Musicians, athletes, face painters, food sellers, stu-dents and staff all gathered together on the track for the American Cancer Soci-ety’s Relay for Life. The relay took place on May 4 at 6 p.m. through May 5 at 6 a.m. to fight back against cancer.
This event was the result of Seniors Caitie Bohach and Taylor Wolff’s senior project. “I picked [the relay] because I have been highly affected by it since third grade and it was just something I could do to help,” Bohach said.
Wolff had a different approach. “I kind of just wanted to do a senior project that wasn’t point-less,” Wolff said.
About 110 people gathered together Saturday night from students to teachers to parents to community mem-bers. There are many reasons to relay: for family, friends or even for fun. “It was a very good cause, raising awareness for cancer awareness and I enjoy the stu-dents at Freedom,” Mr. Nate Langelli said.
This event brought the community together. “I feel that it got people moti-vated to help others because sometimes we don’t have the ability or opportunity to do so. I’m happy that Taylor and Caitie gave people the opportunities to help oth-ers. I feel that made us better as a commu-nity and as human beings in general,” Jun-ior Sam Deane said.
Events from the relay included a watermelon eating contest, face paint-ing, hair braiding, lawn games, per-formances by “The Stolen Edge,” a DJ, Finding Nemo and much more. “[The events] were super fun. We im-provised, played ultimate frisbee and played games while we walked around the track,” Senior Noah Marks said.
Although the event went into the wee hours of the morning, teams con-tinued walking through the exhaus-tion. “I think [people kept walk-ing] because at the opening ceremony, we said cancer did-n’t sleep and every-one there had a per-sonal connection to someone who had cancer, so they kept walking,” Bohach said.
“My favorite part was that it all paid off and every-one was having fun that night,” Bohach said.
“We raised over $7,500, but we originally were aiming for $25,000. Of course with this being our first year, this was a little unreasonable, but we were pretty successful anyway. I would have been happy with raising $50. No matter the amount of money that we raised, the fact that we raised some money is what was important to me. Even $50 could make a difference in the fight against cancer,” Wolff said.