'I see a lot of myself in her': Brons memorial scholarships grow, including a new one in Pittsburgh
"It's heartwarming for a family to know people care enough to do all this work."
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The Humboldt Broncos’ bus crash crossed the social-media feed of Pittsburgh’s Rebecca Kayda in April of 2018, and a week later, she read about the death of team athletic therapist Dayna Brons — the only female on the bus.
Kayda, too, was often the only woman on a bus full of hockey-playing men. She’s an athletic trainer at Pittsburgh’s Chatham University, and she felt an affinity with Brons.
“We’re around the same age, and I see a lot of myself in her,” says Kayda, who has launched a scholarship in Brons’s name, to be given to a Pittsburgh-area student studying athletic training. “Every time I hear a news story, I’m ‘Wow, I wish I had gotten to work with her.’
“That’s why I felt such a connection to it — that is me. I travel with our men’s team all year. We don’t have any female coaching staff or anything like that. It was a weird situation, to be able to see yourself in that and to think ‘that could have been anyone.’ ”
Sixteen people died as a result of that April 6 collision with a semi at a highway intersection. Kayda put a stick on her porch, and a pack like the one Brons used.
That Christmas, husband Tom gave her a present — he told her that he’d done a bunch of leg-work, contacted the people he needed to reach (including Dayna’s parents, Lyle and Carol Brons), and now she could take over the launching of a memorial scholarship.
It’s taken a few years, but the work has been done and they recently awarded their first scholarship, with a fundraising golf tournament happening soon to build a base for future years.
“I have a daughter myself now, and she’s only two, but I can’t even imagine what that family went through during that whole experience,” Kayda says. “I feel really humbled and honoured that they’re trusting me with this.”
Carol Brons notes with a laugh that they looked Kayda up when they first learned of the effort, to make sure everything was on the up-and-up. Now she has their full support.
Brons is grateful for Kayda’s work, and notes that it’s one of many scholarships in Dayna’s name awarded in the years since the crash. There’s currently eight, with a ninth in the works.
Those efforts run the gamut — local, like a scholarship awarded to a student in Lake Lenore, where Dayna went to school, plus provincial and national entities like the Saskatchewan Roughriders, Hockey Gives Blood, the Canadian Athletic Therapists Association.
“The dollar value, and the number of scholarships in her name, has grown substantially,” Brons said. “It’s heart-warming for a family to know people care enough to do all this work.
“When we started looking at doing scholarships in Dayna’s name, we were thinking locally. Then we had all these people coming forward, offering to do things like this. Last year, we calculated that well over $25,000 had already been given out in Dayna’s name. We feel pretty blessed.”
The scholarship Kayda launched is geared for athletic training students at nine different programs in the Pittsburgh area. This year, they ran it as a pilot project with a focus on Kayda’s school, and awarded the prize to Matt Calas, originally from Mississauga, who played hockey with Chatham the year of the crash and rode the bus with Kayda.
Their fundraising golf tournament goes July 9, and they’ve contacted the other eight schools in the area to let them know how students can apply going forward. They have a website, which includes a donation portal, at daynabronsscholarship.org.
“Most of the leg-work was setting up the non-profit corporation, making sure we have all our paperwork in a row,” Kayda said. “After it’s set up, it almost runs itself. You send out applications, people apply, you read them over and pick who you think it should go to that year.”
A variety of charitable initiatives, supported by various Broncos families, have sprung up in the wake of the crash.
Brons calls it “a little bit of healing.
“It means a lot,” she says. “We don’t expect it, obviously — we’re just carrying on with trying to heal ourselves, and do what we can to make changes in Canadian trucking. But promoting things Dayna obviously felt were important, with blood donations and things like that … we’re trying to keep the spotlight on those kinds of things, because those were important to her and to us.
“There was such an outpouring of financial support, and things like that (in the aftermath of the tragedy). These are some of the ways we can help to give back to people. We know people gave out of their hearts, when that happened, and we want to repay it in some way by helping support these types of things.”
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