Seawolves are Santa All-Stars
By Erik Boland
Newsday, December 20, 2006
Kim Herold watched her students interact with members of the Stony Brook University men's lacrosse team Monday with a smile almost as big as the ones worn by the pre-school-aged kids under her care.
"They just get so excited," said Herold, who has been a teacher at the Suffolk chapter of the Association for the Help of Retarded Children in Bohemia for eight years. "They're just happy. They smile or make eye contact with these guys, which they might not normally do."
It was the third straight year the Seawolves have played the role of Santa Claus. Three Stony Brook seniors - Sean Chamberlain, Adam Lent and Tom Izzo - founded You Gotta Have Heart, Inc., a non-profit organization with the slogan, "It's all for the kids," three years ago. Chamberlain helped found the group in part to honor his mother, Coleen, who died of a heart attack shortly before his sophomore year at Stony Brook.
"Her and my dad had been into doing charity stuff for years," Chamberlain said. "She was always into helping kids."
You Gotta Have Heart, Inc. has grown exponentially since 2003. Chamberlain said the organization provided gifts for 12 kids at Stony Brook Hospital its first year. The team raised $6,500 this year, enabling it to provide gifts for 176 kids at AHRC and Stony Brook Hospital, where the Seawolves are headed Friday. Lent said player participation never has been a problem over the years.
"Some of the freshmen might not be into it at the beginning, but by the end of the first day, everyone's asking what we're doing next," Lent said. "Everybody seems to take to it."
That was evident Monday as 25 team members - most donning puffy red Santa hats - flooded into classrooms bearing gifts, accompanied by a CD player blaring Christmas songs and led by a player in full Santa Claus regalia. That was Jason Fautas, a senior lacrosse player at Hartwick College (N.Y.) who attended Sachem High School with Chamberlain.
Victoria Shields, AHRC's director of children's services, said she didn't know what to expect when the lacrosse team first visited last year.
"We were amazed," Shields said. "This group, who have not had a lot of experience with kids like this, came in and played and interacted with these kids as if they had been doing it for years."
Chamberlain said the reactions players receive make the time spent fundraising, shopping and organizing the trips more than worth it.
"For the kids to be happy and smiling for 1 1/2 or two hours, that's a huge reward for us," Chamberlain said.
Lent explained the reactions of the kids, who have a variety of developmental disabilities and might not typically react well to strangers, at the most basic level.
"You can tell kids light up when they see a guy in a big red suit," Lent said. "Because of some of their developmental problems, they don't always understand everything people are trying to tell them. But everyone understands Santa Claus."