Beginning this week and throughout next week, Redmond High School (RHS) sports teams and fans alike will be trading in their green-and-gold gear for pink.
Each fall, sports team will be holding a “Pink Out” event at an upcoming home game or meet in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which is in October. This will be the second year the school will hold Pink Out events, though last year was limited to a pink day during school and one RHS football game. Despite the smaller scale of the event, Andrea Snyder said it “took off like gangbusters” and they had a lot of people participate.
“Everybody embraced it,” she said. “Male, female, it doesn’t matter.”
RHS sports fans are encouraged to wear pink to show their support for the cause. This year’s Pink Out events will begin on Thursday with the girls home soccer game. Next week’s Pink Out games and meets will be Oct. 14 with girls volleyball and girls swimming, Oct. 15 with cross country and Oct. 16 with boys football and boys tennis. In addition, Oct. 16 will be a spirit day during the school day for students and staff to show off their pink gear.
“I think it’s great,” Snyder said about the school-wide participation.
To make things easier, the RHS Pink Ribbon Club, which focuses on raising breast cancer awareness, pre-sold pink T-shirts encouraging people to “Stang Up” for cancer — a nod to the RHS mascot as well as a play on the Entertainment Industry Foundation’s Stand Up to Cancer program.
Snyder, a career specialist at RHS and adviser for the Pink Ribbon Club, said for each T-shirt they sold, the supplier — Kimmel Athletic Supplies in Redmond — donated a portion of the sale to the Susan G. Komen foundation.
Snyder became involved in the club because she is a breast cancer survivor. She was diagnosed in 2008 when doctors detected it during her annual mammogram. She went through surgery and radiation and has been clean ever since and now she does what she can to raise awareness about the disease. Snyder, who had no family history of breast cancer, stressed the importance of early detection and said having a mammogram done annually can make a big difference.
Helping her raise awareness are the students in the Pink Ribbon Club.
Club officers and sophomores Sophie McFadden, Sarah Osborn, Lily Packer and Josie Mckillop all feel strongly about spreading awareness as they either have family members or family friends who have had breast cancer.
“It’s nice that there’s a passion among the group,” Snyder said.
Packer said it is important for people to get involved because not enough people realize how big of a deal cancer can be for an individual.
Osborn agreed, adding that the issue often escapes students’ minds.
McFadden said this can be because teens are typically not the demography to get diagnosed.
The Pink Ribbon Club has about 15-20 members. As breast cancer is a disease that mostly affects women, Snyder said the club is made up of mostly female students, but there are a few male members. She and the club officers said this could be because cancer doesn’t just affect the individual, it also affects their loved ones.
This being said, Osborn said each sports team — even the boys’ teams — has been excited for their Pink Out days and each sport will be showing their support in their own way.
Snyder credits the NFL for the support they are receiving from the boys’ teams. She said in the past few years, the league has been holding its own pink events in support of breast-cancer awareness and that has taken out some of the “I’m too cool” stigma that can come with boys and men wearing pink.
