September 25, 2017 at 1:00 p.m.
Nicklaus family makes donation to upgrade LUHS facilities at Lakeland Ice Arena
Nicklaus family makes donation to upgrade LUHS facilities at Lakeland Ice Arena
By Nick Sabato-
Last March, the couple made waves by spearheading a donation - along with River Valley Bank - of $720,000 to install new field turf for the football and soccer teams.
The Nicklaus' are once again opening their checkbooks for the school, this time offering a $315,000 donation to Lakeland Hawks Ice Arena to build new locker rooms and an off-ice training area for Lakeland's boys' and girls' hockey programs.
"They've been working on it for about five years, just figuring out how to try and do it," Greg Nicklaus said. "We decided we would do it."
The rink has locker rooms now, but the JV hockey team is forced to take their equipment home every night after practice, and the girls' team doesn't have an adequate locker room to use.
On top of that, there is no current location for players to work on off-ice skills or warm up prior to getting on the ice.
"The boys' (varsity) team had always had a locker room here, but the JV team was taking their equipment home every time they practiced and the girls' team was just using storage rooms and stuff like that," Lakeland rink manager John Dwyer said. "It was something where it would be nice for everyone to have their own space."
For the team, it's not just an opportunity to have a nice place to change and store equipment.
Now, Lakeland can use the off-ice training area to add another dimension to its training during the season.
"Eventually we'll get it set up the way we want, but we'll be doing our dry-land training in there," LUHS boys' head coach Ken Thanig said. "We'll do stick handling, we'll do shooting, we'll do plyometrics - everything we've done before. The shooting, kids have had to do on their own away from the rink. This we'll give us the opportunity to do it together as a team. All those things are going to benefit us. It's also great in team building for us."
The Nicklaus family has now been involved with the donation of more than $1 million to Lakeland athletics in the last year, with this current donation coming solely from Greg and Darcey.
So the question comes: Why are Lakeland athletics so important to the family to invest so heavily in the school's sports, aside from the fact that they currently have three kids involved with Thunderbird sports?
"We believe in these athletes and these kids," Darcey Nicklaus said. "We want to give them a better chance at producing in their sport. We thought that if we could do it now, while our kids are here and for the future, that would be good."
The Nicklaus family is certainly leaving their mark on LUHS and its athletic teams and it has not gone unnoticed by those who benefit from their generosity.
"We're all grateful as coaches, players and parents to the Nicklaus family for doing this," Thanig said. "We are very thankful to have them as a part of our organization and to have them help us out in that way, because it's huge for us as a team."
Nick Sabato may be reached at [email protected] or via Twitter @SabatoNick.
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