Soccer

Grace College men's soccer team running 48 hours straight for coronavirus relief

By Kevin Mercer Apr 2, 2020
(Photo courtesy of Twitter/Grace__Soccer)

In the wake of the fear and uncertainty sweeping the nation due to the coronavirus outbreak, the Grace College (Winona Lake, Indiana) men’s soccer team is doing a 48-hour run this week to raise funds for pandemic relief.

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The continuous run will began Wednesday at noon, and will end on Friday at noon. The team’s members, as well as a few other athletes and coaches from Grace College, will run in non-stop shifts for the duration of the 48 hours.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-XxFa-DDJ4/

Grace hopes that news of the run will cause people to give to the program’s GoFundMe page, which is raising money to help in the coronavirus relief efforts. All funds raised as a result of the run will go to the Community Foundation of Elkhart County Response Fund, the Warsaw Salvation Army and IMA World Health. The team hopes to raise at least $10,000.

“As a team, we wanted to do our part in the fight against COVID-19,” said Grace head coach Arron Patrick, according to The Indy Channel. “The team decided to use our abilities to move and run to make an impact, and we hope that we can inspire others to give back to their communities as well.”

Tyler Brueckman, one of the players who helped develop the idea for the run, said the team would be running anyway for conditioning. Now, it will help others too.

“With all of the hardship and problems right now in the world, I saw this as a good way to come together and provide assistance where it is needed,” he said. “We are always running for our training, so we want to use our running to positively influence our communities. It’s our way of doing what we can to help others in our given situation.”

Grace College is an evangelical Christian school, and the Lancers compete in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) Division I and National Christian College Athletic Association (NCCAA). The four-year college is connected to Grace Theological Seminary.

“Christ has been the center of our community from the day we were founded in 1948,” says the school’s website. “We follow His example of grace in all things.”

Neighboring Elkhart County in northern Indiana has 23 confirmed coronavirus cases and two deaths, as of April 1.

You can follow the 48-hour run live on Grace Soccer’s Instagram and Twitter pages.

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