Five football players cheered from the black Yukon in the line of vehicles in the Lighthouse Emergency Services parking lot.
The team of Eric Eberle, Jay Wright, Kas Waitku, Joe Popp and Alex Peck found out a sealed envelope left at one of the houses in the neighborhood they went to for the 15th Annual Rush for Food left a check for $310 for Lighthouse ? the most donated.
“We thought we were doing well,” said Eberle. “It was one of our last stops. We were about to leave.”
But they didn’t ? they continued on the street in the Deerwood neighborhood.
Popp found it taped to the door. It was sealed so the players left it as they found it and took it back to Lighthouse with the rest of the bags of food they collected.
“It’s a nice way to end the day,” Wright smiled. “I thought me getting 14 bags was good.”
During Rush for Food, the JV and varsity players head into the neighborhoods to collect food and donations for Lighthouse. The group collecting the most gets a surprise.
Every $5 donated counted as one bag. With the 34 bags they already collected, the monetary donations made it a total of 98 bags.
Over 170 players collected a total of 6,478 pounds of food – breaking last year’s record. The amount does not count monetary donations and bottle returns.
“Every year I kept thinking we can’t go over it. This year we set our goal for 4,800 because we thought how can we get over 4,900,” said Sandy Savoie, chair for her ninth and final year. “To get that amount is amazing. We had a lot of great volunteers. The kids were excited this year. It was awesome. It is a great thing to see them give back to the community because we do have a great community that supports them.”