Hockey Fights Cancer a personal cause throughout AHL | TheAHL.com

Patrick Williams, TheAHL.com Features Writer

Hockey Fights Cancer is more than a work initiative for the American Hockey League head office.

It’s personal, and it has been for the past 25 years. Cancer doesn’t quit, but neither does the hockey world.

The NHL and the NHLPA formed Hockey Fights Cancer as a joint initiative in 1998 and quickly brought the AHL aboard. In the ensuing quarter-century, the effort has helped to raise more than $32 million to be directed toward a variety of local and national charities, children’s hospitals and research institutions.

This season 22 AHL clubs are hosting a Hockey Fights Cancer game. Maybe it’s a special jersey, dasherboard signage or stick tape decked out in the program’s trademark lavender. “I Fight For” cards, on which players, coaches, staff and fans can pay tribute to someone impacted by cancer, make for striking visuals. There are online initiatives, too. Fans can donate at HockeyFightsCancer.com and share their stories via social media using the #HockeyFightsCancer hashtag. Donations go to supporting the American Cancer Society and Canadian Cancer Society Lodges.

Helping to guide those efforts at the AHL office is Chris Nikolis, the league’s executive vice president of business development. But as Nikolis will stress, the effort is widespread.

“Our teams do so much in their cities. Our players – hockey players in general – are so great in the community. What the logo and those jerseys and those players mean at a school, at a food bank, a hospital visit, wearing a themed jersey on the ice, it’s immeasurable.

“To be able to take what they built – and they are the ones that build it, our players, our teams, our management and owners – and use it for an additional platform like Hockey Fights Cancer, it’s great.”

Nikolis was 13 years old when cancer claimed his grandfather. Each summer his grandfather visited from Greece and stayed with the Nikolis family. Chris recalls the impact his passing had on his father, Jim.

“The look on his face,” Nikolis said. “You’re 13, and you think people are going to be around forever. You learn pretty quickly that for whatever the reason, they might not be.”

Nikolis’s mother, Helen, is a breast cancer survivor. Jim died in 2015 at age 83, five months after his own cancer diagnosis. Chris’s father had outlasted other medical challenges, but cancer can be an unrelenting foe.

“I never met someone who listened to his doctors…