is fitted for their own pair of skates, a helmet, and gloves. As you can imagine, this is a significant investment, both financially to acquire the gear, and time-wise, to keep it maintained.

Thank you to Kunstadt Sports for keeping our skates sharpened and ready, and making the logistics of sharpening so many very easy for us. Our skating program would not exist without the support Kunstadt’s provide.

Bushtukah, another long-time support of TFKO, reached out to Kombi on our behalf this year, and Kombi supplied 20 pairs of best gloves ever – high quality to keep everyone’s hands toasty warm, even on the coldest of days.

Several Canadian Tire stores (Bells Corners, Carling, Kanata) give us discounts on skates, helmets and gloves, several Sportchek stores (Kanata, Barrhaven, Orleans, Bayshore) all gave us discounts on helmets, and Lacroix Source for Sports gave us significant discounts on our XXL helmets for some of our tricky-to-fit students.

As you can see, it is not only our huge team of individual volunteers and donors, but our incredibly generous and supportive corporate partnerships that keep TFKO running.  We say it a lot, but it is absolutely true that we could not run our amazing programs without the support of our entire community!