Blue White Illustrated

The emotion poured out of him as Shirley told Jones the news. And it was compounded by the realization that there was no way to combat the disease. Limited kidney cancer diagnoses meant there were limited treatments. And limited treatments meant limited hope. That is what bothered Shirley the most. Jones listened as his roommate talked, but he offered much more than just a sympathetic ear. ���Why don���t we do something?��� Shirley remembers Jones saying. ���We���re Penn State football players. For better or worse, people pay attention to what we do and what we say. If I do something stupid, it���s on the front page of the paper, so let���s take advantage of that and give the attention to people who need it more than we do.��� So they got to work, gathering for brainstorming sessions that sometimes took place in the team���s locker room. To stimulate their creativity, they asked themselves a question: What do football players do best? Other than play football, of course, they lift weights. So they began to organize the weightlifting competition that would later become known as Lift for Life. The objective was to persuade teammates to garner as many sponsors as possible leading up to the event, then get those teammates to lift as many weights as possible. They hoped to attract media attention, draw some fans, then donate all the proceeds to charity, in this case the Kidney Cancer Association. ���We quickly realized that the benefits were going to be bigger than what we anticipated,��� Shirley recalled. ���We had guys come up to our locker asking how they can help. They wanted to get involved, so it gave us the ability to actively engage our teammates. It had the benefits of team building, leadership development and community service. As we sat at a table and planned that first lift, we started to feel that we were running our own business.��� Ten years later, Shirley is executive director and chairman on the board of Uplifting Athletes. He began working full-time for the nonprofit in 2007 after serving as a project engineer with the SCOTT SHIRLEY FOUNDER OF UPLIFTING ATHLETES ���Shrive has raised more money in his career than what the entire team did during the first two years that I was invovled.��� Washington, D.C.-based Clark Construction Group. (He received his master���s degree in engineering from Penn State in 2004.) Uplifting Athletes has grown to include 14 participating football programs, including chapters at Ohio State, Illinois, Northwestern and Nebraska. Each school raises money for a different rare disease, and Shirley said he hopes to increase the total number of participating schools to 20 by this summer. ��� The biggest beneficiaries of the work done by Uplifting Athletes are, of course, the patients. But the student-athletes who get involved gain from it, too. Chapters are organized like a corporation, complete with a president (Shrive, in Penn State���s case), a vice president (Adam Gress), a head of operations (Ty Howle) and a secretary (DaQuan Davis). When Shirley launched the organization, he said the business experience it provided ��� tracking down donations, fundraising, encouraging teammates to join the cause ��� would help the athletes transition into the working world. ���It really kind of filled a void that we had with our year-round commitment to football and not being able to get the offcampus summer internships,��� he explained. Shrive, who is majoring in hotel/restaurant institutional management, said it provides some of the best real-world business experience he can get while fulfilling the role of a scholarship football player. And since he���s often interacting with business owners, it also affords him opportunities to expand his network after football. Shrive and Shirley communicate on at least a weekly basis, and he���s in daily contact with Shirley���s assistant. Face-to-face meetings, text messages, phone calls, emails. Shrive said they���re constantly bouncing ideas off each other, looking for new ways to raise money and create awareness. It���s similar, he said, to what he expects he will encounter during his career. ���That���s one of the reasons that I���m involved as much as I am,��� Shrive said. ���Because I see not only how good it is for the resume, but also the business experience that I can take from it.��� He���s seen it work in other ways, too. After he joined Uplifting Athletes as an ambitious freshman, Shrive saw kidney cancer hit his own family. An uncle ��� Shrive asked that he not be named ��� was diagnosed with the disease. He said his uncle is recovering, thanks in part to treatment options that have been developed in the past decade. Since Shirley, a former walk-on from East Pennsboro High in Enola, Pa., founded Uplifting Athletes in 2003, the Penn State chapter has raised more than $700,000, with those funds going to the Kidney Cancer Association for research. Since that first Lift for Life, six additional kidney cancer treatments have been developed. It���s still not curable ��� Don Shirley lost his battle with the disease in October 2005 ��� but people are living longer. And while the association has other sources of support, Penn State���s chapter has played a large role in funding the research that led to the discovery of the

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