During the week-long event UNM will try to defend its title. Last year UNM defeated NMSU by donating 402 units of blood compared to 283 donated by NMSU.
Abraham Chacon, a regional donor recruitment manager for the United Blood Services, a non-profit community blood center, said the event will create awareness among faculty, staff and students of UNM and NMSU.
“After this week we will have enough blood donations that will help the local patients and hospitals,” Chacon said. “It is a fun event. This is our second annual event and so far it has been really positive.”
Chacon thinks that NMSU will try harder this year to beat UNM to settle the scores, he said.
“NMSU community heard about the news that they got beat so they are trying to come back this year and get more donations than UNM,” he said.
However, Chacon said beating UNM will be a difficult task.
“UNM has the right people and hopefully they will be able to overcome NMSU,” he said. “People can come out save a life and at the same time get a nice T-shirt and take pride in knowing that they are donating on behalf of UNM to beat NMSU,” he said.
This year United Blood Services officials are expecting to get at least 600 bags of blood from UNM, he said.
“I know we can do it. We are asking all Lobos to come out and support this cause. We are located here at the SUB. We want to beat NMSU,” he said.
As part of the competition United Blood Services will setup another blood donation camp at NMSU after two weeks, he said.
Winner of the competition will be announced by the end of February, he said. Andrea Hart, student activities specialist at the Student Activities Center, said that the initial aim of the event was to benefit both communities.
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“Win or lose, the event really benefits both communities. We are learning every year we do it,” she said. “This is only our second year doing a blood drive against NMSU. They do a week long blood drive at the same time and the winner is the person that collects most units of blood.”
This year UNM has expanded this drive to North Campus in order to involve more people and get more donations, she said.
“We are sending blood mobiles to North Campus. It will help community on the North Campus to participate in the drive,” Hart said.
NMSU also has a blood drive rivalry with UTEP, which is called I-10 College Coalition Blood Drive, according to the United Blood Services’ website.
“United Blood Services officials came and asked us if NMSU challenged UNM, we would be interested in doing a week long blood drive or not,” Hart Said. “We agreed.”
Raquee Rivera, communications director for ASUNM’s Community Experience program, said that Lobos were confident of winning the competition.
“We are hoping to keep the crown. We won last year and we just got to keep that title. We are hoping to get a lot of people,” she said.
Sayyed Shah is the assistant news editor at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at assistant-news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @mianfawadshah
