DETROIT — Marlowe Stoudamire wasn\u2019t a hockey player, but he was a player in the sport.<\/p>\n
The Michigan native was a driving force in the Detroit Red Wings, NHL and NHL Players’ Association launch in February 2020 of “Learn, Play, Score,” an ambitious $1 million pilot program to bring hockey to more than 30,000 children in the city.<\/p>\n
Stoudamire didn\u2019t live to see the program\u2019s progress. The always-smiling, entrepreneurial community advocate died at the age of 43 on March 24, 2020, after he contracted COVID-19 and became one of Detroit\u2019s early pandemic casualties.<\/p>\n
Detroit celebrated Stoudamire\u2019s life and legacy on Saturday with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, renaming a park near his childhood home on the city\u2019s east side in his honor. Family, friends, city officials and members of the hockey community gathered at Marlowe D.F. Stoudamire Park to dedicate the newly renovated 1.1-acre space.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things that we realized was the importance of community to get us through (the pandemic), even in isolation,\u201d Valencia Stoudamire, his wife, told the gathering. \u201cThat connection and sense of community was near and dear to Marlowe\u2019s heart and who he was, whether he was advocating for access to sports like hockey in diverse communities or telling Detroit\u2019s story through projects like the (Detroit Historical) Museum\u2019s \u2018Detroit 67\u2019 exhibit\u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, it is truly an honor to be able to renovate a space that once again honors Marlowe\u2019s vision to create organic social collisions within our communities, especially one from which he came, and one where people knew him and remember him,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DETROIT — Marlowe Stoudamire wasn\u2019t a hockey player, but he was a player in the sport. The Michigan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9108,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-9107","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\/9107","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=9107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9107\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}