A day of hard work fundraising went for naught for a minor hockey team last week when thieves made off with a trailer full of bottles and cans.

The Grand Coulee Bulldogs got together last Thursday and set out on a bottle drive, crisscrossing the community. According to Mayor Wally Botkin, the kids managed to get together about $4,000 worth of bottles.

“The entire trailer heaped up with bottles. The kids spent all morning going house to house to house collecting them. The parents and kids spent all afternoon and evening sorting them so it’d be easier to take them into SARCAN,” Botkin said on Saskatchewan Afternoon with David Kirton.

The bottles were packed away, but when the parents went to take them to SARCAN, they discovered the bottles had been stolen.

Botkin said they were cautious about it.

“We had (the trailer) parked, we thought, kind of out of sight a little bit,” he said. “Not to make it encouraging, we didn’t put out any posts about how well we did.”

Botkin said someone must have seen the work being done or stumbled on the trailer and just decided to take it.

The bottles would have helped bring down the cost of hockey fees for the team, but Botkin said this theft won’t keep the kids from playing.

“It just made it a little easier for parents to handle the costs of hockey, because hockey is an expensive sport to play and doing this extra work and getting the kids involved (generated) that satisfaction of ‘You worked for your own hockey fees,’ ” said Botkin.

One good thing that has come out of the whole thing is the support from the community.

“The response has been tremendous with people wanting to help and people wanting to reach out to us, and even from outside of (Saskatchewan). We have people from Ontario, people from Alberta, hockey associations, other small towns offering to do bottle drives to help supplement the cost. So it has been an amazing, amazing thing to see,” said Botkin.

He said this is an important lesson the kids are getting — that there are bad people in the world, but there are more good people willing to help those in need.