The Chinook Ice girls under-11 soccer team (from left) Alissa Cash, Bailey Sievers, Sierra Huntings, Jorie Freitag, Kendall Lujan, Natalie Whitesel, Madison Veltkamp, Olivia Chan, Riley Gray, Meleah Kainu, Madison Hamilton and Savanna Gorham. The Vancouver team has made acts of generosity as much a tradition as the game itself. (ZACHARY KAUFMAN/The Columbian)
The snow that fell on Jan. 25 in Duvall made playing soccer a shivering experience.
"I always wanted to play in the snow," 9-year-old Bailey Sievers said. "But once I felt what it was like, it was not fun at all."
The wintry weather, however, could not compete with the warmth Bailey and her Chinook Ice — Connell teammates spread following their match against Cascade FC 98.
That Sunday afternoon, the team of a dozen girls presented one of the opposing players with boxes of clothes, food, gift cards and more.
The gifts were the result of a drive the team began two weeks earlier, when flooding in the Snoqualmie Valley forced the match between the teams to be postponed — and forced the family of one member of the Cascade team from their home.
"It's kind of hard to imagine just losing everything, so we thought that when we had our next game up in Seattle we could go do something for them," said Jorie Freitag, a sixth grader at Cedar Tree Classical Christian School.
The day before playing the makeup game, the Chinook team gathered to pack nine bins with clothes and food. After the game, they handed those bins and several hundred dollars of cash and gift cards to the player whose family lost its home in the flood.
"Overwhelming," said Alex Hickox, the head coach for the Cascade team. "I had known that they were planning on doing something but the sheer volume (of the donation) was amazing."
The gifts created a special bond between two soccer teams.
"I liked when I saw her face when we gave her all this stuff," Kendall Lujan, 10, said.
Despite the cold weather, the teams took time to visit and pose for a photograph, and the recipient of the aid joked that they looked like a Christmas tree with their red and green uniforms grouped together.
"They had a lot of smiles on their faces," Madison Veltkamp, 11, said. "It was really nice."
It wasn't the first nice contribution from the first-year, select-level soccer team.
In the fall, at the suggestion of Bailey Sievers and her father, the players pooled their money and took pizza and soda to a Ronald McDonald House to visit with the sick children and their families.
Several of the Ice players said visiting the Ronald McDonald House is their favorite memory from the season.
"It was really sad," 10-year-old Brooke Shirley said. "But it was kind of cool to meet all of them, and to kind of know what they're going through."
In addition to their big hearts, the Ice have been successful on the soccer field.
On Saturday the Ice will play in the semifinals of the Fred Meyer Commissioner's Cup, the state tournament for select-level teams. Win on Saturday, and they will play for the state championship on Sunday — perhaps against their sister team, the Chinook Ice team coached by Charles Kleier.
"We were pretty rough around the edges to start the season," said Courtney Connell, who coaches the Ice with help from her father, Chris Connell and Dick Burgess. She said she saw potential for the first-year team to find success if it worked hard for it.
"They've gone far beyond my wildest dreams," Courtney Connell said.
Teaming up to help less-fortunate peers made the Ice a stronger team, several players said.
"It helped us become a better team, because we all worked together," Madison Hamilton, 11, said. "We all went to get the pizza (for the Ronald McDonald House visit), and we all got to know each other better by doing that, and it felt good helping people, too."
"It's not only that we're just playing soccer on a team," Meleah Kainu, 11 said. "All soccer teams have to be part of a community and help each other."
The team had planned to sing holiday songs at a retirement community, but snow nixed those plans.
The snow that fell on Jan. 25 in Duvall did not slow down the team's march through the state tournament. Nor did it spoil the experience of helping peers in need.
"The Cascade team was a fun team to play. They were really good sports," Sierra Hunting said. "It was freezing on the day we played them and gave them their donations. The snowflakes were perfectly shaped, but each a little different. ... just like our two teams."
Hickox, the Cascade coach, said he hopes the story of the Ice's generosity inspires others.
"The Chinook team proves that while we compete on the playing field, we are together in sportsmanship, spirit and the true sense of community," he said.
Alissa Cash, a Lakeshore Elementary fifth grader, summed up the experience: "Even on that cold day, I started to feel warm when I saw them because it's really nice to get together with people who had so much damage done to their house and to see how they feel and sort of get connected."
