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Local nashville predators shirts12/3/2023 ![]() The Centers for Disease Control published its data on suicides for 2022 and the numbers are horrific: The number of Americans who took their own lives last year was 49,449, up 2.6 percent from 2021. It can’t be bad to feel like people are there.” ![]() And I think we just brainstormed this idea to keep that going. “It’s one of those ironies where it’s like, you suddenly see the best in people in the worst possible situation. “From the time we were at the church last year even, I just felt the support, that hand on my shoulder,” Rob Thorsen said. It’s a way to make mental health a casual topic of conversation, not just in hockey locker rooms but across all sports and all spaces where people congregate. Rob Thorsen said he’s been contacted by people around North America, seeking to spread The Shoulder Check’s simple message: reach out. Prentiss, whose gym Thorsen trained in, signed on as a board member so did Gary Zegras, who helps run the Mid-Fairfield youth hockey program where Hayden played and where Zegras’ son, Trevor, got his start as a youth player. Hayden’s parents, Rob Thorsen and Sarah Thompson, put their purpose together. “He brought such lightness to every situation.” “Never in a million years,” said Ben Prentiss, who has trained dozens of pro hockey players out of his gym in Stamford for the last 20 years as well as younger players like Hayden. He was the motivated athlete in the high-performance training center, working to become like the NHL players who also trained there. He was the teammate who had a hand on your shoulder, asking what’s up. Just about everyone who encountered him, either as a rising young goalie in the tri-state area or a junior at Darien High School in the next town over from Stamford, said the same thing: He was the friend who checked in on you. Hayden took his own life on May 26, 2022, at age 16. It was the first event to promote The Shoulder Check, a project born out of the worst circumstance in the lives of so many of the people at Terry Conners Rink. Hayden Thorsen is the reason all those people packed into a hockey rink. “It showed how much Hayden meant to everyone there, the kids he played hockey with, his friends and family. His thoughts, as did those of just about everyone else in the rink that night, turned to the reason they were all there, to his friend. “It was just awesome,” said Cleaves, a soon-to-be high-school senior and future Dartmouth College student and hockey player. In the corner of the rink, NHLers he’d watched at Madison Square Garden, prepping for the game after his. In the stands among the sold-out hundreds, plenty of familiar faces and also ones he’d never seen before. There were the players on the ice with him - some longtime teammates, some he’d just met that night two weeks ago. ![]() Cooper Cleaves took a look around from the ice at Terry Conners Rink and marveled at what he saw.
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