The College of Wooster's men's and women's swimming and diving teams joined thousands of athletes from collegiate, high school, and club teams across the nation in the 12th Annual Ted Mullin "Hour of Power" Relay for Sarcoma Research.

The annual event features thousands of participating student-athletes from a variety of age groups.

The "Hour of Power" honors those who are fighting or have succumbed to cancer, including former Carleton College swimmer Edward H. "Ted" Mullin, who died from synovial sarcoma, a rare soft-tissue cancer, in Sept. 2006.

As part of the event, participating teams engage in continuous relays of any stroke for a full hour of all-out swimming.

When the event began in 2006, 15 teams joined together to raise team spirit, sarcoma awareness, and $11,000. By 2016-17, participation included 163 teams and 7,750 athletes. Over the past 11 years, participants in the "Hour of Power" have raised more than $667,000 for the Ted Mullin Fund for Pediatric Sarcoma Research at the University of Chicago Medicine (UCM) Comer Children's Hospital.

Money raised acts as seed funding for the UCM pediatric sarcoma research program. The Ted Mullin Fund has supported research into novel chemotherapy/biology agents for sarcomas, new ways to administer chemotherapy in this disease, techniques to visualize more accurately the tumor response in the patient, novel genomics strategies to identify high-risk sarcoma patients, molecular techniques to personalize therapy to maximize benefit while reducing treatment-related toxicity and treatments for metastatic or resistant disease that use the patient's own immune system to attack residual tumors.