October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and it also falls in the middle of The Hazelwood West boy’s soccer season which means it’s time to bring out the annual ‘Kicks for Cancer’ soccer game. During which, awareness and donations are made to help local families that are fighting thi
s disease. The Wildcats played The Ritenour Huskies on October 23 on our home field under the lights.
A month ago, this game wasn’t even supposed to happen but Boston Hammond, Kaden Pridemore, and myself all worked together and did everything we possibly could so this game could be a thing. When we realized nobody else was setting anything up for the game we decided we needed to do something ourselves. After we were told no multiple times, we still did everything we could because we wanted this game to happen. These games have been a significant part of our high school career and we didn’t want to miss out on it during our senior year.
Once we got cleared to start working on it the first thing we started was designing the shirts. Once we got the design down there were a lot of obstacles we faced before we could officially get them made. Our first roadblock was getting our plan approved by Chappelle. Next was getting the financial side sorted out, without that we couldn’t buy the shirts to sell. After we got all of that sorted out the hard part started. Once we figured all the financial stuff out we had to digitalize the design, taking it from paper to the computer. After we sent over various designs with many different colors we finally decided on the final design of the shirts. We finally sent the final design to Vinyl Fun and they created a sample T-Shirt for us. The samples turned out great, so we decided to mass-produce them. We created upwards of 100 shirts.
Finally, after a month of work, we had the shirts in hand and ready to be handed out. This is where we ran into our final and most stressful problem, delivering the shirts. First, we went to the lovely office assistant, Mrs. Vaughn. Vaughn was able to supply us with everyone’s classes and the periods they would be in them. After sacrificing three class periods and running all around the school while carrying a box of 100 shirts we were finally able to say we handed out every last one of the shirts everyone ordered.
Finally, we could focus on the actual game against Ritenour. We had all of the yearbook crew out and other photographers out to document the entire game for us. With a great turnout of supporters and a less great final score, we were satisfied at the end of the night. If you would like to see some of the public photos of the game @mike_.pix on Instagram has some amazing pictures posted of the game.
This game meant so much to us and even more to the people whose families have been affected by cancer. We couldn’t have done this game and had such a great outcome without Mrs. Chappelle, Dr. Manker, Vinyl Fun, Mrs. Smith, Ms. Day, and Mrs. Vaughn. Words cannot describe our appreciation for the people who contributed to this project. Thank you all for supporting and following through with our plan to have the 2023 season Kicks for Cancer game.
