Dear Friends,

This year marks the fourteenth swim since Swim Across America was launched in Baltimore and we are as excited today as we were when we first jumped in the water in September 2010. To date, Team SPLASH alone has raised close to $900,000. The Swim Across America Lab at Johns Hopkins, funded by this swim, supported the clinical trials for the ground breaking and life saving cancer drug - KeyTruda.

This year, Swim Across America Baltimore will fund a series of new and exciting research projects that will explore immunotherapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer, tumor environments of high grade neuroendocrine carcinomas, subtypes of prostate cancer for better outcomes and relapse factors of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL).

It brings us great comfort, pride and hope to support an event where we are able to know the researchers, the studies that are being conducted, and the breakthroughs being made to save lives and wipe out cancer.

This is what makes Swim Across America so different from other fundraisers. We know the impact of our effort and it is significant.

As our current team members know, Team SPLASH was formed to honor our son Alec who died on July 9, 2012 and who was a dedicated supporter of Swim Across America. SPLASH stands for Special People Like Alec Swimming for Hope. On this team we are so thankful that we are able to continue to support our inaugural honoree Pat Dayton, the poster child for cancer research. Pat is now eighteen years out of her diagnosis and we are incredibly hopeful for decades of more good health to come.  

We welcome you to join our team as open water swimmers, pool swimmers, volunteers and donors. 

We hope you can join us in this very important and memorable event.

Andy Cosgarea