The BG football team gathered together Wednesday to fight a different opponent with its fourth annual bone marrow drive.
The team helped sign up people at the Union as part of the “Get in the Game, Save a Life” program, sponsored by the “Be the Match” organization.
They were signing people up to donate bone marrow to help people on the donor list become healthy again. Players came out in full force Wednesday to support their cause and helped sign up 315 new members to the National Marrow Donor Registry.
The program started at Villanova University, where BG coach Dave Clawson was the offensive coordinator from 1996-98.
“It’s something that our team really jumped on board with,” Clawson said. “Bowling Green football has probably been responsible for close to 1,200 people registering for the national bone marrow drive.”
Other participating universities include Harvard, Brown University, the University of Miami, Old Dominion University, San Jose State University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the University of Virginia and Yale.
Team members were standing and talking with students in the student union from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday.
“Not a lot of schools are engaged with their students like we do,” said sophomore Victor Osborne, a defensive back. “We just want everyone to come out and do this.”
Last year the football team registered 288 people in 2012 and were able to surpass their goal of 300 by the end of the day.
“A lot of people need this,” said junior Aaron Foster, a defensive back. “We’re trying to get as many people out to find as many matches as we can.”
According to the National Marrow Donor Program, patients on the waiting list are looking for donors between the age of 18 and 44 because the cells from younger people are more successful for transplants.
“The odds of finding a bone marrow donor are very, very small,” Clawson said. “We thought this would be a good cause for us to adopt and try to add numbers to that, and who knows? We might save someone’s life of a family member of a football player or anybody at Bowling Green.”
Clawson and the team were positive the entire day and look to carry that same energy to next year’s drive.
“[It’s] something they really get involved with and they get active and they enjoy doing it,” Clawson said. “I think when the day is over, they feel really good about it. They’ve done something very positive, not just for the community, but for really, the whole national bone marrow program.”
