DUBOIS, Pa. – The DuBois and Brockway girls basketball teams held their 12th annual Pink Game Saturday and wound up donating $18,369.05 to the Hahne Cancer Center in DuBois.
“We do a lot of donations from both communities,” Michelle Snyder from DuBois, one of the chairs of this year’s game committee, said prior to the game. “We send out about 200 letters to local businesses to see what they can donate. Some of those are monetary donations, some of them are the prizes we are raffling off today. We sell raffle tickets. All the girls and boys players sold raffle tickets. We do activities within the school like jean weeks for the teachers (where teachers donate money in order to wear jeans) and different things to continue to raise as much money as we can.”
Prior to Saturday’s donation, the event had raised $157,000 in 11 years.
“Every single day it amazes me,” Snyder said.
Sue Olsokovsky of Brockway, another of the event’s chairs, echoed those sentiments.
“It’s crazy to think about how much money our businesses have given, our kids have raised, and how we have come together,” Olsokovsky said.
According to Snyder, every single dollar raised through the event goes to help patients at Hahne.
“It could be helping them pay bills when they are on treatment and can’t work,” Snyder said. “They have purchased vans where they go to the people’s homes and transport patients for treatment. It’s nice that at least it helps make their life a little bit easier while they are going through something so awful.”
According to Olsokovsky the two communities coming together for the event is one of the reasons it is such a great success.
“When we decided to do this, we wanted to join both communities together and work together for a good cause and help support Hahne and all of our local patients,” Olsokovsky said.
The impetus for the event came from other schools doing the same thing,” Olsokovsky said.
“We started by going to a Pink Game at another school and said we think we can do this,” Olsokovsky said. “Let’s pair up with DuBois and alternate every year. It just snowballed.
While the game switches every year between the two schools, the two schools equally share the work every year, according to Olsokovsky.
“It is pretty evenly split,” Olsokovsky said.
Watch the full interview with Olsokovsky and Snyder.
The monetary donation wasn’t the only part of the equation, as players from both teams honored those fighting cancer, those who have fought it, and those who have lost the fight to it in a pregame ceremony.
Watch the ceremony
As for the game itself, Brockway won 37-27.
