Tromsø’s women’s ice hockey team will be supported by Mats Zuccarello to participate in the Norwegian Championship.

It’s not only football that is expensive in Norwegian sport. Hockey is a sport where athletes have huge outlays for both equipment and travel.

A recent example is the women’s team from Tromsø, who wish to participate in the Norwegian Championships (NM) in Stavanger that is held from March 31st to April 2nd, but can not afford to so by themselves. Half of the team’s players are students.

They decided to create a fundraising page at sponsor.me, so they can participate in the NM “to gain experience, but also to show Norway that Tromsø hockey belong on the top level and to encourage recruitment of girls to this wonderful sport “.

– This means so much

The girls had already gathered around NOK 5,000 kroner as Mats Zuccarello donated another 12,000 himself.

– Are you kidding? It’s surreal. I am speechless, says Marte Idrupsen to Nettavisen.

Tromsø’s number 22 had not been informed of the support from Zuccarello before Nettavisen made a call.

– This is amazing! It means so much to us. It is quite expensive for us to travel around. We do a lot of voluntary work (Dugnad), Idrupsen says.

Zuccarello did not want to comment on this to Nettavisen, but his manager Kevin Skabø confirms the contribution.

– Mats do not want to make a big deal of this. He came across this page and wanted to support the team. He wants hockey to grow in the country, among both boys and girls, says Skabø to Nettavisen, who adds that he is not surprised by the support from Mats.

– Mats has an incredibly big heart

Zuccarello is notoriously committed to supporting children and young people into the sport through the Zuccarello fund.

– Now everyone can join

Team leader Ananke van Oostrum is – to put it mildly – pleased with the support from the biggest Norwegian hockey star.

– It is absolutely insane! We monitored the page to see if support came in and suddenly we saw that Mats Zuccarello was topping our list with 12,000 kroner, says van Oostrum to Nettavisen.

She says that they deliberately set the target low at NOK 12,000, hoping to entice family and friends to make a contribution, but that there definitely is a need for the 17,000 that has been received in total.

– It is incredibly expensive to travel to NM and a large deductible, so it was a handful of players who could not go as they could not afford the trip, but now it seems that everybody will be travelling, says Ananke van Oostrum.

Source: nettavisen.no / Norway Today