Football Team Looks for the Match

Football Team Looks for  the Match

The Dickinson College football team hosted “Be The Match,” a bone marrow donation registry, on campus to help students, faculty and members of the Carlisle community join the registry.  The team set up stations in the HUB Social Hall to walk potential marrow donors through the registry process.

The registry, which is “the connection between patients searching for a cure and life-saving bone marrow donors,” is “the largest and most diverse donor registry in the world,” according to their website.  By joining the registry, students, faculty and Carlilians were adding themselves to the pool of possible matches available to those who are in need of bone marrow donations.  Donors are kept on the registry until their 61st birthday.

The football team, as the hosts, organized the entire event as they have in the past.  At one station was Tucker Slade ’20, who worked a shift at the registry from 11 a.m to 2:30 p.m.  He explained that, “every football player was assigned a station today and we really want a lot of team involvement so we have people working every station and we have people out front trying to bring in large crowds.”

Slade said that he “was among the first people to [register] this morning… [the football team] had a meeting last Friday and the coaches really wanted us to get involved with it…I figured I could do my part and get swabbed.”

One football player, Thomas Nocka ’19, was nearly a match earlier last semester.  “I got this email saying ‘You could be a potential match, please fill out this form and respond,’” he said. “So I filled out a bunch of forms and sent them back in an email and I got contacted a week later saying ‘You’re still a potential match for this person’…and then they said that if they didn’t respond within a week, [I] wasn’t a match, and I never got a response.  But I was close, I think.”

The importance of saving those in need of marrow donations was a common theme amongst both football players and potential donors.  As Nocka said, “It’s been our drive for five to eight years now…I think every football player wants to do it ’cause it’s easy, and you [might] save a life…”

Kevin Ssonko ’20, a new member of the registry, commented that “to know that I can [be] someone who can give someone else the opportunity to live a little bit longer, be with their family, that’s something that you can’t put a price tag on and it’s something that I always try to be aware of, so that’s why I’m here, being the match.”

James Turner ’20 commented on how the need of others takes precedent over any anxiety or fears that he might have about the possibility of donating.  “The whole process might be a little nerve wracking,” he explained, “but if you think about the whole picture it’s [for] someone who needs a bone marrow transplant and there is no one else. You put that over a scary procedure.”

Those interested in becoming a match should visit Be The Match’s website at bethematch.org.