GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – “Lets please just score one goal so these teddy bears can come flying out here.”
Green Bay Gamblers Forward Benito Posa is new to the team, but he says it was plain to him that Saturday’s home game had an added sense of meaning to the entire team.
Almost the entire crowd of 7,441 fans had brought with a teddy bear to the game and were waiting for the home team to score a goal in order to launch it over the glass and onto the ice.
The Gamblers took care of business Saturday night when forward Noah Prokop scored a second-period goal.
“It was fun to experience all the bears coming down and [the] twenty-five-minute delay trying to clean up seven-thousand bears,” explains Posa.
Posa joined the Gamblers in January following a trade, which made Saturday his first Teddy Bear Toss experience.
On Monday, he joined a group of teammates at Aurora Baycare Pediatric Center as a portion of the collected stuffed animals were distributed to patients by the players.
Katie Gajeski was there with her three-year-old son Brennan for a doctors appointment.
For them, the sight of the players and the stuffed animals was a pleasant surprise.
“We know about the Teddy Bear Toss, absolutely,” says Gajeski. “I just didn’t remember what they did with the teddy bears.”
A majority of the stuffed animals on-hand were traditional teddy bears, but there was some variety available.
Brennan had his eye on not a bear, but rather a stuffed penguin.
“It might have been the first one he saw,” explains Gajeski. “We do like to visit the penguin exhibit at the NEW Zoo, so he does like penguins.”
Brennan was happy with his penguin, while Posa was keeping an eye on a different stuffed animal.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be.
“Someone took it,” he says. “It was a big, big, big bear.”
In fact, the entire assembled team seemed to take a liking to the “big bear” and decided to give it a name.
“We called him Hambone,” explains Posa.
Now with his first Teddy Bear Toss in the rearview mirror, he says it was a great experience for both the kids and the team.
“It’s fun to just come out here with a couple of teammates, have fun, talk, get to meet some fun people,” says Posa. “The little kids they crack you up, they come up and they want the unicorns [or] the teddy bears, it’s funny.”
In the twenty year history of the Teddy Bear Toss program, the team and its fans have donated over 119,000 stuffed animals to local charities and hospitals.
