For the last few years, co-founders, Jorge Soto and Tawny Rohzen, have worked to gather the greater San Diego Hockey Community together for some summertime beer league hockey games at the Classy San Diego Tourney. Best part - all proceeds are donated to a local San Diego Non-Profit Foundation. This year the benefitting organization is, Active Valor, a group showing love to the local military community since 2016.
San Diego is home to a large number active and veteran military personnel and Active Valor is "dedicated to giving new purpose to veterans by pairing them as mentors to children of our nation's fallen heroes, referred to as Gold Star Children. The organization not only supports Gold Star Children but also invites Gold Star Spouses to join events for their own time of relaxing, fellowship and community-building."
As part of the Classy San Diego Tourney, the co-founders hosted raffles and accepted donations throughout the weekend to help raise additional funds for their Non-Profit of the year.
In addition, local vendors set up booths outside the rink for players and their families to hang out between games. Although it wouldn't have been a Beer Leaguer's Tournament without a beer garden all weekend long and an afterparty Saturday night.
We were honored to head down for the event as a vendor on Saturday and Sunday. Our staff had nothing but wonderful things to say about Jorge, the players and the tournament as a whole.
After the tournament, we spoke with Jorge to get his thoughts on how the weekend went after a few days to recover from hours at the rink. “What a weekend we just had, as founders of Classy SD Hockey Tourney, we are so incredibly thankful to the San Diego Hockey community for giving us the opportunity to host this event and show the rest of the world what we are all about. This weekend was filled with passion for the sport, sweat of hard work, and love of friendships. There is nothing that makes us happier than seeing smiles all around, observe new friendships blossom, and watch people enjoying the sport we all love while supporting local businesses and raising funds towards charity. San Diego is indeed classy and so is the hockey community. Congrats to the champions, thank you to all the vendors, participants, staff, friends, family, and of course Active Valor. This tourney will keep growing and so will So-Cal Hockey, we invite you to participate next year and experience Classy Hockey.” - Jorge Soto (co-founder)
Be sure to check out some of the photos below from the weekend. Want to get involved? Go check them out at classysdhockey.com to learn more or sign up to play in 2023.
