For the University of New Haven’s Love Your Melon Campus Crew, a student cancer fundraising group, March isn’t about madness. It’s all about March Mania.

In March, the national organization holds contests to find the Champion Crew.

Every few days, new challenges of varying difficulty are sent out to every local organization nationwide. Every Campus Crew will compete for  chances to win new and increasingly more impressive prizes each bracket.

The most recent challenge was  “3-Pointer Pros.” In this competition, , the Crews must spread the word about Love Your Melon, and the work they do. The groups must creatively and accurately represent the Love Your Melon topic of their choice in the form of three facts. The university crew based their challenges on the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, a charity which, like Love Your Melon, is working to raise funds and promote research to “conquer childhood cancer.” 

Rebecca Spargo, a junior psychology major and public relations manager of the university crew, said that of a St. Baldrick’s display on a Bartels window: “That’s our work. That’s our creative component of how we’re going to share these three facts around campus.”

Representatives of the organization have also appeared on the campus radio station WHNU, and shared their three facts at a USGA meeting. Samantha Slaza, a sophomore theater major and a Love your Melon Ambassador, said the three facts the group is sharing are: “Over 470,000 heads have been shaved at 990+ St. Baldrick’s Events, St. Baldrick’s is the largest private funder of childhood cancer research grants, and more than $234 million have been raised and given to research centers all across the globe in 27 countries.”

If the university crew wins the challenge, their prize will benefit the student organization, and children with cancer. Members of the top eight crews in the country may visit a children’s hospital, or that hospital will receive a donation.

Slaza said the university group is motivated to win.

“Winning this challenge will allow us to help bring smiles to the children who fight every day for their lives,” she said. “Those kids deserve that smile, and we want to be the ones to put those smiles on their faces.”