Yale hosts 16th Mandi Schwartz marrow drive, nears 100 lives saved
NEW HAVEN — One of the first things Jonny Auh’s lightweight crew coach told him to do when he first came to Yale two years ago was to sign up to become a bone marrow donor.
At that time, Yale for 14 straight years had hosted its annual Mandi Schwartz Marrow Donor Registration Drive, which searched for potential donors whose stem cells could save the lives of cancer patients.
Auh went to the 14th annual drive in 2022 and took the swab test used to determine potential matches. After two years of waiting, he got the call that he was a potential match and ended up donating bone marrow.
“It’s awesome,” the junior said. “Just the fact that I could transform one person’s life potentially is just an awesome thing to do.”
Auh was one of the few who could donate but is one of the many Yale athletes and students who volunteered at the 16th annual Mandi Schwartz Marrow Donor Registration Drive at Yale’s Beinecke Plaza Wednesday. Started nearly two decades ago, the drive is responsible for saving almost 100 lives and registering 10,000 people as potential donors.
The bone marrow donor drive, which has been held at Yale every year since 2009, was started in the hope of saving the life of Yale women’s hockey player Mandi Schwartz. Schwartz was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2008 and battled with it for two years.
In September 2010 with no matching adult donor found, she required a blood stem cell transplant — designed to give her a new immune system — using two anonymously donated units of umbilical cord blood. There was hope she could return to Yale and resume her hockey career.
The cancer, however, returned and she relapsed. She died at home in Saskatchewan on April 3, 2011 at 23-years old.
The marrow registry drive began shortly before the Yale community learned Schwartz had leukemia. Former Yale assistant football coach Larry Ciotti’s close friend and football coach at Villanova, Andy Talley, started a marrow drive at the suburban Philadelphia school as part of the “Get in the Game, Save a Life” program enlisting football teams across the country.
Talley advised his former teammate at Southern Connecticut State University about starting a donor drive at Yale. Now, the drive has grown into a behemoth that has hundreds of Yale athletes and students volunteering to support the event.
Athletes from the men’s soccer, men’s and women’s swimming and diving,
football and other sports teams put on their orange “Mandi Schwartz “shirts and gave their time to the longtime cause. They worked alongside National Marrow Donor Program representatives.
“It’s very gratifying to know that everybody’s working — our students at Yale, our athletes at Yale, coaches — to save lives,” said Ciotti, who was a championship coach at Daniel Hand High School before coaching at Yale. “We can make a difference in the saving of lives for people with blood-born cancer diseases…We’re just trying to extend lives.”
That message reached junior Claire Michalik once she found out her swim teammate, Alex Massey, was a potential match and donor. Massey’s initiative spurred Yale’s women’s swim and dive team to get involved in the drive.
Massey didn’t end up donating because doctors found a stronger match, but it showed Michalik how athletes could use their platforms to make an impact, Michalik said.
She’s impressed by the numbers the event has been able to generate.
“When you see that tangibility, when you see those numbers ticking up, it’s just surreal,” Michalik said. “We’re motivated by that target of 100 (lives) this year.”
Community support is the “bread and butter” of this and other types of drives, said Dr. Ron Jacob, who is the NMDP director of medical recruitment for the East Region. The simple desire to make a difference, he said, can help save someone’s life.
Jacob ended up matching with a leukemia patient and donating his stem cells to help save that person’s life. He was motivated to donate because he had a friend who died from leukemia, like Schwartz, because he couldn’t find a match.
“You do not have to be a physician,” Jacob said. “You don’t even have to be working in healthcare to save a life. This is something that is in your hands. You have the ability just because of your altruism.”
Altruistic sophomore Naomie Mbadazi took a moment of her time on her way through Beinecke Plaza to take the swab test and register as a potential donor.
When the volunteers explained to her what they were doing, it resonated. The Rwanda native thought of her cousin who battled cancer and an auto-immune disease who was able to find a donor and live. His story inspired her.
“It was really important for me to know that I could give back.”
So, she did.