Fund for Argentina & Statement from Irish Captain
October 05, 2012
Following the various announcements this week regarding the Irish Men's participation in the Champions Challenge in Argentina and the difficulty funding the squad, a web page has been set up to allow hockey fans make any level of donation to the Fund for Argentina -click here.
The FIH has given Ireland until Tuesday evening to confirm or otherwise the teams participation in this event.
Statement from the Irish Senior Men's Hockey team
The Irish Senior Men would like to thank the Irish Hockey Community for their unreserved support since Tuesday morning. We are on an incredible journey, and you have been there with us from the beginning. The squad wants to continue that journey, to Rio 2016, and your reaction to what happened on Tuesday showed that you too have a deep desire for this to happen. We as a squad truly value this.
The Board have apologized and have committed to us that they will sit down once we have completed the Champions Challenge phase and address any unanswered questions that remain. In the meantime we have an opportunity to fund the team to travel and compete in Argentina.
The Board has provided us with an opportunity to work together with them in order to raise these funds through a donation page, the Mega Draw, and player sponsorship. The Mega Draw represents a great opportunity for us to work together and sell the remaining tickets at €10 each. These tickets are available at your clubs and on-line for purchase. We are appealing to you, the public, to help us sell all remaining tickets, donate money or sponsor a player and fund the trip to Argentina!
The Irish Men's team self-fund home training camps including travel, meals, home-hosting and flights from the continent at their own cost to ensure we maximise money available for our High Performance program. In the same manner, we are also looking at opportunity to drive down costs of the trip to Argentina. Working together, we can achieve the required €45,000 through fund raising and cost minimising.
Again - THANK YOU all for your incredible support since Tuesday. Our next critical date is Tuesday October 9th, when the IHA must confirm our attendance at the tournament with the FIH. Our opportunity is to make a huge dent in the required fundraising amount to enable the Board to make this decision, and follow this up by completing the fundraising in the days and weeks after.
We are truly grateful to have such a special sporting public getting behind us. Help us to fund the trip to Argentina! We will keep working and training to improve, keep breaking barriers and keep pushing towards our World Cup and Olympic dreams.
Yours in hockey,
Ronan Gormley
Irish Senior Men's Captain
For and on behalf of the Irish Senior Men's Squad
