donate tickets each season<\/a> to area nonprofits to bring area families to Lightning games, his cousin inspired him to help area families affected by cerebral palsy.<\/p>\n\u201cI\u2019ve been around it my whole life. I see how hard he works every day and everything he does. It seems like he\u2019s gonna have a setback, and he just powers through it,\u201d Goncalves said of Sandford. \u201cI know how much support he had growing up with his family and how big our family is and all the nurses that came over. But I also found out that not all kids have all the necessary requirements or needs to have a happy, healthy life and be able to do things that they dream of doing. So it\u2019s nice that Tampa has this program. That\u2019s what makes this organization the best, the little stuff like that to help give back to the community.\u201d<\/p>\n
Goncalves has watched his cousin go on to earn a scholarship and become a college wheelchair tennis player in Texas.<\/p>\n
He shares that story with the kids he meets through the Lightning\u2019s player ticket program.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust being able to see him not through the struggles, but just how hard he had to work every day. Whether it was walking or speech or how much time and loyalty it takes from your parents to be there and provide,\u201d Goncalves said of what inspired him. “It’s a great cause, and I love meeting the kids after the games and getting them to talk through it and tell them about my little cousin, Lachlan, too. They get pretty fired up when I tell them his story.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What do six-time National Basketball Association (NBA) champion Michael Jordan and Tampa Bay Lightning forward Gage Goncalves have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":119378,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[135,137,136],"class_list":["post-119377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}