Medicine on ice — hockey

BY JARED MILLER UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO NEWS CORPS

On a typical Wednesday morning at Edge Ice Arena, skates cut into a sparkling, freshly cleaned sheet of ice. Patrick Donnelly is standing on the bench spitting blood because his wisdom teeth were pulled the day prior. But he wouldn’t miss supporting his friends and teammates at a practice. Not for pulled teeth. Not for the mid-March snowstorm. And certainly not for his heart condition.

Hockey players have a toughness to them, but Donnelly and the rest of his crew of amateurs, all part of the Dawg Nation Hockey Foundation, aren’t afraid to share what’s in their hearts with the world.

Donnelly is here for hockey as much as he is for the community the players have built around it.

Dawg Nation started with a pass of a hat among friends more than a decade ago. Since then, the men’s league hockey team has evolved into an organization that has given away more than $4 million to those who need it most.

It all began in 2009 when the Dawgs were just 15 friends who loved playing hockey together. en, in the span of just nine days that February, three of them were diagnosed with cancer.

“Each time I would pass my hat around the room and we would go see Danny or Dave or Andy in the hospital,” Dawg Nation founder and CEO Marty Richardson said. “It wasn’t that we gave them 250 bucks, but it was the fact that they have buddies that had their back.” All three won their battles. About a year later, Jack Kelly, a fourth member of the Dawgs, would come down with an autoimmune disease. In six months, Kelly was gone. Richardson spoke at his funeral, and it was the rst time he had lost a close friend.

“I told his three daughters, ‘I want to do something in your dad’s honor,’” Richardson added. “‘I don’t know what it is, but I want to do something.’”

Eight months later, in 2011, Dawg Nation Hockey Foundation was born. Nobody was sure, including Richardson, what it would grow to be.

“We started Dawg Nation, and what it was designed for was [that] we can’t be the only team in the whole area that needs help or has players that need help,” Richardson said. “So we put on a [hockey] tournament to help a couple of guys, and then we put on a golf tournament,