Adviser Georges: ‘We have the best students …. Only Ocean City can pull this off’
OCEAN CITY — It was beyond noisy in the Ocean City Civic Center Thursday afternoon with the crack of pickleball paddles smacking balls around the indoor courts mixed with cries of triumph and disappointment as shots landed in and out of bounds.
The cacophony was augmented by frequent peals of laughter from the good-natured contestants and highlighted by the deafening buzzer that sounded to rotate the 62 players off the sidelines and against new opponents.
Thirty-one two-person teams of middle and high school students and adults ponied up $25 each to play in the tournament, a student-run benefit for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LSS), an organization that raises money for blood cancer research.
LLS also provides free education and support for blood cancer patients and their families and advocates to “accelerate the development of new blood cancer treatments and break down barriers to care,” according to the nonprofit group’s website, lls.org.
The benefit itself was part of the LSS Student Visionaries of the Year contest and organized by Marissa Vallese, an Ocean City High School junior from Ocean City.
Frank LaSasso, a mathematics teacher at Ocean City Intermediate School and assistant football coach at the high school, was watching the blur of action with a smile.
“This is what kids can do. You can see this is a great turnout. They are all supporting each other and supporting a great cause and all of this money goes to cancer research through the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society,” he said.
“My son, Frankie, as most people around here know, was diagnosed with T-cell leukemia two and a half years ago and is on his last month of treatment right now,” LaSasso said. “Everybody in the area has been so supportive of him. Last year LLS honored him as the South Jersey Honored Hero for the Student Visionaries of the Year contest.”
When Frankie was honored, LaSasso said he noticed there was no representation in the contest from “true South Jersey schools.”
“There were a lot from the Mount Holly area, Medford area, Cherry Hill and Moorestown, but there was no one from Atlantic County and Cape May County and I felt like our area has so much to offer in terms of overall support and good-hearted people and sense of community that we needed to get teams from down here,” he explained.
“I ended up on the LLS committee, which recruits high school kids to basically run their own program to raise money for LLS. Marissa Vallese signed up,” he said. “This is her event. She and her team have set this entire event up with the help of many advisers from the high school.”
Each year the LSS divides the state into North Jersey and South Jersey for student teams to compete to raise money for LLS research into all types of blood cancers including leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma.
The competition ends up “all in the hands of the students,” LaSasso said.
‘This is what kids can do. You can see this is a great turnout. They are all supporting each other and supporting a great cause and all of this money goes to cancer research through the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.’
– Frank LaSasso, OCIS teacher who got involved with LSS as his son, Frankie, battled leukemia
Vallese said she was asked to be a student visionary for the LLS and decided “it was a great reason to help.”
She said it took “a lot of work and help from a bunch of kids in the school. We had help from the National Honor Society, Ms. (Catherine) Georges and my mom.”
The turnout, Vallese added, was a lot more than she expected, making her “very happy.”
“NHS meetings helped out. We had to create a form to see who wanted to come out. We kind of threw it all together,” she said.
Junior Kara Hender of Marmora was by Vallese’s side Thursday.
“Marissa and I are friends and I know she did so much for this, I really wanted to help her out so I told her I would help as much as possible. And I’ve been seeing all the work she did. She had lists and notebooks worth of organizing. I think it’s amazing of her to do this,” Hender said.
National Honor Society board member Ellie Kutschera, a senior from Sea Isle City, was helping at the event, but was able to talk only briefly before she ran off to compete.
“Like Marissa said, we had a lot of help from really the whole school. The intramural club did something like this and the board members from the intramural club are also National Honor Society board members so they really helped,” Kutschera said. “(Vallese) came to us and said we had resources, but she was the brains behind it. She said, ‘This is something I want to do and raise money for this foundation.’ And we’re like, ‘We’re all in.’
“This is a school that loves an athletic event and will do anything for an athletic event. In terms of pickleball, we do it in gym class and people get really intense about it so we turned it into a way to raise money and people really turned up,” Kutschera said. “Each team had to donate $25 to participate and they were fully willing … and I’m going to go play right now.”
“We have the best students. We truly do,” said Georges, a biology teacher at the high school, National Honor Society adviser and the adviser for the Student Visionaries. “We put this out, we didn’t have a gym because of the flooding at the high school. We had to make this happen at the Civic Center. The Civic Center worked with us, the police worked with us, everyone worked with us to make this happen within two weeks. Only Ocean City can pull this off.”
Georges got involved after working with LaSasso on the Relay for Life, a different cancer research fundraiser, last year.
“He told me about the Student Visionaries Project and I said, ‘We need to do this at our school too.’ He and I worked together and ended up getting two different groups together who were actually doing the fundraising,” Georges said. “This one is pickleball through Marissa Vallese and we also have a coin drop with local businesses with Kayleigh Donegan.”
(Look for LLS coin drop containers at local businesses through the end of this week.)
LaSasso said his experience with his son taught him about the importance of making progress in the fight against cancer.
“People who donate toward cancer — and I used to be one of them — used to think, ‘Where is this money going? There is no magic pill that cures cancer yet. It’s 2023, we should be able to cure cancer.’ While that is the hope to one day have (a cure) … when my son got diagnosed we were told he had an 85 to 90 percent chance of survival because of new medication, new practices, new trials,” LaSasso said. “And if this was me when I was 8 years old, they would have told my parents I had a 15 to 20 percent chance of surviving.
“All of the cancer research that goes on, all of the money donated all goes to a great cause and it helps families in need going through it. I’m thrilled to see the turnout today not only to support families like mine, but to support students like Marissa who want to be involved, who want to help and want to make a change.”
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff