Elizabeth Frazier, Lightning executive vice president of community development and social impact, was elated when Van Trees reached out with the idea. The hats used to get donated before COVID, and now that has returned.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were donating them, and then it went away. With everything going on, all of a sudden we had hat-tricks and a bunch of hats,\u201d Frazier said. \u201cAnd we were like, \u2018What can we do?\u2019 Mark Van Trees to the rescue.\u201d<\/p>\n
Van Trees worked with Lightning Senior Vice President of Game Presentation John Franzone to start the initiative, and they\u2019ve now been able to supply nearly 150 baseball caps across two hat-tricks this season.<\/p>\n
Two weeks ago, Van Trees and the Lightning Community Foundation held their first hat donation at the VA mental health clinic, providing 60 hats before supplying another 80 this week.<\/p>\n
\u2018A natural extension\u2019<\/p>\n
The Lightning Ice Crew collect the thrown hats, and Van Trees then takes them before sanitizing them in a special frame inside of a dishwasher.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the busiest VA in the country. They did 2 million visits last year,\u201d Van Trees said. \u201cAll of the polytrauma and spinal patients in the VA system come to Tampa. This is the center of excellence. They do the best care here for them, and we have a phenomenal response from them, and they’re just good folks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Van Trees credits the Lightning for their passion in supporting area veterans.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Lightning are by far the most passionate sponsors of the military. Jeff (Vinik)\u2019s dad served in World War II, so they’ve been supporting the military for 15, 16 years now. It\u2019s just a natural extension for them to step up and support veterans.\u201d<\/p>\n
Van Trees was eager to help veterans select a hat from the collection on Friday, saying many of the military members in the room are passionate Lightning fans.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey just love it,\u201d he said. \u201cAs you can see, almost every veteran wears a ball cap from what era they serve. They take off those hats and put on the Lightning hat, and it\u2019s pretty cool.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Frazier, Lightning executive vice president of community development and social impact, was elated when Van Trees reached…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":229031,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[135,137,136],"class_list":["post-229030","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\/229030","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=229030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}