Before a weekend full of signing autographs and posing for pictures at Bally Sports Redsfest presented by PNC, a collection of Reds players volunteered at Freestore Foodbank last Friday morning.

Prior to heading over to the Duke Energy Convention Center for the team’s annual fanfest, Andrew Abbott, Casey Legumina, TJ Hopkins, Connor Phillips, Christian Roa, Carson Spiers, Levi Stoudt and Bubba Thompson assembled food boxes for Freestore’s Power Pack program. The program allows kids around the city to take home a bag of food on Fridays to last them through the weekend until they can get their school meals on Monday. Packing these meals is, essentially, a nonstop process, with Freestore sending out approximately 30,000 Power Packs each month.

“It’s a good opportunity to give back to this Reds community and Cincinnati community,” Spiers said. “It’s all about helping a lot of children and families out. It’s an easy sell to come out here and do this.”

The service event took place Friday morning at Freestore’s new distribution center just west of downtown in Riverside. More than three times larger than its previous location in Norwood, it has already proven to be a game changer for all of Freestore’s operations. The facility opened on April 6, and the volunteer room was up and running just two days later.

“We had this finished quickly so that we could make the transition, and not have a large gap in volunteer services and the stuff we produce,” said Freestore’s Matt Resetarits, who coordinated Friday’s volunteer session. “Having this new building really expanded what we could do, how many volunteers we can handle at one time and how many different products we can throw out there at the same time. The warehouse space has been huge for us, because we’re cycling through food so fast. Now that we have storage to spare, we can continue to increase our purchasing and make sure that we have enough food for everybody.”

Of course, you can’t have a group of ballplayers together without throwing in some friendly competition. The Reds worked on the meal assembly alongside other volunteers, and to begin, the players raced against the three other groups to see who could package their first meal the fastest. While the professional athletes gave it their best effort, they came up just short against the other volunteers.

“You should have seen the light in their eyes when I told them that they would be racing against the Cincinnati Reds,” Resetarits said.

By the time the morning session was completed, 1,680 Power Packs were packed and placed on pallets, ready to be delivered to schools throughout the area.

While a few of the players volunteered for a similar service day last year, this was a new experience for most of them. And for all but Abbott, it was their first time seeing the new location. Abbott spent time volunteering at Freestore throughout the 2023 season and was at the facility again last month while in town for an autograph signing.

“It’s just about helping out where you can, trying to make the struggles of kids and other people a little easier to manage,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to give back and be there for people in a different way other than on a baseball field. And it’s an easy sell to get teammates to come along. I’m sure during this coming season, a bunch of guys will come out here and we’ll try to do our part to help people out.”

Freestore Foodbank is the largest emergency food and services provider to children and families in Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky and Southeast Indiana. The organization -- whose mission is to improve lives by eliminating hunger in partnership with the community and create a hunger-free, healthy and thriving community -- distributes 37.7 million meals annually to low-income individuals and families.

To volunteer, visit freestorefoodbank.org.