Charity game at A2Ice3 offers players of any age a chance to skate with Jack Johnson

Photo by Andrew Knapik/MiHockey
Photo by Andrew Knapik/MiHockey

 

By @MichaelCaples –

Dating back to their middle school days, every year Justin Spiro would organize an exhibition hockey game for he and his friend Jack Johnson to skate in.

Yes, that Jack Johnson.

“I just go way back with Jack,” Spiro told MiHockey. “We’re friends from our middle-school days. We used to do an exhibition hockey game even as seventh and eighth graders. Almost every summer, just got a bunch of guys together and played. There was no real purpose behind it, originally.”

When Spiro lost a friend to a tragic incident, however, he decided it was time to make the event more significant. Last year, Spiro turned his informal skate with his friend-turned-NHL-star friend into the Andrew Singler Memorial Cup, a now annual skate that raises money for the Andrew Singler Stay Strong Foundation.

Singler, a college friend of Spiro’s, was killed during his final year of undergraduate studies at Michigan State University in 2013.

“His family set up the Andrew Singler Stay Strong Foundation, which established a scholarship at Michigan State in his honor, given to an underprivileged youth that qualified that couldn’t otherwise afford to go to school,” Spiro said. “I had the idea to benefit the fund, I think we could do pretty well by turning it into a public event, instead of just having Jack and I play with our friends and family and whatnot, and make this as a public thing, get to play hockey with an NHL player and have all the proceeds go to the foundation.

“We did that last summer for the first time, where we made it a public thing, and did pretty well with it. We’re looking to hopefully do better this year – we already have more people committed to play and attend this year than we had last year and we still have a little bit more time to go. It’s looking pretty good.”

The second annual Andrew Singler Memorial Cup will take place at the Ann Arbor Ice Cube on August 1, and there are still a few open spots on the rosters. A $20 donation can get hockey players of any skill level a spot on a team either with the Columbus Blue Jackets standout defenseman, or against him.

“It’s sort of two-pronged,” Spiro said. “It’s $20 to play in the game, and it’s a very eclectic mix of people. My uncle is playing and he’s 64, and then there are kids who are 10, 11 years old that play. There are varying degrees of skill level. Hockey’s probably my seventh best sport, I mean, I’m a terrible hockey player. I go and push a chair out there, figuratively speaking, so it’s really wide-open to anyone who wants to skate around and shoot around and have fun.

“The other aspect of it is we do a raffle, my wife and a couple other volunteers sell raffle tickets throughout the game while the game’s going on and the prizes, last year and pretty much the same this year, we had an iPad, Tigers tickets, Red Wings tickets, gift cards to various places, it’s kind of another way to get involved. People that don’t want to play can go and buy raffle tickets and win some pretty cool prizes. I think we actually have two iPads this year. One-hundred percent goes to the foundation. We did pretty well, I think we did about $1,400 last year, we want to do hopefully well over $2,000 this year. We have more notice, more planning ahead this time, so our aspirations are that it goes well.”

Spiro said having his childhood friend involved – a NTDP and University of Michigan alum – is what makes the event possible.

“He’s the draw, no question,” Spiro said. “If we were opening up to the public and I was talking to people, saying it was me playing, they would ask who I was and nobody would really care. I mean, you have to throw that name out there. He really is the backbone for the whole event, and he didn’t even know Andrew or his family, but he did it because it’s important to me. He’s a really good friend to me, and that’s everything. I don’t think we could have the event the way we have it without him. He’s driving in from Dublin, Ohio, it’s a suburb of Columbus where he lives with his wife, and he’s coming up just for the event to give his time to the charity. He’s really a special kid and I’m really thankful to him to do this.”

For more info, visit the event’s official Facebook page here.