April 14, 2015

Football Hosting 6th Annual Be The Match Bone Marrow Donor Drive on April 28

BETHLEHEM, Pa. --- The Moravian College football team will host its 6th Annual Be The Match Bone Marrow Donor Registration Drive on Tuesday, April 28 from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. in Johnston Hall.

For the sixth straight year, the Moravian football squad has joined Villanova University Head Football Coach Andy Talley and Be The Match^® to help save lives by recruiting potential marrow donors. This year more than 30 football teams from colleges and universities across the nation are participating in the program to recruit 5,000 new registry members.

Every three minutes someone is diagnosed with a life-threatening blood cancer. More than 14,000 patients don't have a matching marrow donor within their family. They depend on Be The Match to help find someone to give them hope for a cure.

The Get in the Game. Save A Life. Program raises awareness of this need and invites students, faculty, staff and the community to join the Be The Match Registry. To sign up as a committed registry member, people need to meet age and health guidelines and be willing to donate to any patient in need. Registration involves completing a health history form and giving a swab of cheek cells. Those of diverse racial or ethnic heritage are especially needed. Donors and patients who share the same ancestry are mostly likely to match.

"We are excited to continue our partnership with the Be The Match Foundation," stated Head Football Coach Jeff Pukszyn. "We have had great success over the past few years and we're looking forward to another large turnout. The Get in the Game, Save a Life program is a great opportunity to positively affect people's lives and make an impact that reaches far beyond the football field."

This is a ten-minute process that includes filling out a medical history form and a painless cotton swabbing of the cheek. Moravian is looking for people from every background so more patients have a chance for a cure.

In 2010, Moravian registered 457 for the program including Stephanie Pezzello '13, a member Moravian's field hockey team. In June 2011, Pezzello was found to be a perfect match an 11-year-old with leukemia, and she had the surgery to make the donation shortly after that.

"I was so surprised to hear that I was a potential match, let alone an exact match," Pezzello explained in 2011. "When I got the final word that I was an exact match, there was no question, I had to do it. I would have never gotten this opportunity if it weren't for the football team holding the Be The Match donor registry drive at school."

Moravian has three other students that have been matched and gone through the procedure to donate bone marrow with senior Rachel Knecht (Nazareth, Pa.), a former cheerleader, and junior Matt Adams (Easton, Pa.) each registering in 2012. Theresa Civitella '13 registered in 2011 and was notified she was a donor match in 2013 before going through the procedure.

"I would tell people that if you are on the fence about signing up, and I was one of them at first, it is something you should do because you have the potential to give someone a second chance at life," Knecht said last year. "The process you go through as a donor can't be any worse than the pain and suffering the person you are donating too has been going through."

The football program registered another 207 people in 2011 and with the 205 in 2012, 168 during the 2013 registration and another 125 people last April, Moravian has accounted for a total of 1,162 registrations in five years.

For more information, contact assistant football coach Chris Leavenworth at 610-625-7955 or by email at leavenworthc@moravian.edu.