WHL Community Collective: Vancouver Giants

The Western Hockey League strives to promote and foster a welcoming community across our 22 clubs scattered throughout Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. Every team is given the creative freedom to allow their players and staff to work with the organizations and groups that they are most passionate towards. The end goal is to create and maintain long-lasting relationships and ongoing partnerships within their community.

Through the WHL Community Collective we aim to highlight these outstanding initiatives done by each club over the course of the year.

This is what the Vancouver Giants’ #WHLCommunity looked like this season:

The Vancouver Giants are proving to their youth supporters that they don’t need to be tall in stature to be a ‘Giant’ in their own lives.

As a substitution to the towering height of a Giant, students in the primary and intermediate grades can model in the footsteps of their on-ice role models by following a four-pillar program implemented by the Giants organization that motivates students to put their best foot forward in their everyday lives.

The four pillars — which are the foundation of program — requests that students be a Giant at school, at home, in the community, and for their health.

Today, your Giants visited Howthorne Elementary school as part of our ‘Be A Giant’ initiative to speak with the students about how to Be A Giant at home, at school, and in the community ❣️ pic.twitter.com/gCAPlLTYoL

— Vancouver Giants (@WHLGiants) February 10, 2023

This wouldn’t be the first season where the Giants organization worked closely with local schools. After all, the Club prides itself on being strong believers toward students and their education.

Since 2016, the Be a Giant program has visited over 4,000 students with the goal of motivating the student participants to lead their lives with positivity through their four pillars of being a Giant. During the Giants’ 2021-22 season, over 3,800 students signed up for the program.

And much like years prior, the course, which runs for two weeks during the school year, sees members of the Vancouver Giants visit the collaborating classroom to chat about their personal experiences in their school and what it takes to be a Giant like themselves.

Lessons about education, healthy living, responsibility are passed down from the team as they teach the students about taking care of their physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

The players also introduce a hands-on component to the program — a daily log that helps highlight ways in which each student has been a Giant through the four pillars. The log is monitored by both parent guardians and teachers alike.

When the two weeks of being a Giant concludes, Giants staff stop by the school to celebrate the students’ success and to drop off tickets to upcoming Giants games for the participants.

While the program itself only lasts for two weeks, the Club hopes that the lessons taught by the Giants and the hands-on, four-pillar program leaves the students inspired enough to continue being a Giant at school, at home, in the community, and for their health.