I know I speak for a lot of fans when I say that most of us can trace our love of sports and/or the Kings back to being a kid. For me personally, I remember the first time my dad would take me to a game fondly. We were only able to go once a year or so but it was always a treat. 

For some kids, even once a year sounds like a crazy dream. I was fortunate to have gotten those experiences through my parents and it’d be nice to be able to provide that same experience for another child. 

I’ve long admired Blazers Edge for their annual tradition of donating tickets to foster children. They’ve managed to send thousands of local Portland children to Trail Blazers games and have been doing it for a decade. This year alone, they managed to send 2000 kids from all over the Pacific Northwest to a game. That’s pretty incredible, especially for those kids who got to see what looks like it was a pretty thrilling overtime victory. 

We want to do the same, and as such we’ve partnered with the Kings and the Ticket to Dream Foundation this year to start what will hopefully be our own annual tradition. There are over 6,000 foster children in Sacramento alone, and we want to give them a chance to check out the new Golden 1 Center and see the Kings in action for what could be the first time for many of them.

 The game we’ve chosen is the April 11^th season finale against the Phoenix Suns. It’s also the Kings 6^th Man celebration, with free t-shirts and lots of giveaways for fans. It should be a fun game and an amazing experience for these kids. 

The Kings will also be matching each and every ticket we sell with another ticket, so if you donate for one ticket, you’re essentially making two kids very happy. There are three ticket price ranges, $15 and $25 for the upper level and $40 for the lower level. 

If we can sell just 250 tickets, that’s 500 kids who get to attend their first Kings game and who knows, maybe some of those kids are future StR commenters (if StR hasn’t imploded by 2035 through the sheer weight of GIFs in the comments). 

The link to donate tickets is here. There are no additional Ticketmaster fees and the price you see is the price you get. All tickets purchased through this link will automatically be donated to the Ticket to Dream Foundation and matched by the Kings. This is only our first year doing this but I’d like to hopefully make this something we can do every year. 

So let’s spread the word and get as many kids to this game as possible. After all, the community aspect of the team is one of the many reasons why we fought so hard in recent times to keep them here, and now that they’ve stayed, we have the chance to set up a new generation of Kings fans who can enjoy this team and this sport for decades to come. 

To find out more about the Ticket to Dream Foundation, visit www.tickettodream.org.

UPDATE March 31st, 2017:

You guys are amazing. Even with a short notice, we were hoping to sell 250 tickets, meaning 500 kids get to go to a Kings game. It didn’t even take 24 hours for us to sell over 300, blowing past our goal!

With so few games and tickets remaining this season, the Kings and the Ticket to Dream Foundation have asked us to keep it going and they’ll match everything over the original 250 up to 1,000 between the final games with any overage going towards one or two November games next season!  That’s a lot of happy kids.

If we can, let’s try to hit that 1,000 goal before the end of the season. Then we’ll have all offseason to dream up (pun intended) cool ways to get even more kids to the games next year.

Way to go Sacramento!

UPDATE April 4th, 2017:

You guys are rock stars. We’re now at 572 tickets sold, or 1,144 kids going to Kings games.