Ludlowe Athletes Unite Against Childhood Cancer With Fairfield Family's Foundation

FAIRFIELD, CT — September saw a push among the 400 or so fall athletes at Fairfield Ludlowe High School to help out in fundraising and awareness efforts for pediatric cancer treatment.

Kids for Kids Going for Gold, spearheaded by The 9th Floor Foundation — a Fairfield-based nonprofit centered on raising funds to help abet the financial struggles of families facing the trials of pediatric cancer — helped band the sports participants together in the initiative.

“Every fall sports team at Ludlowe had a designated ‘cancer captain’ to educate their team about what they were going to do,” explained Kristin Spengler, cofounder of the nonprofit. “Each team dedicated one gold game and the team wore gold throughout their uniforms.”

The idea, she said, was to show solidarity with children with cancer.

“The program was a great success,” she said.

The 9th Floor Foundation got its name from the ward at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where her son, James Spengler, 16, who was only 2 at the time, received his life-saving treatment for an extremely rare kind of sarcoma.

During that time, parents Matt and Kristin met many children and families who were facing the emotional, physical and financial struggle of similar situations.

“One hundred percent of all donations go directly to the families to help alleviate the enormous financial burden of cancer treatments,” Kristin said, with the average annual cost far exceeding $1 million and families incurring many costs outside of what insurance covers.

For many families as well, she said, travel to New York City to have children treated at Sloan Kettering in and of itself is a very costly endeavor.

“Many families have come from around the world or across the country,” Kristin said, “and now have to somehow afford the enormous cost of living … on the upper east side of New York City, which is insanely expensive.”

According to the foundation, 20,000 children in the U.S. are diagnosed with cancer each year, with one-fifth of them not surviving.

“The whole thing is to sort of get the message out about what The 9th Floor Foundation is,” said Luke Lesizza, a 17-year-old senior at Ludlowe who is close friends with the Spengler family and helped lead the way with the football team.

“There’s nothing more precious than children’s lives,” he said, and so he has strived to help his friends with the initiative at school.

He said the response was very positive among students.

“It’s just great,” he said, “everybody getting together around it.”

Kristin said it was James, who has been cancer free all this time, who thought it would be a good thing to involve the students.

Like Kristin and her husband, each year when James returns to the hospital for a checkup, he’s touched by seeing the families there.

“Every time we leave the hospital he says, ‘I feel like we’re leaving these families in a burning building,’” Kristin said.

“The whole experience has had an enormous impact on him,” she said.

To date, Kristin said, James is the only person to have survived the type of cancer he had.

For more information on The 9th Floor Foundation, visit www.9thfloorfoundation.org.