Local youth football team loses gear in fire, season at-risk
A local youth football team is asking for the community’s help after a fire destroyed their equipment.
The Coachella Valley Junior Raiders had around $30,000 to $40,000 worth of equipment destroyed in Monday night’s fire at Silva’s Radiator & Air Conditioning on the 83500 block of Indio Boulevard.
Joe Moya, the president of the team, said he woke up to a call around 11:30 Monday night and found out his storage bin in Indio was on fire.
“I rushed down here to find out whats going on,” Moya said. “There were firefighters inside and it was still smoldering real bad. I was devastated, I was devastated, my stomach turned. The first thing that came to mind, was the kids, oh my gosh, here we go again, something else is going to come up..they’re not going to have a season, we almost lost our season last year.”
This is not the first time the team has lost their gear. Team officials said that last year, $14,000 of worth of team equipment was stolen. The team has been fundraising to make up those cost ever since.
“We still haven’t recovered, we haven’t been able to replace all of that. We still owe the city of Coachella money,” Moya said. “They’ve been gracious enough to allow us to carry a balance. We’ve never carried a balance, we’ve always been able to pay our way. To the point where we’re able to bless the children of our community, we sponsor about 60 percent of our kids. the socio-economic area that our children come from their parents can’t pay 250$.”
Kali Alonzo, the team’s vice president, created a GoFundMe page to help replace the equipment which the team needs by August, at the latest, to play this season.
“I know that when a community comes together, great things can happen so we just turn to the community, and even if it’s just a share on Facebook or anything like that it definitely helps,” Alonzo said.
More than 100 children play for the team, plus cheerleaders. You can also reach them on Facebook here.
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Noticias en español: Telemundo 15
