To earn the award, Tassone had to be nominated as the Lightning\u2019s candidate, then earn the most votes from the community. Voting took place between March 1 and April 1.<\/p>\n
He was nominated by Jordan McKenzie, the Lightning\u2019s community and hockey development manager for ball hockey, who said Tassone was \u201cthe first person who came to mind\u201d when deciding on who to nominate for the award.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just the impact that he has and that we hear about,\u201d McKenzie told NHL.com. \u201cHe\u2019s an all-around great human being, so it was just an easy selection.\u201d<\/p>\n
Each of the 32 NHL teams nominated one teacher for the award.<\/p>\n
McKenzie has gotten to know Tassone over the last four years through the Lightning\u2019s ball hockey tournaments, and he made the trip out to the pep rally to celebrate the Most Valuable Teacher.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was incredible,\u201d McKenzie said. \u201cVery special seeing all the students excited. A great little surprise.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tassone \u2013 who was quick to thank the Lighting and the community for voting for him \u2013 earned his nomination by running ball hockey tournaments in the community as well as implementing hockey into his PE curriculum.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a huge Lightning fan, so I talk about hockey,\u201d Tassone said. \u201cThe kids just love it, running around with a stick in their hand. This school is just a fantastic school with a lot of great kids, and they just eat it up. It\u2019s so much fun and they\u2019ve really taken to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 10-year educator said he started the community ball hockey clubs eight years ago, starting by enrolling one team in the Lightning\u2019s development tournament. Now, he has enough participation to submit three full teams into the tournament.\u200b<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To earn the award, Tassone had to be nominated as the Lightning\u2019s candidate, then earn the most votes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":653996,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-653995","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\/653995","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=653995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/653996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}