Morgan City baseball team takes a swing at cancer

The Morgan City High School baseball team is raising awareness and funds for childhood cancer by selling T-shirts to the public like the one’s they will wear in two upcoming games.
The money is more than just a fundraiser, though, as Morgan City baseball coach Andrew Madden has a personal connection to the cause.
Madden said the money will be donated to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, in honor of Paisley Collins, the daughter of a friend of Madden’s from high school in Willow Springs High School in Willow Springs, Missouri.
Paisley passed away from leukemia in August 2016.
Madden, who played football and baseball with Collins’ father, Tyson Collins, said he wanted to find a way to help Tyson Collins and his wife Sarah after watching them and their daughter battle this disease.
“I figured this was a good platform to raise some money for St. Jude in honor of Paisley Collins,” he said.
Madden said educating others about the importance of helping others is one of his chief jobs as a coach, dad and person.
“I think doing stuff like this and making these kids aware of people that have had hard times hopefully makes them a more rounded individual and … makes them better men for down the road when they become husbands and have jobs and do things to make this community a better place,” he said.
The Tigers will wear the yellow and gold T-shirts in their District 7-4A game at South Terrebonne Saturday and again in their district contest at home against Ellender on April 6.
The yellow represents cancer, and purple was Paisley’s favorite color, Madden said. The jerseys also feature Paisley Collins’ name.
Madden said he would like the public’s T-shirt orders in by Friday. They can be purchased at Morgan City High School for $15 apiece. He encourages fans to wear them to the teams’ games in which they will play in the jerseys.
Anyone who would like to make a donation can do so by making checks payable to Morgan City High School, Madden said.
“What they’re doing is just so humbling,” Sarah Collins said Sunday of the Tigers’ effort. “It’s hard to explain. All these things that you hear people doing for you, it just becomes, you realize, your way of healing, and that there’s just so much good out there.”
She said when others do things on behalf of Paisley, it “just means the world to us.”
Sarah said her daughter was diagnosed with mixed lineage leukemia, which she said is a rare form of the disease, when she was 17 months old. Sarah said Paisley was just the eighth patient at St. Jude’s with that type when they sought treatment there.
While Paisley was in remission after five weeks of treatment, Sarah said Paisley contracted a virus during her last round of chemotherapy just before she was to come home.
“It just kind of overtook her lungs, and she was on life support for two months and ended up passing on Aug. 1, 2016,” Sarah said.
Paisley had just had her second birthday.
Sarah and Tyson Collins, who live in Rogersville, Missouri, started the Paisley Collins Memorial Foundation following her death. The nonprofit gives $1,000 payments to families of those with pediatric cancer in the region of Missouri where they live each year that their child is going through treatment. The money is used for nonmedical expenses.
“I don’t understand everything, and probably never will here on earth, but I do know that my husband and I, this is how we find healing,” Sarah said. “This is what keeps us going, just being able to keep her name alive and to help these families who are in a very dark place.”
For more information on the foundation, visit its Facebook page, Paisley Collins Memorial Foundation.