Southlake hosts annual Relay for Life

Southlake hosted its third Relay for Life, but organizers had to again contend with inclement weather.

The third annual Southlake Relay for Life event was scheduled from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday at Carroll High School. However, due to the rain, organizers were forced to end the event early and pull everything inside.

"We had to bring almost the whole event inside. Because of the rain pattern on Friday, we thought we'd be going inside, but then the weather got better. We celebrated Rachel's rally outside, but midway through, we had to move inside," said Kristie Millican, chair person for the Southlake Relay for Life. "All of our activities and vendors were able to move inside. Even with the weather, we had a full house for the event."

Event organizers expected to have more than 2,000 participants and another couple thousand spectators are expected. Millican said they had about 1,900 participants and about 5,000 people involved with the event.

"Each year our goal is to have more people than the last year, but we ended up with fewer participants than last year," Millican said. "Our first year, we were named the 'rookie event of the year' by the American Cancer Society. However both the second and third year of the event, we've had rain on the day of the events, which affected turnout."

Millican said they were hoping to raise $275,000 this year. The first year the event raised $200,000 and last year it raised $250,000.

"Money is still trickling in, but right now we're expecting that we raised about $200,000," Millican said. "We got very close to our goal for participants, so we're very pleased to see that we hit that mark."

The theme for this year's event was "The power of change begins with me." Organizers encouraged people to take PowerAde bottle and fill it with silver coins, which would raise $75.

Southlake brought the Relay for Life event to the city in conjunction with Rachel's Challenge, which is district-wide initiative of being kind to others. Rachel's Challenge is nationwide as well and began after the Columbine shootings.

"One of our students asked if we could do a relay as a culminating event at the end of the year," Millican said. "Within just a few months we were able to get approval for a race. The American Cancer Society gave us a goal of $50,000 for the first year, they were quite impressed with us our first year."

Organizers are calling this year's event a success.

"We held a survivor's dinner and had great participation for that. We also had survivors begin the relay. Seeing survivors begin the race was motivating," Millican said. "We will start planning for next year's event about nine months ahead of the event. Every year there are things that we think we can improve on. For this year's we still have a scheduled wrap up celebration where we'll hand out awards and give people one more chance to donate in person."

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