Dave Isaac

@davegisaac

Flyers chairman Ed Snider knew he would lose his battle eventually and set up several things before he died April 11 after two years of combating bladder cancer.

He prepared Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts to stay a part of Flyers ownership through several video calls.

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He said goodbye to everyone close to him, many of them going to his California home before he died. One of them was Scott Tharp, president and CEO of Snider Hockey. Snider wanted to make sure that his foundation, his legacy, was in good hands.

“He still had such unbelievable resolve and he just reiterated how important the foundation was and expressed the confidence that he had in me to make sure we reached our goals,” Tharp said. “That meant a lot to me.”

Considering Snider’s impact on the Philadelphia sports scene — emerging with the Eagles and helping establish and oversee the Flyers for the team’s first 50 seasons — that’s got to be some burden to carry.

“You know,” Tharp said, “he had the foresight to leave us in a position where it’s not a burden. It’s a challenge, but we’re going to be able to continue to do what he wanted and continue our growth to serve thousands more kids.”

That’s another thing Snider did before he passed. He knew that when he died he’d prefer donations to the foundation in his memory as opposed to flowers or something like that. Because the foundation is so important to him, he wanted to keep giving and triple whatever was donated in his memory.

This week, the foundation estimated more than $60,000 in donations with a few more contributions still trickling in.

“Ed was very, very careful to want to preserve Snider Hockey as his legacy and as such he left us through his planned giving, a very significant, nine-figure endowment that we’re going to use to be able to perpetuate to match all future donations 2-for-1,” Tharp said. “We’ll match that out of the gift that he left us.”

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Snider’s memorial service April 21 put his foundation in the spotlight. One of the dozen speakers was Virlen Reyes, a woman from Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood and the first Snider Hockey student to go to college.

“The glimmering lights reflecting off the wide open expanse of the ice, and the warm welcome of the coaches…hope, promise, and possibilities soon began to displace my previous sense of depression and despair,” she said that day.

Reyes told of a letter she sent Snider when she joined the foundation and fell in love with hockey. It started, “Dear Mr. Snider - Before Snider Hockey, I had no hope in life. I was lost, and quite frankly I did not see a reason in living.”

“It just resonated with Ed so much that he was on the phone to me immediately,” Tharp recalled. “He said, ‘Come up to my office. You’ve got to look at this. We have to help this girl.’ But it’s a story that’s been repeated time and time again with the girls and boys in our foundation.”

By Tharp’s estimation, there are dozens of stories just as dramatic and uplifting as Reyes’. The foundation serves 1,900 in its after-school program, roughly 300 of which from South Jersey. Including in-school programming like floor hockey and tutoring, the foundation reaches 900 South Jersey kids.

Because of Snider’s posthumous donations, the foundation will receive more than $180,000 in new funding and is taking new steps. The organization used to hang its hat on high school graduation rates, but the goal is now to get students enrolled in post-secondary programs that help them finish college and gets them prepared for the workforce.

The thing that Tharp is most excited about is a new partnership Snider Hockey has formed with a Princeton-based organization called the Give Something Back Foundation.

“We are able to now tell all of our ninth graders when they enter the ninth grade that if you stay in the program and if you maintain a B average in high school, we’re going to give you a full college scholarship and room and board to one of 10 universities that we partnered with,” Tharp said.

Among the 10 schools are New Jersey universities, Rowan, The College of New Jersey, Montclair State and Saint Peter’s. New things are coming for the foundation, which just added Flyers president Paul Holmgren and Montgomery County (Pa.) Bar Association president Paul Troy to its board of directors.

“We’re able to do this because Ed was such a visionary and had such unbelievable foresight,” Tharp said. “He was also able to surround himself with people he knew would keep his legacy moving forward.”

Dave Isaac; (856) 486-2479;disaac@gannettnj.com