MOSCOW, Idaho – University of Idaho football is taking steps to get better on the field this spring, but the Vandals aren't stopping there. Wednesday, April 20 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Idaho football will host a bone marrow registry drive at the Teaching and Learning Center lounge 143 on the Idaho Campus in Moscow.
The bone marrow registry drive is in coordination with the Andy Talley Bone Marrow Foundation and the Be The Match Bone Marrow Registry. Talley, the former head coach at Villanova, has encouraged football teams around the college landscape to encourage their campuses to start a Be The Match Registry.
"I connected with the Andy Talley Bone Marrow Foundation going back to the spring of 2017," Head Coach
Jason Eck said. "I think it's a really unique opportunity for our players to make a difference in the world by adding people to the national registry of bone marrow donors through Be the Match. I've seen first-hand at my previous school we had about eight donations where people's lives were saved."
Any member of the community age 18 to 40 is encouraged to participate in the drive. It will take just five minutes to complete.
Be The Match will gather demographic information and then do a cheek swab to check your tissue type. If you are matched with a patient, you will be contacted to complete either a life-saving stem cell donation or possibly a bone marrow donation.
"The best candidates to be donors are young people and they're always trying to increase the diversity of the registry," Eck said. "Those are two great, readily available groups that we have on our campus so we hope that we can have a heck of a turn out on our drive on April 20th. We want our players to use the power that they have in the community as student-athletes to make a difference in the world."
Bone marrow treatments are most often used to help leukemia patients but can be used to treat many immune diseases and cancers.
The Be The Match Registry is the world's largest hematopoietic cell registry, listing more than 22 million individuals.
