Life's Lessons

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Red Bank Elementary's Relay for Life team has had a couple of groups break off to form their own teams. It's part of the growth.

But now there's another team on campus. A team of children, under the direction of sixth-grader Delaney Hooven.

"I figured, if adults can do it, why can't kids?" said Hooven, whose team, Kids for a Cause, is comprised of about 15 students.

Delaney and her teammates will join about 28 teams and 325 participants in the relay, a benefit for the American Cancer Society in which teams raise money for the 24-hour walk. The Clovis Relay for Life starts at 8:45 a.m. May 17 at Clovis High's track.

The first lap will be taken by cancer survivors at 9 a.m. May 17. At dusk, bags with names of cancer victims and survivors will have candles lit inside them to light the way.

The walk will conclude at 9 a.m. May 18. One member of each team must be on the track during the entire 24 hours.

"There's something going throughout the entire night," said Sarah Gattie, co-chair of the Clovis relay. "Games, contests to keep everybody's spirits up. You go through a lot of emotions in this 24-hour period."

Gattie said the project has raised close to $6,000 in online donations -- that doesn't include what the team members have raised.

Delaney had no shortage of inspiration when it came to forming her own team. Her grandmother, Susan Hooven, was a top donor in Eureka before cancer took her life in 2002. Currently her grandfather, Robin Hooven, is battling the disease.

"She had done the Relay for Life for a lot of years, and she was the top donator from Eureka," Delaney said about her grandmother. "She got all the donations by herself."

Delaney has gone to the required monthly meetings for the relay, and, like her grandmother, has done as much as she can on her own.

"She's been talking about it for several months, since we went to the first relay meeting in January," said Mark Hooven, Delaney's father, who captained his own team a year ago. "She just decided this was something she wanted to do."

But Delaney's task hasn't been the easiest. There have been roadblocks for the 11-year-old, such as the $150 it cost to register her team. That took her and her friends about two weeks of door-to-door fundraising to accumulate.

"It's hard to put together a team when you're younger," she said. "You don't know a lot of people like parents know, and you don't have friends from other schools you can put on your team."

Along the way, Delaney has been helped by Tina Chan, the captain of Patty's Pals, a team formed by the Red Bank faculty and named after Patty Negrete, a Red Bank teacher who passed away seven years ago because of cancer.

"She only comes to me if she has questions," Chan said.

The two teams have shared fundraising materials, and Chan said it was Delaney's idea to sell them at the school's movie night.

"Every month, a bunch of kids come to the cafeteria and watch a movie," said Delaney, who has participated in the Clovis Relay for Life as a team member since the Hoovens moved from Eureka three years ago. "We sold cookies, two types of wristbands and a piece of paper where you can write your name and room number, so it shows you do support it."

Aside from that help, Delaney has taken the team into her own hands.

"She's really taken it upon herself," Chan said. "She registered the team online herself, she registered her friends herself."

Along with fundraisers such as movie night, which netted the team $77, Delaney has gone door-to-door again, and said she has learned a lot.

"Some parts are kind of hard, and some parts are easy," she said. "Most of all, it's really really fun."

Details: http://events.cancer.org/rflclovisca.