Spring Slam Fights Cancer

***Update 2: We have passed our 1st stretch goal and are on our way to the next goal of $1500! Let's keep going!***

***Update! We’ve reached our original goal of $800 so please help us reach our stretch goal of $1200 so we can do even more to help the fight against cancer!***

Who are we?

Spring Slam is an annual charity basketball tournament held at Northwestern over Memorial Day weekend on the Bobb outdoor courts to raise money for cancer research by bringing people together through sport.

Last spring, we launched Spring Slam as a student organization at Northwestern and executed the first iteration of our signature annual tournament. The two-day event featured students from across the University—undergraduates and graduates alike—plus a food truck and vibrant crowd support. Now in our first full year as a student organization, we have worked hard to recruit passionate individuals to join our team and to come up with innovative new ways to implement our philanthropic mission.

Your Help

The money you donate will go directly toward funding breast cancer research at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine in downtown Chicago. The doctors and professors at Feinberg have been doing incredibly innovative and influential work, and we want to help them achieve as much as possible for the cancer research effort. Note that your donation will be collected by a fund at Feinberg and will contribute to our donation totals for the year.

Our Mission

Cancer has a very personal relevance to our organization, and research toward its cure is the driving force behind our efforts. Last spring, a member of our leadership team lost his mother to cancer. This was a loss that was felt profoundly in our community. Our team, brought together in large part by our shared residence in Bobb-McCulloch, saw Spring Slam as a unique opportunity to channel loss into support and into progress.

The strong friendships we formed in Bobb had become an overwhelmingly positive part of our Northwestern experience and identity. Accordingly, we thought it would be fitting to remember this loss and the many people who have fallen victim to such a devastating disease by bringing the greater Northwestern community together right outside a place that had come to represent friendship, camaraderie, and comfort.

Sports bring out the best type of energy in everyone, players and onlookers alike. It is the epitome of exerting personal effort while recognizing the efforts of others, pushing to achieve while maintaining a strategic perspective, challenging others around you while respecting their abilities and their character. Sports bring out an infectious enthusiasm that spreads with ease, and we witnessed this. We watched friends rally around each other in support, and saw smiles on the faces of participants who put forth a heroic effort. The feeling of an event of this nature is inherently and overwhelmingly positive. Our goal is to capture people’s energy when they are at their best, when they are their most enthusiastic, for such a deserving mission. Cancer research is a large burden for humanity to bear and an extremely difficult challenge to take on, but we stand the best chance of tackling it when we are in a position to give our all and to encourage positivity in others.

This coming year, in addition to running our main event over Memorial Day Weekend, fundraising, and raising awareness for cancer research, we are working to expand our influence to the surrounding Evanston and Chicago area communities. We saw last spring, more than ever, that sports is an incredibly effective way to spread good intentions and spirit. Going forward, we will be working to bring basketball tournaments, clinics, and other relevant events to the youth populations of these surrounding areas. We want to promote sports as a means of establishing friendships, as a means of supporting each other, and we want to be a unifying influence in as many communities as we can reach.