We can’t thank everyone enough for your continued support making our 4th Annual 5K Road Race & Walk a complete success raising over $45,000. Despite the rain we are so pleased to say we had 450 registered participants with 230 runners and 220 walkers. Directly following the race we randomly select 1 boy and 1 girl to each win a $500 Scholarship. Toni Spellman a 9th grader from Blackstone, Ma and Jacob Jackson a senior from Pascoag, RI were our 2016 Cory Edward Gaudet Memorial Scholarship winners. In addition, we will be giving away a 3rd scholarship at the Blackstone Millville Regional High school senior awards night coming up June 2. As many of you are learning through the years, this is a fundraising event where teams & individuals start months prior to the event asking for sponsors, pledges and hosting their own fundraising events. We had 18 fundraising teams with our top 3 teams & individuals receiving fundraising awards. The top 3 fundraising teams are as follows: 1st place team Kicking Asphalt with team captain Amy McMahon raising $7,108, 2nd place team Angel’s Among Us with co captains Mary Desrochers & Denice Lubash raising $5,641 and 3rd place Team Depot with captain Tanya Scott raising $4,234. Our top 3 fundraising individuals 1st place Amy McMahon $5,278, 2nd Place Tanya Scott $2,904 and 3rd Place Tracy Bak $1,565. I could not be more proud of the fundraising efforts of all the teams this year. I would like to thank a new team Ignite Your Life Nutrition with team co captains Alex & Tiffany Clute, they had a team of almost 50 people. I would also like to give a shout out to our son Nicholas who in addition to his full time job takes care of our graphic design and website design work. He and his girlfriend Mikayla also headed up a fundraising team Easier Said than Run raising over $2,000. Mikayla thank you for working so hard, reaching out to businesses and getting most all of our raffle items for this year’s event. Our daughter Nicole had her own fundraising team Never Give Up raising $680. This year we had two very special teams taking part, Fighting for Emma B and Rhythm’s Journey. Our brave warrior Emma a beautiful 14 yr old and her family attended our event. Rhythm is a little boy battling DIPG from Hawaii with local ties. His grandmother, aunts, uncles & cousins joined our event as well. Other mentions Team Got Your Bak team captain Tracy Bak raising just over $3,000 and team Miles for Smiles co captains Jason & Tina Carroll raising just under $3,000. The support we receive from local and even non local businesses is so amazing and needed so very much. Whether they are supporting a team, an individual or just sponsoring the event their involvement makes it possible to do what we do. We also have businesses who donate their time, product and or service to help make our event a success and for that we would like to say thank you. We had 55 business sponsors this year but would like to say a special thank you to G-Form for being our corporate sponsor and covering the cost of our 5K event t-shirts.
To see the race times you can visit www.coolrunning.com and click recent results, May 1st and find Cory’s Crusaders Annual 5K
Top 3 women over all: Lauren Dequire, Haley Carrol and Lori Cunningham, Top 3 men over all: Christopher Tringali, Nathan Carroll and Cole Bolduc. Girls 18 & under: Haley Carrol, Megan DeWolfe and Abby Smith. Boys 18 & Under: same as overall seen above, Women’s 19-29 Lauren Dequire, Melissa Branchaud and Rebecca Carroll. Men’s 19-29 Peter Archetto, Isaac Barros and Max Nolan. Women’s 30 and over Lori Cunningham, Karen Quitzau and Amy Verreault. Men’s 30 & over Philip Amylon, Brandon Rockwell and Chris Baker.
Special mentions: The band Anger Management and Chuck Ladouceur (sound guy) for donating their time and talent providing excellent entertainment during the day’s event. Alexandra Dutremble for singing our national anthem so beautifully. Volunteers from the Blackstone Lion’s Club who helped cook throughout the day. Blackstone Valley Rental for providing us with the tent, tables & chairs. Consigli for providing the much needed portable toilets and PJ’s for coming down with their food truck and donating a percentage of the days sales to Cory’s Crusaders. Thank you to our road race volunteers and the Blackstone Police Department for providing detail for this event and keeping our runners and pedestrians safe.