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Fairfield and Pekin to fundraise for ‘Everybody vs. Cancer’ Thursday
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FAIRFIELD – The Trojan Booster Club will hold its annual “Everybody vs. Cancer” event on Thursday, Jan. 15 to raise money for cancer research, local cancer patients and the American Cancer Society.
The event will be held during Fairfield’s girls and boys basketball doubleheader against Pekin at Fairfield High School. Corporate sponsors have paid for all basketball players for both Fairfield and Pekin to receive rally towels and T-shirts that say “Together We Fight.” The junior varsity squads will kick off the contests at 4:45 p.m., with the JV girls at the high school and the JV boys at the Cambridge SportsPlex. The varsity girls will follow around 6:15 p.m. at the high school, and the varsity boys will play the nightcap.
Nancy Diers of the Trojan Booster Club said this event, also known as “Trojans vs. Cancer,” was normally held later in the basketball season against a random opponent. However, when the booster club saw that the Trojans would host the Pekin Panthers on Jan. 15, they thought it would be a great opportunity to involve a neighboring school in the fundraiser.
FHS Student Council will hold a soup supper that night, while the booster club puts on a dessert auction in the adjacent hallway. A portion of the gate receipts from those games will be donated toward the cause, and corporate sponsors will present a check for $500 to Fairfield Activities Director Jeff Courtright. Other opportunities for the crowd to get involved include a duck toss, where patrons can purchase a rubber duck for $1 that they throw toward center court, and the person who gets the closest to the center wins a prize. The booster club will pass around a 54-second bucket through the stands for donations.
For the past decade or so, the event has raised a little over $40,000. Diers said many people help make it a success, not just all the booster club members who help with the activities that night and by donating desserts, but also members of the Student Council and FHS band, along with Mark Myers helping coordinate the T-shirts with Pekin, and working with corporate sponsor Community 1st Credit Union.
Diers said she continues helping with this event every year because so many people she knows have been touched by cancer, including her father who passed away from melanoma, and her sister who is now cancer-free.
“The more we can raise money for research, the better our future generations will be,” she said.
The corporate sponsors of the T-shirts and towels for the players are Iowa State Bank, Weaton Capital, Farm Bureau Financial Services, and Agri-Industrial Plastics. Hy-Vee is donating cake for the dessert auction.
Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com
