Zach Hyman<\/a> then brought Stelter into the postgame media conference, where he endeared himself to the entire city with his infectious personality.<\/p>\nStelter and his family became a fixture at Rogers Place for the rest of the season and through the playoffs where the Oilers were swept by the Colorado Avalanche in the conference final.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is important to me because Ben and the Stelter family is important to me,\u201d McDavid said. \u201cIt\u2019s a terrible thing when kids are not feeling well and they\u2019re in that situation, and the work the Stelter family does with the foundation — helping out those families that are in that situation, whether that\u2019s a dream experience, medical equipment at the house or just continuing to research for treatments and now there\u2019s proton therapy as well — it\u2019s great work that they\u2019re doing. It\u2019s going to help a lot of people that are going through similar situations.\u201d<\/p>\n
The foundation, which helps families in need that are battling cancer, is working on bringing proton therapy to Canada and is hoping to break ground on a one-of-kind center in the country later this year.<\/p>\n
The school fundraiser was the brainchild of Aariz Mawji, 16, who is the son of Ashif Mawji, the board chair of the Ben Stelter Foundation. Last year, the fundraiser amassed over $74,000 with 10 schools participating.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust seeing the growth of this fundraiser that I founded three years ago in one school, and we raised $11,000, and now raising $285,000 in 50 schools, I never would have imagined it,\u201d Aariz Mawji said. \u201cI think we can do $1 million next year and so we\u2019ll get to it right away. We\u2019re going to try to get to 100 schools next year. We\u2019re going to go for that and we\u2019re going to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
By winning the draw, Allendale got a visit from McDavid, who took questions from the roughly 600 students assembled in the gym. McDavid also presented an award to the fundraising school leaders, Grade 9 students Moossa Choulli and Atharv Keshri.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a great experience because we\u2019ve had (Leon) Draisaitl before for Hockey Helps Kids,\u201d Keshri said. \u201cThat was a great experience and it showed that our school is valued and I\u2019m so glad they took the opportunity to come here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stelter died at the age of 6 on Aug. 9, 2022, from glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-438811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}