| HISTORY OF THE CENTRAL TEXAS ALLIANCE | |
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Thank you for taking the time to look over our team’s website. Here is a little information about the team, what our goals and purpose are and what we are trying to accomplish. Hopefully this information will assist anyone with questions they may have about the team. To begin, let us explain a little about the team. Cpl. Andrew Kos has been working on forming the team since he got the idea late in the spring of 2007. He is a commissioned police officer with the City of Austin Police Department. He has been employed with Austin P.D. since he started the police academy in January of 1994. Andrew has had a life long passion for sports of all kinds and an obsession with the great sport of ice hockey. The forming of the team started to come to fruition from a discussion between Andrew and the Central Texas Wolfpack founder Ron Phillips. Ron is an Austin Police Department Detective that came up with the idea in 2004 to form a public safety football team in Central Texas. Before Ron formed the team he created a non-profit organization 501(c)(3) for his team to become part of. When he formed the non-profit organization he envisioned other public safety teams joining the organization as well. He mentioned basketball, softball and any other sports that would bring public safety employees together in support of local charities. Andrew told him that he had been researching public safety hockey teams and found that there are a significant number of teams throughout the country and even the state of Texas. Ron said he would love to have us join his non-profit organization. It seems that almost every major city around the country and many smaller cities have some sort of public safety hockey team. For instance, Texas has teams in San Antonio, Houston and 5-10 in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. Andrew decided to proceed with forming a team because he felt that the Central Texas region was missing out. He researched other teams around the state and country and began to make contacts with other teams about how they operate. The Dallas/Ft. Worth Titans Public Safety Hockey Association has provided much needed guidance and support in our efforts. See their website for more information on their Association. www.dfwtitans.com One weekend Andrew was talking with his supervisor Sgt. Clif Blanchard about the team and Clif decided to jump on board as well. Clif is a computer expert. They decided to get a website up and running. Andrew purchased a domain name and began working on the site. Sgt. Blanchard initially was the Webmaster and got the site up and running very quickly. Since then Andrew has been developing and updating the website every day. Once we got the website up and running things started moving fast as far as getting a team together. Eventually David Jimenez joined the team and turned the website into what it is today. The Chief of the Austin Police Department, Art Acevedo, supports and encourages the police’s activities and involvement in the community. He has encouraged everyone in the police department to support our organization. He had a department wide email sent out to everyone at APD announcing the existence of our organization. Chief Acevedo also attended our first game against the DFW Titans public safety team on January 20, 2008. A press release announcing his assistance with the kick off of our first game on January 20 was sent out to all the local media outlets. The Chief put on one of our jerseys and posed for a picture to be added to the website and also a team picture. Andrew worked on writing up a constitution and by-laws for our organization. These can be found on our bylaws page by clicking here.. The by-laws include our vision and goal, purpose, membership requirements, discipline issues, financial issues, board of director responsibilities and various other issues. The non-profit organization that Ron formed and that the Central Texas Alliance Public Safety Hockey Team operates under is a non-profit that raises money for Central Texas organizations that provide organized athletics to at-risk children. We will donate all our excess proceeds earned from exhibition, tournament or competitive games to this charity or any other charity of special interest that may arise. For example, if a local family is adversely affected by a family disaster like a death in the family or significant health issues we would have a charity hockey game in support of that cause. The community and team sponsors would be encouraged to notify us of worthy causes that we could work toward raising money for. We also plan to participate in various games against other teams in other cities around the state and country who are holding an event to raise money for a cause they are supporting. The Central Texas Alliance would be very appreciative of any level of sponsorship that businesses and individuals can provide. There are many costs associated with participating in tournaments and exhibition games. One of the main start-up costs involved with starting any sports team is equipment. Specifically the team needed jerseys. We purchased a dark colored jersey (red) and a light colored jersey (white). Each new member pays $100 for the jerseys and hockey game socks but that does not cover all of the costs. The team’s logo and numbers are in the process of getting screen printed on the jerseys. Another very big expense is the cost of ice time for practices and games. Other expenses include operating and maintaining a website, printing game day and exhibition flyers, creating and publishing a media guide, promotion and advertising of events, travel expenses to tournaments and out of town games, entry fees to tournaments and other facility usage fees. Another large expense is travel and lodging costs. The team plans to attend tournaments all over the country. Recent plans for the Western States Police and Fire games in Boise, ID in August of 2008, are in the works. Hopefully the team will be able to attend the World Police and Fire games in Vancouver, BC in 2009. These are just some of, but not all, of the expenses involved. Our team members will be expected to pay their own money for equipment and membership dues to our organization and to USA Hockey. At this time we have enough members to create two teams of different skill levels and we are quickly getting closer to having enough members to form 3 teams.. Hopefully this has answered some of the questions you may have. If anyone out there has any questions about the team or would like to inquire about joining the team, membership requirements, sponsorship levels, donate money, let us know about a charity or cause that we can help support please don’t hesitate to contact us. The team’s email address is: centexhockey@yahoo.com Thanks again for visiting our site and hope to hear from you soon!
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