As Stillwater High School seniors Emalee Gilliland and Addison Harmon prepared for this year’s “Pink Out Week,” they didn’t have to search for motivation.
The annual fundraising week benefits cancer research at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. And both Emalee and Addison had people in their life who’d been affected by cancer.
For Emalee, it was this year’s Pink Out Week honorary captain, Justin Mills, a longtime track and football coach and special education teacher at Stillwater Middle School. Mills has multiple myeloma, which originates in the plasma and causes tumors in bone marrow.
“I’ve known Coach Mills my whole life,” Emalee said. “His daughter was my best friend all through middle school.”
For Addison, inspiration came from Kendra Kilpatrick, a beloved high school girls basketball coach who died of breast cancer at age 36 in 2022.
Addison refers affectionately to Kilpatrick as “Aunt Kendra” and frequently babysits her two children. In fact, the children watched as Addison and her classmates decorated the school for Pink Out Week.
Since naming OMRF as its Pink Out Week beneficiary in 2011, Stillwater High School has raised almost $130,000 for cancer research. The annual effort is led by the school’s Family, Career and Community Leaders of America chapter and its sponsor, teacher Jody Webber.
This year’s events included a bake sale, penny wars, a silent auction and nights when local restaurants donated proceeds from dinner sales. At halftime of the football team’s 66-20 homecoming win over Lawton Eisenhower High School on Sept. 27, students passed donation buckets, replicating one of OMRF’s most successful outreach and fundraising methods from the 1950s.
The amount raised from this year’s activities won’t be disclosed until after the final event on Oct. 29. But they hope to exceed last year’s total of $14,000.
Each spring, Webber brings her FCCLA students to tour OMRF. Earlier this year, they met OMRF scientist Jake Kirkland, Ph.D., whose lab is trying to determine which breast cancer patients will benefit from a particularly aggressive form of chemotherapy.
“Hearing him discuss his research, it was like a light bulb clicked on,” Addison said. “That was the chemo they gave Coach K. It was like, ‘This is why we work so hard for Pink Out Week.’”
