ARLINGTON – The gym was packed with pink Tuesday night in Arlington for its eighth year of participating in the nationwide American Cancer Society fund-raiser called Coaches v. Cancer.

The effort empowers basketball coaches, their teams and communities to make a difference in the fight against cancer, said Heather Logan, who was emcee for the event.

ACS has invested more than $4 billion in cancer research since it began in 1946. There has been a 25 percent drop in the death rate – leading to 2.1 million fewer cancer deaths between 1991-2014.

As part of the event, Logan introduced nine local honorary captains and their families for the game that followed between Arlington and Snohomish.

•Jocelyn Dice, 8, a second-grader at Kent Prairie, was diagnosed with left tibial osteosarcoma last March. She has gone through surgery and had her last chemotherapy treatment in November. She is now going through physical therapy and will get a prosthetic leg. •Steve Willits, who lost his mother in November after her four-year battle with leukemia. She was also a 20-year breast cancer survivor. Willits has been involved with ACS for over 20 years, co-founding the Shoreline-North Seattle Relay for Life. •Byron Sjolund and his mother Mernie McConkey are both currently fighting cancer. Sjolund has tonsil cancer and McConkey leukemia. Sjolund umpires baseball and softball and is also play by play announcer for Arlington Youth Football. •Bailey Ceruti is the sister of Ava, who died in October after a nine-month bout with brain cancer. Last year, at age 11, Ava was diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma. For three years Bailey was a basketball manager, and Ava would help her out. •Jeanine Nichols was diagnosed with invasive lobular breast cancer in December of 2016. She went through five months of chemotherapy, had bilateral mastectomy surgery and 30 radiation treatments last year.

•Charleen Bawden was diagnosed with stage 2B pancreatic cancer in 2012. She underwent extensive treatment, but lost her battle in June of last summer. Arlington boys basketball coach Nick Brown feels “their grief and pain on a personal level” as he has known them for years. The coach and his wife, Caryn, are the driving forces behind this event.

•Cheryl Boatman is the wife of Arlington High School assistant principal Alan Boatman. She has been fighting breast and colon cancer for 16 years. Money made from the bake sale at the event was to go directly to the Boatmans.

•Ayden Rapelyea, 11, is a fifth-grader at Presidents Elementary. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor in November and has been undergoing chemotherapy, to be followed by radiation therapy. The tumor is already half its original size. The visiting Snohomish team also named an honorary coach, Larry Scherrer, who had melanoma cancer in his back. That is gone, but he has now developed lymph node cancer. He also is a survivor of open heart surgery.