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Main >> News Listing >> August 2004 >> Article ID 6115
 Softball tournament means $50,000 to family facing cancer | Type: Internet Article |
| | Softball tournament means $50,000 to family facing cancer | Aug 11, 2004 | by Ken McCarthy
Summary:
Cortazzo is also working to arrange a meeting between Poust and his hero, Mario Lemieux, continuing a tradition started last year when recipient Kayla Sansone, 13, was able to meet pop star Christina Aguilera.
Read on for the whole article. |
You could argue that it was the Seven Fields North team that won the fifth annual Cranberry Cup charity softball tournament this past weekend.
And you'd be right.
But the real winner was Alex Poust.
Poust, 15, of Cranberry, has beaten brain cancer twice and is now waiting for a bone marrow transplant to help battle a rare form of leukemia called myelodysplastic syndrome.
Cathy Cortazzo, tournament coordinator, estimated this year's event would raise about $50,000 for Poust. It will be used to pay for his family to travel back and forth to the MD Anderson Medical Center in Houston for his treatments.
That's a far cry from the $3,800 that the tournament raised for the American Cancer Society in its first year, 2000.
The idea was hatched at a homeowners association meeting in Cortazzo's neighborhood. Residents were brain-storming for some fun things to do and decided to challenge a few other neighborhoods in softball.
There were seven teams that year. It's been growing ever since, and there were more than six times that many this year.
Most of the teams in the tournament represent the Cranberry neighborhoods where their players live, but many businesses and organizations in the area have gotten in on the action lately.
Cortazzo said this year about 45 teams participated in the two-day, double-elimination tournament Saturday and Sunday with the team from Seven Fields North beating last year's champion from the Hampshire Woods neighborhood to take home the cup.
This year also marked the first that the recipient was chosen by a newly formed nonprofit organization called Cranberry CUP, which stands for Communities Uniting People.
Cortazzo heads the organization's five-member board.
She said the organization became necessary because of how large the event has grown and because this year there was more than one potential recipient nominated by members of the community.
Cortazzo said one of the nominated recipients withdrew because his children were not aware he had cancer and another declined because the family was already the focus of other fund-raisers.
Poust, whose family is originally from Erie, was in kindergarten when doctors found a tumor the size of a tennis ball in his brain. He was taken to Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, where it was surgically removed.
The family was later told that Poust had glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. He was given a 30 percent chance of living for five years.
Surgeons then discovered another brain tumor, which resulted in another surgery, four rounds of chemotherapy and 33 radiation treatments. But the tumors kept returning.
Eventually, a New York neurosurgeon took Poust's case and made some progress, and the boy's life had become almost normal by September 1998. But tragedy struck again when his father died that winter.
The diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome means Poust's only hope is a bone marrow transplant, Cortazzo said, and his family members are being type matched.
Poust's mother, Bonnie, said that before the tournament and all the attention focused on her son, she had had little time to get to know others in the community.
"I've been so tied up with Alex's needs that I haven't gotten to know many people here," she said. "It's heartwarming to know that a community that doesn't really know me and that I haven't been able to contribute to is willing to help us out."
Cortazzo is also working to arrange a meeting between Poust and his hero, Mario Lemieux, continuing a tradition started last year when recipient Kayla Sansone, 13, was able to meet pop star Christina Aguilera.
Sansone, who was battling cancer, died in November.
Thirty teams competed in the tournament last year to raise $40,000 for Sansone and her mother.
In 2002, 23 teams participated to raise $23,500 for Pennsylvania state Trooper Bob Newton, who is now in remission from cancer.
Fourteen neighborhoods participated to raise $14,000 for the Children of JoEllen Maughn Evanson Scholarship Fund in 2001. Maughn Evanson, Cranberry's first female police officer, died after a long battle with cancer, and the fund will help educate her children. |
 Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | |
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