The Minnesota Wild didn’t take home any of the big on-the-ice honors during the NHL awards ceremony on Wednesday night, but Jason Zucker did win the league’s top award for community service: The King Clancy Memorial Trophy.
The trophy goes to the player who demonstrates leadership qualities on and off the ice and has made a significant humanitarian contribution to his community.
Zucker and his wife Carly Zucker, a Twin Cities media personality, started the #GIVE16 campaign in 2017-18 and have since turned it into the Zucker Family Broadcast Studio at the University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis.
The campaign has generated more than $1.2 million, and another $40,000 is going to the hospital thanks to a donation that comes along with the trophy for the humanitarian award.
“The award is great, it shows the work the community did to raise all that money and create the space at the hospital,” said Zucker, via the Wild.
“But the work’s not done, we still have money we’re going to raise. We’re still going to create programming for the kids to have fun while they are there and be kids and enjoy their life as much as they can when they are in the hospital.”
The Zuckers’ studio at Masonic “allows children and their families to watch Wild games in a setting that simulates the experience of being at the game,” according to the Wild, in addition to serving “as a state-of-the-art broadcast studio” for the kids.
The studio opened in March earlier this year.
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