Hockey is a tremendous community and Cranford Hockey Club is our family.  Today one of our own needs our help.  

The Morreale family came to us three years ago from Toronto.  Nadia and Elio moved to Clark with their son Anthony and daughters Emily and Julia.  We received a call shortly before the season started that year from Nadia that her son Anthony was a Bantam AA player looking for a club to play for.  Needless to say we were more than excited for the Morreale family to join our special club and they have been staple at the rink for all of Anthony's games and looking forward to his final year playing for our Midget U18 AA team.  

The Morreale family moved to our area for better medical treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital for their brave and determined young daughter Julia.   Julia has fought many battles her entire life including a heart transplant when she was just 8 months old.   She was diagnosed with cancer at 3 years old and has been fighting ever since.   Julia is now 15 years old and her doctors just let the family know that she needs a bone marrow transplant.  Julia would be the first heart transplant recipient to also have a bone marrow transplant at Memorial Sloan Kettering so this is a high risk and experimental procedure for even the best cancer hospital in the world.   

To say the costs of this all are staggering would be and understatement.  Nadia's cousin, Amerina Petrucci, has organized a GoFundMe page named "Team Julia" where you can find more information about this incredible family's journey and donate:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/x2fgwz-team-julia?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=sms&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet  

Julia is also looking for a bone marrow donor and the Morreale family has organized a Bone Marrow Donor Drive at Clark Recreation Center on October 4th from 11am until 2pm.  Please consider coming to the drive to get your cheek swabbed for this life saving procedure.  Recommended age for a donor is between 18 and 45. 

In these unique and difficult times for everyone we hope our hockey family can rally around Julia and the Morreale family.