TicketsMay 11, 2011
By Rachel Hundley
GoBEARCATS.com
Every game, Mark Konitsch and his fellow University of Cincinnati men's soccer teammates step out onto the field prepared to compete against and defeat whatever opponent is on the schedule that day. The Bearcats play to outscore, outshoot, and outrun whatever team stands between them and victory. However, there are some opponents in life that one cannot outrun or outscore. Those are the kinds of opponents that threaten to take more than a soccer victory away from their victims.
Konitsch, a senior graduating next month, and his teammates understood that there are those who face challenges far more difficult than those the Bearcats face on the field, and they were determined to help patients face their own challenges.
"My junior year, last year, a couple of us were named captains. We always volunteered as a team in the community, but we wanted to get in touch with something new to establish ourselves as a senior class," Konitsch said. "We wanted a relationship with something in the community, and we wanted to leave a legacy behind."
Konitsch and the UC men's soccer team chose the Barrett Cancer Center at University Hospital as a place to establish a relationship with after hearing about the UC football team's successful involvement with Friends with Jaclyn, a foundation that links young children with brain tumors to college and high school football teams and allows kids the opportunity to attend practices and games with the Bearcats. Konitsch and his fellow senior captains, Nick Weightman, Chris Mitchell, and Branden Stelmak, happened to hear that Dr. William Barrett wanted to establish a relationship with the UC soccer program, and they saw a perfect opportunity to help tackle an illness that affects so many people, including those on the team, in so many ways.
"As a team, we decided we wanted to volunteer and give back, and what better way than to start volunteering at something that has affected most of us at some point in our lives," Konitsch said. "Matt Williams [senior goalkeeper] lost his mom to cancer, and my grandmother, who was like my second mother, passed away from it when I was in high school."
Konitsch and his fellow captains saw volunteering at the Barrett Cancer Center as a great opportunity to help lots of people instead of just helping one. This past week the Bearcats made their first of what they hope to be many visits to the center.
"Guys were walking around talking to patients and their families and trying to ease them through the process of chemotherapy or whatever they're there for," Konitsch said. "We escorted people to appointments, and we tried to make them feel comfortable in order to ease some of the pain."
The people the Bearcats met are facing an opponent that threatens more than a soccer defeat. Cancer threatens to take away precious days, it threatens to take away years, and it threatens to take away lives. Cancer isn't a 90-minute match. It holds lives hostage for much longer than the mere 90 minutes it takes to battle through a soccer match.
"There's so much more to life than sports and school. There are a lot of people out there who are facing much tougher challenges," Konitsch said. "The whole experience opened our eyes that there are other people who are having a difficult time, and they're surviving. They're facing something that's threatening their lives, and they're bravely confronting it, which showed us that there are much more difficult things in life than being a student-athlete."
The volunteer program between the Bearcats and the Barrett Cancer Center began in the spring, and it will include monthly visits from four groups of team members for two hours a day.
The Barrett Cancer Center, located on the University Hospital's main campus, has a long-standing reputation for providing the most advanced and complete range of cancer services available in the region, and it currently serves 35,000 patients with a known cancer diagnosis. The treatment facility has made esteemed contributions toward cancer research as a member of both the Association for Cancer Institutes and the Ohio Partnership for Cancer Control, while consistently being ranked among the best in the U.S. News and World Report guide to "America's Best Hospitals."
Konitsch emphasized that he and his teammates really wanted to create a lasting legacy that will continue to develop more and more every year, even after he and the other seniors are gone. For the fall season, there are plans to do more with the Barrett Cancer Center, including providing tickets for UC soccer games to patients and families and hosting pre-game barbecues and soccer clinics.
"We want to make them feel a part of our family like we've become a part of their families through our volunteering," Konitsch said.
Even though Konitsch, Weightman, Stelmak, and Mitchell will be gone next season, Konitsch feels like the relationship with the Barrett Cancer Center and its patients are in good hands.
"Matt Bahner, one of the new captains for next season and also my roommate, will be heading up the program to keep it going," Konitsch said. "He's really focused on maintaining these relationships that we're starting to build."