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....

Merrimack at Lehigh Game Breakdown and Fearless Prediction, 9/28/2019

It's what we do every week: copiously go over the opposing game notes and analyze the upcoming game matchup. I'm starting to call these the "football nerd" previews because it feels like the audience for these detailed team breakdowns are other football nerds like myself. For Lehigh fans, there is no greater need for a "football nerd"-level breakdown of an opponent than Merrimack. Few opponents have been as big as an unknown to Mountain Hawk fans as the school that formed right after World War II in North Andover, Massachusetts. Helping that sense of mystery is that the Merrimack Athletics' website offers no football game notes, and when you click on the link called "Weekly Two-Deep", you get a two-deep from 2018. Merrimack, until recently a member of the Northeast-10 conference in Division II, announced they are going to join the NEC as a full Division I member in time for the 2023-2024 season. “The College’s 2011 strategic ...

Fifteen Guys Who Might be Lehigh's Next Football Coach (and Five More)

If you've been following my Twitter account, you might have caught some "possibilities" as Lehigh's next head football coach like Lou Holtz, Brett Favre and Bo Pelini . The chance that any of those three guys actually are offered and accept the Lehigh head coaching position are somewhere between zero and zero. (The full list of my Twitter "possibilities" are all on this thread on the Lehigh Sports Forum .) However the actual Lehigh head football coaching search is well underway, with real names and real possibilities. I've come up with a list of fifteen possible names, some which I've heard whispered as candidates, others which might be good fits at Lehigh for a variety of reasons. UPDATE: I have found five more names of possible head coaches that I am adding to this list below. Who are the twenty people? Here they are, in alphabetical order.

Lehigh Football Nation

Search This Blog