MAHA to introduce academic, athletic scholarships for youth hockey players
By @MichaelCaples –
At the Michigan Amateur Hockey Association’s 2015 Summer Meeting in Mount Pleasant, organization president George Atkinson announced a new plan to assist players both on and off the ice.
MAHA, starting over the next season, will begin offering both academic and athletic scholarships for their youth hockey members.
“It’s a program that we decided to start, we decided to do a program where we can give back to the players and/or help players that don’t have the ability to play hockey,” Atkinson told MiHockey. “Really, it’s a two-prong thing…where there are academic scholarships for players who are kind of finishing up their hockey career, if you will, and going on to a secondary education. Then the other part of that is to try to create a scholarship fund for those players that may need a little bit of assistance in order to play at the level that they want to play at, so it’s really a two-prong effort.”
The governing body for youth hockey in Michigan will be creating a committee to head up the new endeavor; the goal is to use MAHA funds to initiate the program and then find financial assistance through sponsors and donors.
“We’re going to put some seed money in to get it started for the first year, and then we hope to have a committee around that will help us come up with some initiatives to grow and gain some sponsorships and things like that, so we can grow it and have more availability for both types of scholarships.”
While the academic scholarships will be for high school-aged players about to begin college, Atkinson said he expects the athletic scholarships will be available to a variety of youth hockey age groups.
An exact time frame for the launch of the program is still being discussed, as well.
“I would say, the scholarship applications will probably be more towards the end of this year,” Atkinson said. “I would say the academic scholarships will probably start this year, the playing scholarships probably won’t start until next season, because obviously we’re almost already at the start of the season. It’s probably going to phase in over the course of the next year.”