JCC Students Partner With Sports Charity To Raise Funds
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A group of students at Jamestown Community College were able to get some hands-on experience for their Sport and Society course this past semester, thanks to coordinated work with the Autographs For A Cure Foundation.
The relationship started when Jacob Hordych, director of sport management at the college, was looking for ideas about how to engage his students in implementing positive social change through sports.
"It kind of happened organically. The Autographs For A Cure is an organization that I just kind of stumbled upon this summer," Hordych said. "I was listening to a podcast on autographs because I am a big autograph collector. It is a passion of mine."
The not-for-profit was founded by Michael Rhoades in 2019, after a cancer diagnoses had flipped his life upside down three years previously. Drawing inspiration from his battle with cancer, Rhoades wanted to find a way to parlay his personal interest in sports and sports memorabilia into support for cancer charities.
"He started acquiring donations and autographs and things to auction and sell off ," Hordych said.
Partnering with The Orlando Health Cancer Center and the Orlando Health Foundation, Rhoades' organization now auctions off memorabilia from all across the country and all different sports.
"It was a really great opportunity because I have a Sport and Society course and one of the weekly topics that we spoke about in class was sports for change," Hordych said
"This was a really neat way to allow the students to kind of try to do their part and see firsthand how sport can kind of be the facilitator of massive change, whether it be cures for cancer or social injustice, gender equality or things like that. Sport can be a tool to facilitate those changes."
Over the course of the semester, Hordych and his students collected more than 50 autographs from coaches and athletes to donate to the cause.
"Students would send a letter and send a couple of cards that I had provided for them (with) a return address. There is always a process behind it, and some autographs we would get back in two weeks. Some we would get back in three months," Hordych said. "It was all over the place. We had coaches, we had NASCAR drivers, baseball players, football players. Current athletes and past athletes."
The project was concluded when the autographs were sent to Orlando where they will be auctioned off.
In response, Rhoades recorded a thank-you video that was distributed to the students, in which he displays the autographs collected and explains parts of the donation process.
After having a positive and tangible experience in teaching his class about the possibilities of sport for change, Hordych intends to make working with Autographs For A Cure a part of the curriculum moving forward.