McClure Students Swim to Fundraise for Friend With Epilepsy

At 1:00 p.m. Saturday at the Westmont High School pool, the Westmont Swim Club’s grueling practice was long over. Most of the team had left to enjoy their weekend.

Two boys were still swimming, lap after lap. They took turns.

An assistant spun a makeshift six-colored “Wheel ‘o Fun.” “Dolphin dives,” she called out. The boys launched into the porpoise-like acrobatics, up and down the pool. A few bystanders and family members cheered them on and kept a tally beneath a large banner declaring “HUGH-A-THON.”

The eponymous Hugh O’Donnell, a Western Springs sixth-grader, couldn’t be there. He has epilepsy, for which he is undergoing treatment at the Rochester Mayo Clinic. The two boys were his friends of seven years, McClure students Jeffrey Vitek and Charlie Mavon, carrying out the fundraiser they had personally organized and named in their buddy’s honor.

Going door to door, petitioning neighbors and teammates for per-lap pledges and flat-fee donations, the two had expected perhaps to make a modest $500—not a bad total for two kids working on their own. On Saturday, as they swam, their total was ballooning towards $3000.

“It just went crazy,” Christy Vitek said of the fundraiser as she watched her son swim. “It got passed all over the place. We’ve got people that we don’t even know dropping checks in our mailbox… knocking on our doors saying, ‘I heard your boys are doing this, what a great thing.’”

Jeffrey and Charlie have swum together on various teams since they were six. In the summer, they go head to head as members of La Grange Country Club and Hinsdale Golf Club, respectively. When not swimming, one of their pastimes has been hanging out with Hugh, perhaps playing video games or messing around in a park or backyard.

This year, that hasn’t been an option—Hugh isn’t around. So Jeffrey and Charlie found a new output for that energy: develop a fundraiser for their friend.

“We feel bad for him. He’s such a nice kid and he has to go through all of this,” Jeffrey said. “It’s been fun raising money for him, and we feel good to be raising money for a good cause.”

That good cause is Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy (CURE,) an organization devoted to funding epilepsy research. CURE isn’t just collecting a check—they gave Charlie and Jeffrey a full plug on their official website.

The boys threw themselves into their project, going door-to-door on a regular basis and spreading the word any way possible, with some parental help. For the actual swim marathon, they personally ordered Dunkin’ Donuts and Gatorade for the energy rushes.

“I’m really proud of them,” said Westmont Swim Club assistant coach Jason Holbrook. “They did a great job—they did everything by themselves.

“When I heard of it I wasn’t totally shocked—I knew they would be up for something like this—but the extent of what they did went above and beyond.”

For 30 straight minutes, 94 lengths of the pool, the boys did “rocket jumps,” “corkscrew” swimming and even a stroke called the “chicken,” all at the whim of the “Wheel ‘o Fun.”

It was preferable to more dreary freestyle or breaststroke, Charlie figured. “We just wanted to make it fun,” he said. “We didn’t just want to be swimming; we wanted it to be an actually fun event that everyone could get engaged in.”

A postmortem e-mail on the event said that the boys’ efforts are expected to raise over $4000 when all is said and done. The check will go to CURE, and towards helping Hugh and those like him.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey and Charlie are already considering how they might do a Hugh-A-Thon next year, too.

If all goes well, Hugh himself may be able to be there that time.