By: JERRY REILLY, Sports Information Director
FREDONIA, N.Y. – At the end of practice Monday, Fredonia State men's hockey coach
Jeff Meredith stood and addressed his players.
He signaled out
Ken Nosky, a junior defenseman, who wears jersey No. 5.
“Friday night,” Meredith told Nosky, “you'll be skating for your team, your teammates, and Relay For Life.”
Meredith was referring to the name of the back of the pink No. 5 jersey Nosky will don for the Blue Devils' annual Pink The Rink game – 7 p.m. Friday vs. the Morrisville State Mustangs.
He told Nosky and his teammates how a campus group, Colleges Against Cancer, had purchased the jersey to “to honor the survivors, remember the taken, and encourage people to never give up hope.”
“What a great honor,” Meredith said, “to be representing them and all that they stand for.”
Meredith had another story to tell Tuesday – picking out junior forward
Mat Hehr, wearer of jersey No. 4 -- about former Fredonia State student Jessa Webber, who died in 2010. Her mother, Barbara, purchased the jersey, and wrote to Meredith about how her daughter dedicated her herself to school work and the Sigma Kappa sorority.
“Some of her sorority sisters will probably be in the stands Friday,” Meredith told his assembled players. “What a great thing to be able to honor her.”
On Wednesday, Meredith talked about Wendy Rzepkowski Vosper, a former Dunkirk resident who survived cancer for four years before passing at the age of 46. “We miss her smile,” wrote a friend, “and her sense of humor.” Freshman forward
Brian Doust will do the honor of wearing No. 23 bearing the name “Rzepkowski.”
The coach is saving the Jeremy Richardson story for Thursday.
“It's a hockey-to-hockey connection,” Meredith said.
Richardson was a star forward in the Alberta Junior League with a bright future in hockey. Several major U.S. colleges recruited him before he became a prized recruit at Findlay, a middle-of-the-pack NCAA Division I program in Ohio.
“We signed him early in the process,” said Craig Barnett, the Findlay head coach at the time. “I remember getting a call from a friend of mine who was coaching at BC (Boston College). He wanted to know how the hell we landed a kid like that.”
Richardson never got a chance to play a single college game. On his cross-continental trip from Alberta to Ohio, he started feeling sick. Once he arrived on campus, he was sent to doctors for tests. The diagnosis was skin cancer.
He started treatments almost immediately at home, then returned to Findlay to take classes the following January. After a brief upturn in his health, the cancer spread and took his life in 2005, two years after it was discovered.
“Our moms are long-time friends,” said Fredonia State sophomore forward
Alex Perkins, whose family purchased the No. 11 jersey – worn by Perkins – as a tribute to Richardson. “It'll be an honor to represent him and his family.”
Barnett will be in the stands Friday to see something he longed for back in 2003.
“It would have been great,” he said, “to see “Richardson' on the back of a jersey playing for me at Findlay. We had bigger things planned for him.”
