Thousands vow to embrace Jersey Day: ‘There’s healing in the helping’
TORONTO — When office co-ordinator Jill Batten dons her 2010 Sidney Crosby Team Canada jersey on Thursday, she’ll be honouring more than just the 16 people who perished as a result of a Saskatchewan highway crash.
She’ll be thinking about a 16-year-old classmate who died in a hunting accident when Batten was a high school student in Grand Bank, N.L., and three other young acquaintances who died in two separate highway accidents roughly 10 years later.
Batten, now 38, says she can’t help but think of her own childhood tragedies as she mourns last week’s horrific accident near Tisdale involving the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team, which also injured 13 people.
It’s a big reason she’s heeding the call of a group of British Columbia hockey moms to wear a jersey as a show of solidarity with victims’ families and the tight-knit Prairie community of Humboldt, Sask.