Faith Angelo, a Lynnfield High junior, recently played four consecutive hours of basketball at this year’s A Shot For Life Gauntlet, where she raised $1,475 for cancer research. That puts her in the top 10% of this year’s 623 participants, who raised a total of $295,029 for the Mass General Cancer Center.
Faith said, “People in my family have had cancer, including my mom and my grandmothers. Cancer affects so many lives and families, and I wanted to do my part in helping to fight it.”
A Shot For Life is an organization that raises money for MGH Cancer Center’s research into “Tandem CAR-T” immunotherapy for glioblastoma treatments. Glioblastoma is “the most common and aggressive type of brain tumor (that) carries an exceedingly poor prognosis,” according to the MGH Cancer Center.
ASFL was founded in 2011 by Mike Slonina after his mother was diagnosed with brain cancer. According to the ASFL website, that year, Slonina became the first person to shoot a basketball from all over the court for 24 consecutive hours. This marathon challenge style — “loosely symbolic of the struggle that cancer patients often endure in their fight against cancer” — permeates the ASFL events.
Since 2011, ASFL has grown into a multi-sport 501(c)(3) charity that hosts both all-level and talent-based, invite-only events. In addition to basketball, they have baseball, lacrosse, and football events. There is also the “Clash of the Badges,” a team basketball event for Boston first responders, pitting the Police against the Fire Department in a “friendly rivalry game.”
The ASFL Gauntlet, introduced in 2017, is an “all-star game” style basketball marathon that is open to players of all ages and skill levels. The Gauntlet has two divisions: the No Brakes division, which plays four-hour games, and the Black Ops division that plays 24-hour games.
Each division is further broken up by intensity level so that “players are placed on a floor that is comfortable for them.” Players “have free range to change floors if they want more or less intensity.”
