Fans Unleash 81,000 Stuffed Animals in Beloved Hockey Tradition

The Hershey Bears of the American Hockey League hosted their annual Teddy Bear Toss over the weekend, and as it does year after year, it delivered.

The Bears, which serve as the Washington Capitals' AHL affiliate, have hosted the Teddy Bear Toss since 2001, asking fans to bring new stuffed animals to the game and toss them onto the ice after the team scores its first goal. The stuffed animals are donated to local charities, and seeing them cover the ice makes for a scene that never gets old.

The honor of setting the festivities off in Hershey this time around belonged to Louie Belpedio, who scored just 2:55 into the first period. It took all of about one full second before the first stuffed animal was chucked over the glass.

Funny enough, Belpedio has some experience with being on the wrong end of the Teddy Bear Toss game. He spent three seasons with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, and remembered the arena being filled with stuffed toys during the 2024 teddy bear toss goal.

"I've been here as a visitor and tried to get down the tunnel as quick as I could so I didn't have to see it, but just seeing how passionate everyone is and the amount of bears thrown, I've never been a part of anything like that, so it was pretty cool," he told the team's official website after the Bears beat the Rockford IceHogs 5-2 on Sunday.

The final tally of stuffed animals this time around was 81,796. While that seems like an unfathomable number of stuffed toys, it doesn't come close to last year's tally of 102,343, which set a new world record.

The drop in numbers from this year compared to last year snapped a streak that had run from 2018 to 2025, during which fans consecutively broke the world record.