About Penn State University Uplifting Athletes

Uplifting Athletes^SM is a group of Penn State football players working together to raise awareness and funds for the Kidney Cancer Association.  The Uplifting Athletes chapter at Penn State was started in 2003.  To date, the chapter has raised nearly $600,000 for the Kidney Cancer Association. In 2011 at Lift For Life, the chapter raised a record of more than $100,000.  This year's Lift For Life date has not yet been determined.  Lift For Life is a fun-to-watch strength and conditioning competition held each year at Holuba Hall on campus.

The Penn State chapter of Uplifting Athletes was the charter chapter and started with an innocent conversation between two college football players.  The story has been pretty well documented at this point, but it bears repeating.  In the fall of 2002, executive director Scott Shirley was on my way home from practice when his cell phone rang; it was his mom and he knew it was bad news.  Sure enough, Scott's mom was so choked up she could barely talk.  She told Scott that his father had been diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma, commonly known as kidney cancer.  Doctors told the family he'd be lucky to see Scott graduate 6 months later.

Thanks to Coach Paterno’s teachings (you’re never as good as you think you are when you win…and you’re never as bad as you think you are when you lose), Scott had developed a pretty level head.  Scott knew his dad was a fighter and lived a very healthy lifestyle.  He was sure his dad was going to beat kidney cancer and everything was going to be okay.

The rest of the fall Scott went with his parents to the best medical centers in the mid-Atlantic region.  Everywhere they went though, they were told that nothing could be done.  In Scott's mind, that meant that they just hadn’t found the right doctor yet.  The Shirley family finally got a referral to Hopkins, which in Scott's mind was like going to see the Wizard of Oz.  As excited as he was to go, he was equally heartbroken when he left.  The doctor wasn't even in the room long enough to close the door.  All he told Scott's family was that the reality was that there was nothing they could do for his dad's kidney cancer.  On the way back to State College, it hit Scott like a ton of bricks that there had to be more to this story.  Scott called the American Cancer Society and they told him kidney cancer does not typically respond to standard first line treatments like chemo or radiation and it’s not one of their priorities.  Scott's next call was to the Kidney Cancer Association.  That is when he learned that the reason nothing could be done was because kidney cancer affected fewer than 200,000 American, classifying it as a rare disease and offering little financial incentive to make and market new treatments.

The rest of the trip home left Scott plenty of time to think.  He had always assumed that cancer was cancer and had never considered different cancers as different diseases.  But they are.  Different molecular pathologies.  Different treatment protocols.  So now what?  By the time Scott walked into his apartment, he was pretty aggravated; his roommate and teammate Damone Jones was sitting on the couch watching TV and greeted him as usual.  Except this time, when he asked how Scott's day was, Scott expressed his frustration with the situation that my family was facing.  It wasn’t that “nothing could be done" but that it wasn’t important enough to do anything.  Without hesitation, Damone shrugged his shoulders and suggested that they do something.  To quote him directly, he said “We’re Penn State players.  If we do something stupid, it’s on the front page of the papers.  Let’s take advantage of the position that we’re in and use that spotlight to make a difference.”

Thereafter, the chapter was started and the team has worked hard to bring awareness to kidney cancer.