The leaders of Ashland Health Center and Comanche County Hospital, two critical access hospitals in southwest Kansas, might have become discouraged when state high school athletic officials warned them not to go ahead with a girls' benefit basketball game. Instead, they got to work, turning a modest fundraiser to fight breast cancer into a star-studded phenomenon that brought some of the biggest names in women's college and professional basketball to one of the most sparsely populated regions of the nation. By tipoff on Oct. 30, Fox Sports was on hand to broadcast the game, and Sports Illustrated and ESPN.com were telling the world how a small community with enormous spirit pulled off one amazing event. Benjamin Anderson, who has been Ashland Health Center's CEO since February, tells H&HN Managing Editor Bill Santamour how they did it.

To listen to more of the interview with Ashland Health Care's CEO Benjamin Anderson please visit our podcast page.

How did this start?

It began with an idea from a 21-year-old dishwasher [Joe LaBelle] in our kitchen whose grandmother had passed away from breast cancer. He asked if we could have a charity basketball game between a girls' team from our town, Ashland, and a girls team from a town about 30 miles away called Coldwater. But the state doesn't allow you to play any more than three current players on any high school team in a game like that without jeopardizing the season.

So then what?

We figured, we will use three high school players from each town, three recent graduates and then we'll get a group of celebrity players together. I went to college at Drury University in Springfield, Mo., the same four years Jackie Stiles went to Southwest Missouri State, now Missouri State. She made a women's basketball fan out of me‚ and I remember thinking she's from a town in western Kansas. As it turned out, Jackie actually bumped our high school team out of the state championships two years in a row. So people knew her well, not because she was the NCAA leading scorer, but because of how she played in high school. They knew her parents' names, knew where they lived, knew that her father worked at the high school in Claflin, Kan. So I called the high school number and eventually caught her dad on the phone—he's the track coach there—and explained what we wanted to do and he just said, "Here's her e-mail, here's her cell phone, she'll love it, give her call."

It took off from there?

Shalee Lehning from Sublette, Kan., who played at Kansas and now plays for the [WNBA's] Atlanta Dream was the second one who said right away, "I'm flattered you asked me, I'd love to come on board." Then two other former players from Kansas State, three from KU, girls from Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Missouri State, Wichita State.

Players weren't the only ones to join.

The KU cheerleaders said they would cheer and then of course K-State couldn't allow that to happen without them being involved so they jumped on board and they said, "Well not only that, we'll bring our pep band." Two nationally recognized television analysts out of Kansas City said they would be commentators for the game if we could get a broadcaster. So we went through K-State and KU's athletic departments and got hold of Fox Sports Net Midwest and asked if they'd cover this, and, who knew, they said they would.

And you got national coverage.

I was in an airport in Atlanta and picked up a Sports Illustrated that featured an article written by a woman named Kelly Anderson. I just put that in my back pocket and said I wonder if we could get her to write something about what we're doing. I called Kelly and chased her for about a month until she eventually called me back. She said, "I don't think this is something we can pass up." Joe Posnanski at Sports Illustrated ended up covering this.

You even attracted opera stars.

My brother's an opera singer in Cincinnati. He had a professional gig (on game) night, but hooked us up with a group called Sing for Hope that connects artists with causes they support. We found two young ladies [Amy Buckley and Kirsten Allegri] who are very talented classical vocalists and passionate about women's health and breast cancer. They hopped on a flight at 5 o'clock in the morning out of New York, got into Wichita just after noon, got in a car with a hospital administrator I know and his wife, drove two and a half hours to the practice session in Coldwater where they sang "America the Beautiful," hopped immediately in a car, drove 30 more minutes to Ashland where they warmed up with the Kansas State band and sang the National Anthem, saw the game and hopped on the bus with the band, headed back to Wichita, got there about 1 o'clock in the morning, slept two or three hours and hopped the 5 a.m. flight back out to New York. They weren't even in Kansas for 18 hours. They did that for free.

What was the reaction to the event?

Initially, it was disbelief. They just couldn't get their arms around the fact that it would be happening in their town, so there was some suspicion. What happened early on was we explained it to about a dozen or so movers and shakers, ladies in the community who had a passion for women's health and breast cancer, and who we knew would carry the torch.

Tell me about the night of the game.

Oh, it was electric. Three months before, the game sold out in two hours. The gym seats 1,000. For two hours before the doors opened, there was a line around the building. From 7 to 8:30, when (the game was underway), there wasn't an extra seat in the gym. Of course there were many, many people who couldn't get tickets and ended up watching it on a jumbo screen on the side of a semitrailer out near the football field. The local banks underwrote that. So it was a community wide effort?

Well, it was five towns united and I think that's what's most notable. In my experience, rural communities tend to be inwardly focused. They don't have many resources left so they hoard what resources they do have and in doing so they shrink until they wither away. These communities dropped those walls, locked arms and agreed to collaborate on something, understanding that if you don't collaborate you're forced to consolidate.

The game wasn't all there was to it.

It started with a practice session at 2 o'clock in Coldwater. We sold tickets to that. After that you had a tailgate party, and from the tailgate party you went into the game, then after the game you had a youth rally where Shalee Lehning and Ruth Riley delivered a positive message to the kids. The next morning, Ashland Health Center hosted a health fair at the grade school at the same time the little girls had a cheer clinic led by the KU and K-State cheerleaders.

And there was a health forum ...

Cynthia Cooper, a Hall of Fame basketball player, Olympic gold medalist and national champion on the college and professional levels, spoke about her mother's bout with breast cancer and how she lost that battle and may not have if she'd had an earlier mammogram. After that, four women's health experts led by a moderator from Susan G. Komen for the Cure gave practical resources to get access to care. Three of the women are breast cancer survivors and the fourth has a husband who is battling brain cancer.

What about the money raised?

We're still collecting donations [ www.wepacthehouse.org ]. Ten percent of it will go to the Kay Yow WBCA Cancer Fund. She coached at North Carolina State and was one of the winningest women's basketball coaches in history. She lost a 20-year battle with breast cancer earlier this year. The other 90 percent of the money stays local. It's going to be used for mammograms, pap smears, colonoscopies, well woman checks, any type of preventive care. Women in our communities can walk in, we'll give them a voucher, we'll pay for what their insurance doesn't pay. If they don't have insurance, we'll pay them cash, Merry Christmas, go get a mammogram. We're one of the lower income per capita areas in the country and a $150 mammogram in this community is a much bigger deal than it would be in Kansas City.

And there's a convenience factor.

There are mammogram machines about 50 miles away in Dodge City, but there's not a digital mammogram machine at this point to my knowledge closer than Wichita, two and a half hours away. So if you are getting a mammogram, you are taking a full day off work, burning an entire tank of gas or more and paying for a mammogram. Most women don't do that. "My kid needs shoes; we just can't afford it right now ... it's no big deal, I checked myself and couldn't feel anything so it's probably OK."

What's the plan?

We're negotiating rates to get a mobile digital mammogram service to come to Ashland and Coldwater to our hospitals. There will be strong social encouragement—is that the word?—social pressure to go out and get this mammogram because everyone needs to use it or we lose the service.

Do you have a broader aim for getting this project publicized?

Yes, we want other small communities just like ours, communities of any size, to see this and copy it. We want people to realize that if five towns totaling 2,500 people can do this, then anyone can do it. So we're hoping it's contagious. We're hoping that other communities just say hey, how'd you do that? And pick up the phone and let us share the hard way so maybe they can do it an easier way.

This article 1st appeared in the December 2009 issue of HHN Magazine.