November 20, 2009
Kade Hannan holds on to his new basketball in the company of (left to right) his father Kyle, sister Margo, Joe Antonelli, Edward Lawson, M.D., and Mike Berger, Terrapin Sports Marketing.
Some of the 25,000 Flacco bobbleheads in production.
To the cheers of the crowd at the University of Maryland men’s Terps game against Charleston Southern, November 13, 6-year-old Kade Hannan took center court at half time to accept a basketball signed by Head Coach Gary Williams. The bespectacled little Marylander and his family were guests of Carroll Independent Fuel and Terrapin Sports Marketing for an evening of basketball in his and Hopkins Children’s honor. Diagnosed in utero with a congenital heart condition, Kade spent the first four months of life in Hopkins Children’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). By the time he was 4, he had had four open heart surgeries at Hopkins.
That November day, Kade and his parents, Angie and Kyle, and sister, Margo, had joined Johns Hopkins’ director of pediatric neonatology and vice chair of its Department of Pediatrics, Edward Lawson, and Carroll Fuel executives in the company’s Sky Box at the Comcast Center in College Park, Md. At half-time, Lawson spoke on-air about Hopkins Children’s with sportscaster Johnny Holiday, the official “radio voice” of the Maryland Terrapins.
In a program organized by Carroll Fuel’s Joe Antonelli, BP station owner Doug Miller and Terrapin Sports executive Mike Berger, the Hannans and Lawson were invited to the game to spotlight the medical care and hope that Hopkins Children’s provides. Over the years, Carroll Fuel, in association with Amoco and BP, has helped raise approximately $1.5 million for Hopkins Children’s, with golf tournaments, auctions and the sale of Maryland Preakness tickets. To supplement its donation to the hospital this year, Carroll sold Baltimore Raven quarterback Joe Flacco bobbleheads. “We had them made in China,” says Antonelli, “and worried, when we saw the factory photos of Flacco’s face being hand-painted on all those things, that we wouldn’t be able to sell all 25,000 of them. But we did, in three weeks. Hopkins Children’s Center is a great cause. We love it. And it’s right in our own backyard.”
Read Kade’s story.