Gold shoelaces let athletes nationwide team up to help kids fight cancer

(MCT)

AKRON, Ohio — Wearing gold shoelaces, thousands of Northeast Ohio college, high school and youth athletes have joined a national movement to team up to help kids defeat cancer.

Soccer, football, cross-country, tennis and other players are wearing the laces they purchase for $5 per pair through a national program called LaceUp4PediatricCancer, an offshoot of Go4theGoal, a national nonprofit founded in 2006 and based in New Jersey that supports pediatric cancer research and children's hopitals across the country. The group estimates that more than 250,000 of the laces have been worn across the U.S..

The money raised in Akron will benefit a childhood cancer center at Akron Children's Hospital.

"That's priority No. 1, supporting the patients and their families," said Dr. Jeffrey Hord, director of the cancer center at the hospital.

Kameryn Zingale, 16, was the first Akron-area athlete to offer to wear the shoelaces after spending her summer volunteering in the hospital's cancer center.

For several hours each week, Zingale played games and read with young patients if their parents had to leave.

"It started out as fulfilling required service hours, but it became more than that," she said.

When she spoke with Hord at the end of the summer about her interest in pursuing a career as a pediatric oncologist, the doctor asked if she would wear the gold laces and encourage her teammates on her high school's girl's varsity soccer team to wear them, too.

Zingale agreed, then persuaded other fall sport teams at her school to wear the laces while competing in September.

She plans to sell laces and other Go4theGoal items during Friday's football game, when the Hoban players will be lacing up with gold.

"It's special because it's going back to Akron Children's Hospital," she said. "The kids I worked with are going to benefit."

Go4theGoal executive Director Beth Stefanacci and her family started Go4theGoal in 2006 shortly after her son, Richard, was diagnosed with cancer. He died the following year.

"We understand what these families are going through," said Stefanacci, a Northeast Ohio native. "Really, the only thing they should have to worry about it getting a very ill child well."

Go4theGoal launched the LaceUp4PediatricCancer public awareness and fundraising campaign in September 2011 to coincide with Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.

Because gold is the designated color for pediatric cancer awareness, the group decided to bring attention to the cause by asking athletes to lace up with gold for their games throughout the month.

Stefanacci said proceeds from the national campaign go to children's hospitals in the regions where they're purchased. For every $5 pair that's sold, the local hospital gets $5.

All of the money raised from the local laces fundraisser is "staying right there in Akron, because shame on organizations that you don't know where the money goes," Stefanacci said. "We have people who raised funds all over the country, and we wanted to make sure it stays to benefit the kids in those communities."

When Ohio's Cuyahoga Falls High School boys varsity soccer coach Eric Ortopan heard about the LaceUp4PediatricCancer initiative from a hospital blog and from his sister, he immediately wanted to get his team involved.

The team has several ties to pediatric cancer. One of the players is a cancer survivor, and the coach's niece is a patient at the brain tumor clinic at Akron Children's.

"The boys really like it," he said. "These kids like to be involved."

The soccer players wore the gold laces and jerseys during a recent home victory.

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©2014 Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio)

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