“Often in college you’re consumed in your own little world. It’s good to get out of yourself and to gain a community perspective, which I really think that this event did,” said women’s lacrosse captain Mary Noonan ’09.
FOJ supports and raises awareness for pediatric brain tumor patients by matching them up with sports teams to serve as their mentors and support base. It was founded in 2004, when the Northwestern University Women’s Lacrosse team sponsored Jaclyn Murphy, then eleven years old, who had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. The Amherst men’s soccer team became the College’s first team to participate in the program when it adopted nine-year-old Michael Lanosa last October. Since then the football, field hockey and men’s lacrosse teams have each sponsored a child.
Those teams and others gathered in Coolidge Cage for a rally proceeding the race. Friends of Jaclyn founder Denis Murphy, Jaclyn’s father, spoke with an affecting tone of the hardships that a child with cancer goes through. “When a child has cancer, everything goes out the window. These children suffer; they have their worlds turned upside down. They have to deal with chemo and radiation and the side effects of it. As a parent, it’s torture having to watch a child go through that,” he said.
Senior Development Officer for Principal Gifts and brain tumor survivor John Pistel also provided inspiration at the rally. Quoting Teddy Roosevelt, he said that “The greatest adventure in life is to be shot at and missed.” He also noted, “There is no more amazing gift than someone reaching out when it’s not required. Bending to help a child is wonderful, even when you know that you will get no greater of a reward than a smile.”
After the rally, all participants filed outside to the athletic fields where they ran five kilometers on the cross-country race course or walked a one-mile circuit.
Amherst Soccer Coach Justin Serpone thought that the participation of so many student-athletes was remarkable. “The fact that today’s race was organized and executed by student-athletes gives me great hope that the ‘best and the brightest,’ the Amherst students, have a social awareness that will help lead our country far into the 21st century,” he said on race day. “I think that everyone that had the chance to be a part of today’s festivities will remember and cherish the positive effect that it has on the kids.”
At the awards ceremony, Jaclyn gave out medals to the top three male and female finishers and to the top ten overall. Medals also were given to the three brain cancer children in attendance as well as to their siblings, whom Murphy acknowledged are often overlooked.
Soccer player Kathy Nolan ’10, whose high school team had adopted a little boy with brain cancer, remarked afterwards, “These little kids are so wonderful; it’s just that they have a disease that’s so debilitating and horrible. It really makes you feel blessed, and lucky to know them.”
Since FOJ’s founding, forty-three sports teams across America have sponsored children with brain tumors, forming relationships with them beyond the playing field. The men’s soccer team, for example, organized a soccer clinic for Michael’s whole school last April and shared pizza with him and his friends afterwards.
Athletic Director Suzanne Coffey compared the effects of the FOJ organization to a pebble thrown into a pond. “The pebble creates a ripple effect that keeps going for years and years: Where else? Who else can I help? Where else can I make a difference?” In her speech at the rally, Coffey described how after Saturday’s win, the football team tossed its adopted child into the air in trumph. “Joey Widman is an amazing young child who has endured two 10 hour brain operations in the last year,” football Coach Edward Mills said of his team’s adoptee. “He is a Lord Jeff now - and we look forward to helping Joey in his fight to defeat his tumor.”
In that spirit, the Amherst College men’s lacrosse team finalized their adoption of a child named Justin after the race. When asked about his new team, Justin said, “I’m very excited. They’re going to make the NCAA Championship game, and they’re going to win it. I know it.”