Sept. 27, 2017
With South Bend in our ?
Happy to donate our time today for a great cause!#WBCADayofService pic.twitter.com/jbVnR1hQj1
– NOTRE DAME WBB (@ndwbb) September 27, 2017
NOTRE DAME, Ind. – When the opportunity presents itself for the Notre Dame women’s basketball program to give back to the local South Bend community, they will certainly jump at the chance. So was the case on Wednesday, as the Irish participated in the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA) National Day of Service.
“Today was the WBCA initiative so everybody in the country was out trying to do community service,” Notre Dame Karen and Kevin Keyes Head Women’s Basketball Coach Muffet McGraw explained. “The girls picked the food bank. They love doing community service and giving back. They know how lucky and blessed they are in this community. The people support us so much so we wanted to do something for them.”
Coach McGraw and company showcased the power of participation of women’s basketball by spending an hour at the Northern Indiana Food Bank. The Irish hopped on the assembly line where they furiously assembled boxes of food, packaged them and crated them off, all for senior citizens in need.
“We have people in the front trying to speed things up, and people in the back trying to keep up the pace,” Kathryn Westbeld said. “We did the same exact thing here last year, so we kind of had a routine and knew what we wanted to do, knew how it worked.”
Last year over 118 teams performed service projects in conjunction with WBCA’s Day of Service.
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Josh Bates joined Fighting Irish Media as associate athletics communications director in July of 2017, serving as the women’s basketball and men’s golf contact. Bates earned both his bachelor’s (2011) and master’s (2014) degree in sports management from the University of Illinois. He also worked as a grad assistant at Illinois from 2012-14 and worked full-time at Tulane University from 2014-17.