Lehigh Joins Bone Marrow Match Program

While Saturday's Brown/White game will tell us important information about how Lehigh's football team will look in 2009, it's this Sunday - at Grace Hall on the Lehigh campus, from 12:30 PM to 3:30 PM - which could potentially provide life-saving information to someone with leukemia or another life-threatening disease.

The Lehigh football program is joining up with twenty-nine college football programs (including Villanova, Penn, Temple, UMass, and Lafayette, to name a few) across the nation in a bone marrow testing drive to add to the national registry of blood marrow donors.

It's important to note that all potential donors would be doing on Sunday is a cotton swab DNA test on Sunday - an easy process:

Lehigh assistant football coach Donnie Roberts has been heavily involved in the upcoming event, and is looking forward to a strong turnout on Sunday. “The idea is to get your name on the national registry as a potential donor. What the test is looking for are healthy adult stem cells. The actual process is a cotton swab DNA test. The person getting tested is not donating now, but rather to see if they are a potential donor if they match.”

He continued, “Cancer affects such a large number of people and this is a chance for us to give back to the community as well as make people aware of different types of blood and bone cancers such as leukemia. We’re hoping that Lehigh’s athletic teams as well as people outside of the University tell their friends and can bring as many people out as possible for the event.”

Bone marrow is desperately needed nationwide for genetic disorders, immune disorders, lymphoma and leukemia. The need for a large national registry is important since bone marrow matches are very rare - only 1 in 80,000 are actually matches for people with disorders. The more people in the registry, the better chance that someone might be a match.

If you're at Lehigh on Saturday, you'll enjoy the Brown/White game and learn a bit about Lehigh's football team in the fall. If you're at Lehigh on Sunday, you might just save someone's life.

[UPDATE: The Patriot League just issued a press release detailing spring practice the bone marrow testing drive taking place in five Patriot League schools:

In addition to the spring games, five Patriot League schools are among 30 football teams throughout the country to host bone marrow testing drives. Lafayette, Colgate, Lehigh, Bucknell and Holy Cross will all participate in the "Get in the Game. Save A Life" program, which is an effort to recruit 5,000 new people to the marrow registry. The program was initiated by Villanova and its Head Coach, Andy Talley, as part of the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP). It is a way for college faculty, staff and students and area residents to join the registry.
The date, time and location for the bone marrow testing drive at each of the Patriot League schools is listed below.
Lafayette - April 17th, 5-9 p.m. - Plaza outside of Kirby Sports Center in the Fisher Stadium Complex
Colgate - April 18th, 1:30-5 p.m. - Cotterell Court at the Reid Athletic Center
Lehigh - April 19th, 12:30-3:30 p.m. - Grace Hall
Bucknell - April 20th, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. - Davis Gym
Holy Cross - April 24th, 9:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m - Upper Kimball Dining Hall

So if you're not in the area, you can still participate!]

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results. In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago . Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth. Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled. Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season. The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League....

UMass 21, Lafayette 14, halftime

Are you watching this game? UMass had this game under control until about 3 minutes in the second quarter, and then got an interception, converted for a TD. Then the Leopards forced a fumble off the return, and then converted THAT for a TD, making this a game. It's on CN8. You really should be watching this.

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though? Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me? Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything. Everything. The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who...

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