About North Carolina State University Uplifting Athletes

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Members of the North Carolina State football team have officially launched a chapter of Uplifting Athletes, a national organization that works with college football players to fund rare disease research. Collectively, the team has chosen leukemia as the rare disease in which they will raise money. They chose leukemia to support Offensive Coordinator Dana Bible.

The date was November 20, 2009; Coach Bible even recalls the time -- 5:35 PM. He was told he had Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia, a rare cancer of the blood.

“I was certain they were wrong,” Coach Bible said. “That night, as the team was headed to play Virginia Tech, I was going to the hospital.”

Bible spent the next 30 days in the hospital receiving treatment. Bible says he hadn’t felt well all season, but it never occurred to him that he was battling leukemia.

“For months I was either lying in the hospital, lying in bed or lying on my couch,” Bible says.

The leukemia treatment appeared to work; his Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia has been in remission for seven months. For Bible, he rarely reflects on those dark days. Through it all, Bible did not step aside from his coaching duties. He admits that by spring workouts for the North Carolina State football team in 2010, he was at 40-percent but still made it a point to be there.

“I wanted to be part of the team,” Bible says. “The ACC is so competitive. If you have a weakness, teams will expose it. I didn’t want to be the team’s weakness.”

So Bible persevered, saying the North Carolina State football players were compassionate and filled gaps when he physically couldn’t perform some of the tasks he needed to do as an offensive coordinator and coach of the quarterbacks and wide receivers. He was determined to stay on the football field, though he will admit that after just the second game this past season, he was on empty. Still, he fought through it and finished the football season with a bowl victory. Bible has met and talked to others with similar medical diagnoses. He says he doesn’t sugar coat it since there is no cure for leukemia. But he does offer some insightful advice.

“Hate the disease and then fight it,” he says. “There’s not a redeemable quality about the disease. I had a chip on my shoulder and I fought.”

Bible says he literally lives one day at a time and tries to be a better everything - coach, husband, dad and brother. The true heroes, he believes, are those fighting to beat leukemia and other cancers.

Leukemia isn't the only rare disease members of NC State's football team have helped. In 2009, NC State raised money for the Boston College chapter of Uplifting Athletes shortly after Mark Herzlich (Senior, Linebacker) disclosed his battle with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare form of cancer that typically affects young men.