Today, football coaches Brady Hoke and Mark Dantonio are going head to head in a heated competition – and The Ticker already knows who will win: homeless military veterans in northern Michigan.

Starting today, 12 head football coaches in The Big Ten are starring in public service announcements on the BTN Network to ask viewers to join them in an ongoing effort to end veteran homelessness. And that’s a major stroke of luck for Goodwill Industries of Northern Michigan.

See, Goodwill is nearing a crucial deadline in its efforts to open Patriot Place, a center to serve homeless veterans in Gaylord. The complex sits on a 30-acre site and is awaiting inspections. It will provide housing for 24 homeless veterans from across northern Michigan.

But the funding campaign remains about $250,000 short of its $1.8 million goal. So the recent revelation that Big Ten coaches were starting a donation competition to help homeless vets in the eight states with Big Ten teams was something of a godsend for Goodwill, says McCallum.

She says it’s been tough to raise money in Traverse City – home to the north’s Goodwill headquarters –for a center that’s more than an hour away. But the Gaylord location was chosen for good reason; its geographically central to northern Michigan and has easy access to I-75 to allow veterans to travel downstate for medical care. The nearest VA hospital is in Saginaw.

“We know that everyone is spread thin in this economy,” says Leah Bagdon McCallum, Goodwill’s Director of Fund Development. “But these are veterans, and many of them are from the Traverse City area.”

But what if, despite the extra push from the coaches, the funding goal is not met?

McCallum doesn’t even entertain the notion: “This is gonna happen. If we don’t make our goal, we’ll have monster debt, but it will happen.”

She estimates that there are about 600 homeless veterans in northern Michigan, including a handful of aged World War II vets. Vietnam era veterans make up the bulk of the homeless, but there are also some from the wars in Korea, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Local Love
For more information about the Goodwill Homeless Veterans project, contact McCallum at 231-995-7719.

Watch & Give
According to the BTN, there are somewhere around 19,000 homeless vets in Big 10 territory. The upcoming ads direct viewers to a website set up to handle this initiative, www.homelessvetsproject.org. There, viewers are asked to help make their state the leader to end vet homelessness by participating in the "Big 10 Letterwinners Challenge." For more info, contact Mike Fornear at 724-249-3707.