COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Too many people have personal stories with cancer.

Lots of people have lost friends or family members to it, but for some, that story pushes them on. That is what happened to Colorado Springs Switchbacks FC defender Jordan Burt, and has led him to encourage others to take his step and join the Be The Match bone marrow donor registry in honor of his friend and college roommate Andrew Smith.

“He was an awesome guy and we became good friends, he was on the basketball team and went to national championships. After school, he signed a professional contract in Europe. In the middle of the season when he was over there he found a lump on his throat and had to be rushed back to the United States and it turned out to be cancer,” said Burt. “There was a two-year process of chaos, both ups and downs and part of that was that he had to get a bone marrow transplant. In the last year of his life, they started doing these bone marrow drives. It ended up not working, he lost his battle with Cancer in 2015. He wore number 44 at Butler so after that they started this initiative, it’s called Project 44, and its goal is to get as many people as possible to sign up.”

Burt now wears No. 44 as a reminder, not just of his friend but of his responsibility to help push people on to honor his friend by signing up for the registry. As part of that initiative, the Switchbacks will lead a drive at Saturday’s match against Fresno FC at Weidner Field. It was an idea the club has taken the initiative on as Burt has taken a back seat this time as he looks to serve his friend’s legacy.

That legacy has already had results as it saw a positive outcome from the first patient to receive a transplant through the Project 44 organization. A young child named Deegan had his life saved not just by a member of the registry but by one of Smith's former teammates.

“What was really cool was that they did a drive at the funeral. One of his teammates, Chase Stigall, signed up that day and a year later he got a call and there’s this little boy called Deegan who needed a transplant and it worked and now he’s a healthy kid now,” said Burt. “One of the guys that was closest to Andrew actually signed up became a donor, and saved a little kid’s life.”

While the story of Chase and Deegan is an incredible one, there are many more like it, and there could be more if the registry was larger, which is the whole purpose of Saturday’s drive. With Project 44 still in its first few years of existence, a number of the other success stories can’t be made public as patients and donors are barred from being told who the other is in order to limit pressure on both parties.

“People think ‘what are the odds, I can’t believe that happened’ and of course, I can’t believe that happened but it continues to happen, because the odds are actually pretty good because there are a lot of people that need bone marrow,” said Krissi Edgington, media liaison at Project 44.

The matching process is so precise, every single area from the largest to the smallest needs to be a match between the donor and the patient. That makes not just increasing the size but also the diversity of the pool vital to improve outcomes for patients. That is something that hits Project 44 in particular as Andrew’s wife, Samantha, is of Thai and European descent. Given the broad range of demographics and nationalities competing across the USL and other professional league's in North America, the diversity of the league and its fans make soccer fans ideal candidates to add their name to the registry.

“That’s one of the beauties of sports, in general, is that it crosses all demographics, all races, and all ethnicities,” said Edgington. “So we love igniting the cause with one spot that can hit different demographics.”

The numbers for bone marrow donation has a big divide between races. Caucasian patients have a 75 percent chance of having a match, but that number drops severely for any non-Caucasian patients all the way down to 18 percent for mixed-race patients.