MBJH Spartan Council leads MS kickball

The Mountain Brook Junior High School Spartan Council has a new focus for its annual fall fundraiser. In the past, it has conducted a canned food drive and the Salvation Army’s Angel Tree project. But now thanks to former Spartan Council member Hamp Sisson, the Council’s new project is the Kick MS Kickball Tournament. 

In 2012, Hamp and a few of his baseball friends became aware that teammates Liam Powell and Ford Clegg both had moms fighting multiple sclerosis. 

MS is an unpredictable, often disabling disease of the central nervous system that interrupts the flow of information within the brain and between the brain and body. Symptoms range from reduced or lost mobility to numbness and tingling to blindness and paralysis. The progress, severity and specific symptoms of MS in any one person cannot yet be predicted, but advances in research and treatment are moving us closer to a world free of MS. 

Most people with MS are diagnosed between the ages of 20 and 50, with at least two to three times more women than men being diagnosed with the disease. MS affects more than 400,000 people in the U.S., and 2.1 million worldwide. 

Sisson decided that he wanted start a “fundraiser” for the NMSS Society to help find a cure for MS. Since its inception, the kickball tournament has raised over $47,000. On Aug. 16 of this year, Sisson passed the torch to Spartan Council member Paul Tyson, and in the most recent tournament, 14 teams of ninth graders participated, raising more than $17,000. The teams generated this money through letter writing campaigns, movie nights, raffles, bake sales, a barbecue dinner and parking receipts from the annual Peggy Faircloth Spartan Day. 

Tyson and the-ninth grade members of the Spartan Council will now lead the younger seventh-grade students and eighth-grade council members and students in conducting their own tournament on Nov. 1 on the recreational fields at Mountain Brook High School. This students plan to raise at least $20,000 to fight MS. 

The Spartan Council is selected each year by teacher recommendations and is led by faculty members Larry McCain, Helen Pruet, Derek Dearman, John Phillips, and Mary Riley Ogilvie. The purpose of the Spartan Council is to develop leadership from the student body at Mountain Brook Junior High.

-Submitted by Collins Clegg