With win, school ties series record with Clemson
By around 7:40 p.m. Friday, Anna Drew Jackson was panicking.
The fourth-year exercise science student had just found out how many people representing USC had given blood over the past week — 3,655 — and she was minutes away from learning how many at Clemson had.
Twenty minutes later, representatives of both schools called each other. USC had officially won the Carolina/Clemson Blood Drive, and Jackson, who coordinated the drive for USC, started crying.
“Just relief was probably the biggest emotion,” Jackson said.
It was the fifth-straight year USC has won the competition that pits the in-state rivals against each other in the week before their football teams meet, Jackson said.
And this year, South Carolina tied the overall series. Now, each school has won 14.
In all, the drive brought out 7,189 donors, including 3,534 from Clemson, a relatively tight margin caused by a decrease in USC’s numbers and an increase in Clemson’s, according to Jamie Muldrow, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross’ South Carolina Blood Services Region.
Last year, 4,079 donors came out for USC, more than 1,000 more than Clemson brought.
But throughout the week, Jackson had no idea how USC was doing, since the two schools have done away with their tradition of checking in with each other midway through the week.
Now, with “one of the hardest weeks physically and emotionally” behind her, one she’d been planning since January, Jackson said she could step back and appreciate the impact the drive had beyond the rivalry.
It brought in enough donors to help more than 21,000 people, Muldrow said, and it’ll be sent to fulfill local needs first, before being sent across the country.
Muldrow thinks the drive has impacts in the long term, too. It brings in droves of new donors, she said, and many of them keep giving blood years into the future.
“What’s really exciting is that over the years we’ve seen lots of donors coming back year after year,” Muldrow said. “They may have starting giving blood as a freshman in college, and now they’ve become a longtime donor.”
That’s why Muldrow thinks the drive, one of the largest in the state, is a good opportunity — one that leverages a passionate rivalry to benefit thousands — and she’s happy that both schools did as well as they did.
“The more successful it is, the more patients we’re able to help,” Muldrow said.