By Mike DeSanto
Sports Editor
When the St. Bonaventure University women’s basketball team takes on the La Salle Explorers on Feb. 7, it will be more than a game for some in attendance. The team’s annual Pink Game, which is done in conjunction with Olean General Hospital, supports the research and treatment of a variety of cancers.
The event continues to be part of several events the athletic department has to support worthy causes that affect the area, according to Seth Johnson, the director of marketing and promotions. Other events have included a Child Advocacy Family Night, a food pantry drive, CPS Family Night, various events for local elementary schools and Special Olympics.
“It’s important for us to show that we care, and not just when it comes to cancer-it’s important to us for all of the stuff that we do,” Johnson said. “It’s important for us, as the signature organization in this area, to be very conscious of making sure that we are supporting different organizations, different charities, anything we can do to help locally.”
The game has become a staple for the team and department in their outreach, but only recently became truly focused on local improvement, according to Johnson.
“When I arrived in this position, they had been doing a Pink Game. It had been a ‘Play for K,’ a national organization,” Johnson said. “I met with Coach [Jim] Crowley, who was our coach at the time, and I said ‘I don’t know how you feel about this, but I know that we think a lot of our fans who are donating and supporting this game would be more interested if we kept the donations local, rather than sending it off to a national organization where you don’t know where it goes.’”
Sticking with the purpose of the game, while still attempting to have an effect locally, Johnson reached out to Olean General Hospital and came up with a plan to help treatment of cancer going forward. The hospital’s contact, Karen Fohl, helped get the plan up and running.
Fohl, the hospital’s foundation president and vice-president for institutional advancement, said the hospital’s involvement the first year was a great start and helped tremendously.
“We put out notices through all the media that we were going to be honoring cancer-care survivors, and we thought that would be a wonderful way to engage people in our community,” Fohl said. “We provided a celebration for survivors and their families between 6 and 7 p.m. in the Hall of Fame Room. Everything was pink; we had pink cupcakes, pink lemonade and we were able to hear stories of many people, how long they had been cancer-free or about their journies.”
Fohl also said that so far, after two years of the partnership for the event, the university has raised $3,740, which helped pay for a new densitometer, which helps make mammogram images clearer for doctors looking for breast cancer.
This year, the proceeds of the event will go towards improvements to the hospital’s radiation medicine linear accelerator, which is used to help destroy cancer cells, according to Johnson. Fohl added that the radiation of the machine will be able to focus solely on the cells in the area targeted and should do no damage to any surrounding areas.
Johnson said pink T-shirts will be sold at the game for $10, with $5 going to the hospital, and will take $2 of every ticket sold for the game and donate that as well. Johnson and the department have goals for the event moving forward, aside from the continued donations.
“We want to continue to grow it. We would like to get to the point where we are able to involve more organizations, like the Pink Pumpkin program last year,” Johnson said. “Our goal in partnering with them is to bring more people in, more organizations in and to really make it more than just something that we put on. It’s a community effort; it’s not us putting on a game to put on a game like everyone else does. We want to do it a little bit differently than everyone else does.”
The game is scheduled to tip-off at 7 p.m.
desantmj13@bonaventure.edu
