On Thursday, senior Eric Main, sophomore Mike Werner and first-years Jason Fredricks, Mark Anderson and Joe DeBello participated in a volunteer effort among Colgate varsity athletic teams at Hamilton Central School. Many students know Colgate’s finest athletes for their on-the-field performances; however, involvement the greater Hamilton community are part of a new initiative designed to make contributions away from the arena. The players visited Ms. Sheridan’s fifth grade class where several of the kids anticipated the players’ arrival. One girl sported her maroon “Colgate Hockey” practice jersey, while another student, who has aspirations of taking up photography, brought the camera given to him by his parents -and used an entire roll of film by the end of the day.

Each of the children received a worksheet with the heading, “How Big Is…” and was broken up into five separate groups of two or three children and one Raider player. The groups went around the room to different stations and set up the equipment the players brought with them to measure the weights and lengths of various hockey gear. Main opened up the tutorial by asking if the students were “Ready to do some hockey math?”The players helped the children hone their subtraction, addition and multiplication skills by using a bathroom scale, a balance and rulers to measure the helmets, sticks, goalie leg-pads, shoulder pads, skates and pucks.

Using trial and error, the kids realized that, in order to measure the equipment’s weight best, they would need to weigh themselves with and without the equipment in their hands and then do the subtraction.The students also received word problems on the handout, one of which read, “[Senior] Jon Smyth, a player on the team, weighs 224 pounds with his equipment and 199 pounds without the equipment.What is the weight of Jon’s equipment?”

The kids had a blast laughing and playing with the equipment, particularly strapping on the shoulder pads and helmet like body armor.Every group had a swarm of kids around a hockey player on one knee – the player came down to the level of the children to help them out with their work and to teach them about the basic principles of math.When Sheridan informed the students that the players had to return to their classes, she received was a very disappointed array of boos and protests.

To top off the visit, the children huddled together with the players to take a group picture.Before they left, the players left a parting gift to the class – a hockey stick signed by all the Raiders who had stopped by that day. Sheridan and her class truly appreciated the helping hand, and surely had a blast learning “hockey math.”