FARMVILLE, Va. – Longwood baseball player C.J. Roth wasn't blessed with home run power. Swinging for the fences isn't part of his game, but while the junior second baseman has yet to go deep in his three years at Longwood, this week he knocked something else out of the park.

Roth, a junior from Yorktown, Va., and three-year starter for the Lancers, spearheaded the Longwood Student Athlete Advisory Committee's (SAAC) Project Life initiative, a community service effort that pulled in hundreds of participants from Longwood's campus this past Wednesday and Thursday, March 25-26.
 

The Project Life Movement, hosted by SAAC in conjunction with the Big South Conference's league-wide community service initiative, aims to expand the pool of potential bone marrow donors by collecting cheek swabs from willing participants across college campuses. Volunteers use specially-made cotton swabs to collect DNA from inside their mouths, and those samples are then packaged and entered into a national database. If a submitted sample matches a patient on the bone marrow transplant list, Project Life contacts that potential donor about giving their bone marrow.
 
The cause hit home for Roth, who lost a close childhood friend and baseball teammate who was diagnosed with leukemia and passed away while waiting for a bone marrow transplant. With that in mind, Roth took to heart Longwood SAAC's role in the project: to collect as many cheek swab samples from volunteer students as possible.
 
Roth and his SAAC counterparts led the entire effort, from planning to homegrown marketing through word of mouth and social media. They knew the yield of samples would come to the efforts Longwood's student-athletes put into the project, and when Roth consulted SAAC members from other Big South schools about their projects, he saw the potential for his fellow Lancers to do more than the recommended 100 to 200 collections.
 
"I started thinking and said if we target the right audience at the right time, we could easily push for between 200 and 250," he said. "In our own SAAC meeting, someone threw out there, 'Let's go for 250.' We said, let's do it."
 
With that, an ambitious 250 swabs became Longwood's goal, and Roth and his fellow SAAC members set their plan in motion. After months of committee meetings among his fellow student-athletes, Roth prioritized a setup between Dorrill Dining Hall and the student union, two of the busiest and most popular locations on campus. They chose to host the event during a three-hour window at peak lunchtime hours and across two days to give students the chance to donate around their class schedules.
 
The turnout was immediate. Flanked by student-athletes, vocal members of Longwood's athletics staff and even school mascot Elwood, SAAC's efforts yielded 114 donations on the first day. By day two, word had spread around campus, and the 250-swab goal not only seemed achievable, but modest.
 
"the entire campus came together," Roth said. "That's one of the cool things about Longwood, and it's not just our event, it's other events too. People come up, and they check it out. You see a lot of people at a tent. It attracts more people, and they ask, 'Hey what are you guys doing? Oh, I can help someone? Let me step up to the plate and help somebody.'"
 
In total, 303 people stepped up to the plate and knocked the 250-swab goal out of the park. Nearly 200 people submitted a cheek swab on Thursday alone, including members of Longwood's faculty and staff who met Project Life's donor requirements.
 
Those donations were almost entirely cold sells, coming from Longwood students who simply passed by a large tent on their way across campus. Roth noted that even with the intense planning that went into the event, the biggest hurdle his volunteers faced was educating people about the impact they could have by contributing.
 
"People see the signs, they see 'bone marrow' and they think, 'That's painful.' Yes, it's painful, but at the same time, once you look into the actual donor process, it's maybe four hours of your day and some pain," he said. "A lot of it was just explaining to them that the person who needs that bone marrow is probably going through something a lot tougher, and if you're willing to give that few hours of your day in some pain, that can save their life."
 
And because of Roth and Longwood SAAC, the national pool of potential bone marrow donors has expanded by more than 300, all Lancer Strong.
 
"I really want to thank everyone who helped us: student-athletes, the athletics department, and all the Longwood people who stepped up," Roth said. "There's really not enough time in the day to thank everyone who made this possible."
 
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