SEQUIM — Fast-pitch teams from Sequim and Port Angeles high schools will don pink jerseys in matches Wednesday to promote cancer research awareness during the second annual Pink Up event.
The event will begin at 3:45 p.m. at Sequim High School, 601 N. Sequim Ave., with a speech by Magan Waldron, a Sequim resident who will compete in the Mrs. Washington pageant in Olympia on May 16 as Mrs. Olympic Peninsula.
The games will begin at 4:15 p.m. when the two high school varsity teams take the field.
The junior varsity teams will play immediately after.
Both games are free to the public.
Pam Vass of Sequim and Anne Edwards of Port Angeles, both cancer survivors, will throw the ceremonial first pitches at the start of the games — Vass for the varsity game and Edwards for the junior varsity game.
Vass learned she had leukemia in 1982 and developed two other types of cancer over the next six years. She has been cancer-free since 1988.
Edwards was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2013. She spent a year at Seattle Children’s Hospital and was declared cancer-free in 2014.
She now competes as a gymnast and softball player.
The players are wearing pink jerseys to honor cancer survivors and will place ribbons, which represent friends and loved ones who have been afflicted with cancer, on the chain-link backstop at the Sequim High School baseball field.
Before playing, the team members will collect donations for Operation Uplift, a local nonprofit organization founded in 1983 that raises money for cancer patients in Clallam County.
Donations are used by the organization to fund a biannual breast-health clinic for women who are uninsured or underinsured, provide vouchers for free mammograms via Olympic Medical Center and offer activities for cancer survivors that allow them to interact with others who have had similar experiences.
If Waldron, whose platform in the pageant will be Operation Uplift, wins the state competition, she will compete in the national contest this September in Sevastopol, a city on the southwest tip of the Crimean Peninsula, south of Ukraine.
According to event organizers, the contest is being held there this year as “an expression of peace and goodwill” between the United States and Russia, which annexed Crimea last year.
The Mrs. America Pageant, founded in 1976, was established to honor married American women representing all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It is owned and operated by Mrs. America Inc. and unaffiliated with the Miss America pageant.
For more information about the Pink Up games, phone 360-461-6511.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052; at cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
