Funding sought by mother to help son fulfil ice hockey dream

A GoFundMe campaign has been set up by Lana Rosireva from Ashbourne to help her son Ivan achieve his dream of becoming a professional top-rank ice hockey player.

Lana mother points out that Ivan is part of Ireland's national ice hockey and inline hockey teams and has represented his country on many occasions.

He is the captain of his inline u-15 Flying Ducks team in Dublin. He also plays u-18 for the same club and, of course, plays for the u-16 junior Belfast Giants team in Belfast.

He has received the MVP (Most Valuable Player) award for the 2022 season for u-15 from Inline Hockey Ireland and the "All Star" award for the u-18 age group. Ivan has also made it into the Top 10 point Leaderboard after attending the European Championship 2022 in Valladolid, Spain.

Ivan has played hockey since he was five years old. At the time, there were excellent facilities in Dublin, and the world seemed complete for Ivan. Unfortunately, Santry Ice Rink shut shortly after and this led to Lana and Ivan travelling oversees for training, camps and games.

“In August 2021, we decided to enrol Ivan in the ice hockey club in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which is over 300 km, for a return journey for one training session," points out Lana."We travel every week for training sessions to Belfast, but we also have games either at "home" or away, including boat and bus journeys. Some trips are over 30 hours long with no accommodation. This season alone, we have travelled 32,960 kilometres; multiply this by ten years. Just for comparison, the trip around the earth is 40,075 km!”

Lana has set up this GoFundMe page to help Ivan to achieve his dream by going to Canada to study and play hockey at least four times a week, where he will get hours of ice time that he wasn't able to get here at home and also be one step closer to his dream to play hockey professionally.

The GoFund me link is:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/9vmhvv-help-ivan-to-follow-his-hockey-dream