The Great Teddy Bear Toss (We Hope)

It's our annual Teddy Bear Toss on Saturday, November 14th - bring a teddy bear and toss it on the ice after the Bucs score their first goal against the Sioux City Musketeers. All teddy bears will be donated to local children's charities.

When posting this, we figured we'd do a little research on the Teddy Bear Toss as our interns were looking at as with looks of utter confusion as to where this hockey tradition started.

According to Wikipedia, the first Teddy Bear Toss was said to be in Kitchener, Ontario at Kitchener Rangers games - it's most popular in the Western Hockey League cities of Calgary, Alberta and Portland.

There also seems to be battle between these teams...

The 7,485 fans and supporters of the Portland Winter Hawkswere the first to break the WHL and CHL Teddy Bear Toss record in the 2006 - 2007 with an on-ice donation of 14,361 stuffed animals Saturday, November 25th, 2006. The teddy bears rained down from the stands when Kyle Bailey broke a scoreless tie exactly one minute into the overtime period. This record was eventually broken by the fans of the Calgary Hitmen less than a month later. On December 10th, 2006, when Ryan White scored a short-handed goal 14 minutes into the first period of their game against the Prince George Cougars. 15,540 teddy bears were thrown onto the ice by the 16,380 fans in attendance.

On November 24, 2007, the Portland Winterhawks briefly reclaimed the record with 20,372 stuffed animals coming from the 6,343 fans at the Memorial Coliseum on the 10th Annual Teddy Bear Toss Night. However, fans had failed to realise that the goal that initiated the toss had been disallowed. The record quickly fell again, as six nights later, fans of the Lethbridge Hurricanes set a new mark of 22,736 bears. The Hitmen once again reclaimed their record on December 2, as 26,919 bears hit the ice when Ian Duval scored against the Cougars.

Here are some videos of these epic teddy bear tosses:
Calgary Hitmen (2006) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcif2tNeq6o
Calgary Hitmen (2007) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql_2Fs2q7Q8