Oct. 10, 2011
If you were looking for the Vanderbilt women’s cross country team at Louisville race to start the month, you were in luck–they were easy to spot.
The seven runners sported pink jerseys, rather than their typical black Vanderbilt tops, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month. Head Coach Steve Keith started the tradition last year, when his sister was going through treatment.
“I don’t know how many families this touches, but quite a few,” he said. “A year ago when we first decided to wear pink, my sister was going through chemotherapy all through the fall and into the winter. That was kind of a nice little tribute for her.”
For Louisville native and Commodore sophomore Liz Anderson, it meant a little something to her as well.
“Wearing pink actually means something to me, because my grandma on my mom’s side actually overcame breast cancer–she’s a survivor,” said Anderson. “And it being October 1st, we’d just opened the month and wanted to raise awareness.”
And raise awareness they did.
“Even while we were running you could hear `Oh, Vanderbilt’s in pink,’ so I know they had to think about it,” said Anderson. “Just raising awareness and drawing attention to breast cancer awareness is probably one of the top things we just wanted to do.”
Wearing pink puts life and athletics into perspective for the team, such as for freshmen like Rebecca Chandler.
“On my old team, we had a couple of moms that had breast cancer, so we all did the breast cancer awareness marathon down in Jacksonville,” said Chandler. “It was awesome that we did something like that here.”
“As much as running is a huge part of our life, we do realize that by wearing pink it exemplifies much more than that. There is more to our sport than just going out and hammering miles. It definitely puts things in perspective.”
The team will wear pink again at the end of the month, when several members of the team will run in the Race for the Cure run in Nashville on Saturday, October 29th to close out Breast Cancer Awareness month.
