The Hayes High School girls basketball team poses together wearing Ella’s Fight Club shirts, which feature a green ribbon for cancer awareness. The team will host a Green Ribbon Night during the JV and varsity games today to raise awareness about various forms of the disease.
Courtesy photo | Erin Margraf
The Hayes High School girls basketball teams will host a Green Ribbon Night during their games today to raise awareness about various forms of cancer.
The event will take place at Hayes High School as the junior varsity and varsity teams face off against the teams from Westerville South High School. The JV game begins at 5:30 p.m. today, and the varsity game is set to tip at 7 p.m.
Hayes girls basketball coach Erin Margraf said the event is being held to “inform and educate others about leukemia, lymphoma, and other types of cancers.”
“All of us know someone who has been affected by cancer or who is currently battling this disease,” Margraf said. “As a program, we want to raise awareness and encourage others to join our fight.”
Margraf said this is the first time the event will be held at Hayes, and the plan is for it to become an annual event.
“We hope to raise awareness of blood cancers and other childhood cancers and encourage our fans to find ways to donate and support cancer research,” Margraf said.
This is the second cancer-related event to be held at the school in the last month. On Jan. 12, Hayes High School senior Natalie Hohman organized a charity event to raise money for Margraf’s daughter, Ella, a local student who was diagnosed with cancer last year.
Hohman’s event was a volleyball tournament in which teams consisting of volleyball players from the boys and girls high school teams took on staff and teachers from across the district. Entry fees, donations, and a bake sale at the event generated $1,700 for Ella’s Fight Club, a local group organized to support the Margraf family.
Margraf said after the event that she was impressed with Hohman’s leadership during the event, adding Hohman organized the event purely “out of kindness” since she didn’t really know the Margrafs apart from a few interactions. Hohman said after the event that she organized it because many people in her family have had cancer, and she wanted to help Ella and her family.
More information about the Hayes girls basketball team can be found at https://www.dcs.k12.oh.us/hayes.
