Coaches raising money to offer more support

Navy’s Amplo, others trying to assist medical personnel

The final plan came from Navy men’s lacrosse coach Joe Amplo, but not the original idea.

During a FaceTime call Saturday, Amplo’s twin brother Kris thanked his older brother’s wife, Jennifer, for making a donation to his GoFundMe page. Mystified, Joe Amplo asked for more information from Kris, who began to provide details of his efforts to partner with restaurants to feed doctors, nurses and other personnel working at hospitals in New York to combat the spread of the coronavirus.

The concept stuck with the elder Amplo until the next day, when he asked his colleagues on the coaching staff of the U.S. men’s national lacrosse team to band together to do something similar. Head coach John Danowski, who helms Duke, and assistants coaches Seth Tierney (Hofstra) and Charley Toomey (Loyola Maryland) readily agreed and launched their own GoFundMe page to provide meals for hospital employees.

“I got to thinking, ‘How can I or we leverage our networks if we got together with the USA coaches?’ ” Amplo said Thursday. “That, to me, was the easiest way to reach the most people.

“Wewant to try to help as many people as we can. The restaurants are struggling, and gosh, the front-line workers are in it. Every little bit helps.”

Amplo and Toomey, who both live in Severna Park, have partnered with Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis. Danowski is working with the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, and Tierney has connected with Northwell Health on Long Island,

New York.

Danowski and Tierney plan to work with local restaurants to provide meals. Amplo and Tierney are looking into a few options, including restocking a mini-mart and making 300 to 500 Easter baskets for the employees to give to their families.

“I think we all just feel somewhat helpless sitting at home and not being able to do anything,” Danowski said. “So this is a small piece of helping, and certainly we’re glad to do it.”

The crisis facing hospital personnel is frightening, according to the coaches.

Employees have worked double and triple shifts while facing the very real prospect that they could contract COVID-19. Hospitals have recalled recently retired workers to fortify an already-exhausted workforce. Personnel who have shopped at grocery stores in their hospital gear have been treated like pariahs.

“It’s been sad,” Toomey said. “People are nervous, so we want to kind of keep them in a comfort zone and give them the ability to pick something up and go home and feed their families. … We’re just trying to fill the void that the hospital has at any given time.”

Tierney called the stories he has heard “awful.”

“They need to be thanked,” he said. “They need to know that people are thinking about them. When you watch the news and you hear about these projections that could possibly take place and these people are putting their families on hold to save someone else from another family, they need to be recognized.”

Jan Wood, president of the Anne Arundel Medical Center Foundation and chief development officer for the center, said the crisis has been taxing on hospital personnel.

“This is hard work,” she said. “They are day in and day out putting their own lives into the middle of an epidemic and doing so willingly and with a passion and compassion for the patients and families that they’re caring for.

“But it’s hard. They’re tired, as I think many people in the midst of this are.”

Since the page went live Tuesday, the coaches have raised $7,426 toward their $10,000 goal as of Thursday afternoon. The swift response has been a glimmer of hope in an otherwise depressing period of time.

“All I’ve seen in the lacrosse news lately is disappointment and frustration over seasons ending and all this going back and forth over the eligibility,” Amplo said. “If you looked at this 2 weeks ago on the front end of those decisions, I know I was one of those people that was saying, ‘Gosh, I can’t believe this is happening, that we’re ending the season.’

“But looking back now, I think most of us would say, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t do something sooner.’ We’re talking about a quarter of a million people passing away, so I would hope that lacrosse people are asking, ‘How can we help? How can we go into action whatever way we can that can maybe fill our competitive juices a little bit?’

“It’s not surprising. I just think it’s timely.”

Tierney said he has been especially heartened knowing that donors might have other pressing concerns.

“We’re in a tough financial time as well,” he said. “People have to take care of their inner circle before they can help out some other people. But I know there’s so much generosity out there.”

Amplo quipped that Danowski’s status in the lacrosse world has driven much of the fundraising.

“I think I have 400 followers on Twitter, so I’m not really reaching out to that many people,” he deadpanned. “But Coach Danowski, he’s got that little blue thing next to his name, and his tweets get a lot of likes and retweets.”

Wood, the Anne Arundel Medical Center’s foundation president, said employees are grateful for the generosity.

“I think that’s one of the things that makes Anne Arundel Medical Center very special,” she said. “It is very much a state-of-the-art, high-performing regional health center, but with a community hospital culture, and that permeates through everything that we do.

“Our staff lives in the community and is working very hard. To see that their community supports them and is doing this for them and is giving back so that they can do the work they need to do really spurs them forward, creates a lot of positive energy and allows them to hunker down and redouble their efforts.

“This is not going to end anytime in the near future, and they know they’ve got a long road ahead. But to know their community supports them in this way has really helped energize them to move forward.”

All four coaches said they are willing to consider using any money exceeding the initial $10,000 objective toward another effort or going in a different direction with an eye on helping those affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The top priority is to remain open-minded about how they can pitch in during a time of uncertainty.

“We don’t know how long this virus is going to last and how long people are going to be out there,” Toomey said. “But we have to — in our own way — support these first responders and help them in any way that we can, and this is a way to get the community around them.”