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The Hockey Foundation started a few years before it had a name. Here's how a kid from Long Island ended up coaching hockey in northeastern China, then in the Himalayas, then naming a charity after a cement dealer's sign.
Street hockey & a bad back
Adam Sherlip was born in Brooklyn & raised on Long Island, where the neighborhood kids played curb-to-curb street hockey with a tennis ball & gym-class sticks (on a "rink" they painted on the road). He got on the ice at 11 and by 15 was helping his high school team win the county championship.
Just before his 17th birthday, a back injury ended any plan of playing at the top level. He stayed off the ice for close to five years, which turned out to be long enough to realize how much he missed it.
The poster
In May 2006, while studying marketing in college, Adam spotted a flyer for an internship with the New York Islanders, his team growing up. He ripped it off the wall. In his words: "I didn't want anyone to compete." That September he started in the Islanders' corporate partnerships department.
Project Hope: coaching in China with Angela Ruggiero
As the internship wound down, US Olympian Angela Ruggiero asked Adam to help her with Project Hope. Angela ran the program for the Islanders. Named for team owner Charles B. Wang, it supported hockey in schools across Heilongjiang Province in northeastern China: outdoor rinks, gear & coaching.
First they hosted a group of kids from China in New York for an international youth tournament. Then, in January 2007, Adam & Angela spent about two weeks in Heilongjiang, visiting 8 Project Hope schools in & around Harbin, Qiqihar & Jiamusi.
The rinks had become the center of their communities. The kids skated more than five days a week, and at some schools hockey was a class worth school credit. Plenty of them had come back from winter break just to get on the ice with the visitors. Adam & Angela ran skating & puck-handling drills, held tryouts for scholarships to study in the US (with an English interview on top of the hockey) and reminded everyone, the adults standing around the boards included, that hockey is supposed to be fun.
When Adam saw some of the same kids a year later, the difference one structured clinic had made was obvious. So was something else:
"No matter what country you are from, no matter the environment you grew up in, the only language that is spoken on the ice is of hockey."
Dream job, wrong goal
The Islanders hired Adam full-time as their amateur hockey development coordinator. Over two years (2006-2008) he grew youth hockey on Long Island and ran the Project Hope exchange, with tournaments & trips between Long Island & Heilongjiang. He also held 4 positions, had 5 business cards & sat at 9 different desks.
It was the job he'd wanted since he was a kid. But at the end of every project, the goal was selling tickets, and he wanted to do more with the game than that.
The email
In late 2008, after both had left the Islanders, Angela sent Adam an email about hockey at SECMOL (the Students' Educational & Cultural Movement of Ladakh), a school high in the Indian Himalayas. He had to look up where Ladakh was. What he found was a progressive school that took in kids from every background, ran on solar power & built its own ice rink every winter.
That December he started a blog, The Hockey Volunteer, to raise the money to get there. (Angela chipped in a game-used stick from the 2006 Olympics to auction off.) In January 2009 he showed up in Ladakh without a sleeping bag, but with a bag of hockey gear to donate.
Ladakh, and a name
The plan was a month. Adam extended the trip three times. He lived & coached at SECMOL (two practices a day, plus classroom time on what the game teaches off the ice), then coached India's first men's national team at its first international tournament, the 2009 IIHF Challenge Cup of Asia in Abu Dhabi.
Traveling around India after that season, he started scribbling names for the charity he wanted to build. Somewhere around attempt number 75, on a bus in southern India, they passed a cement dealer with the word "Foundation" on its sign. The Hockey Foundation. The name was free, so was hockeyfoundation.org, and THF was incorporated in New York in January 2010.
What came next
From 2011 to 2018 THF ran programs in India every season. Adam coached India's men's national team through 2015, including India's first-ever international win (2012), and THF set a Guinness World Record for the highest-altitude game of ice hockey (2018). It started in China, though, and the work never stayed in one country.