Red Raiders Assist Local Medical Community

LUBBOCK, Texas – Red Raiders helping other Red Raiders.

That's how assistant women's golf coach Laurie Brower described her latest goal. No, it wasn't helping Sofia Garcia on the proper distance of her approach or how to read a certain putt.

Instead, it was finding the materials necessary through various members of the Texas Tech athletics department to create protective masks for medical professionals in the Lubbock area who are helping fight the COVID-19 outbreak.

"It was a simple text of 'how is it going in the hospital?" Brower said of the conversation starter that ultimately led to 600-800 new masks for the Lubbock area.

From there, Brower was told by several friends who work as intensive care nurses of the shortage of medical masks in West Texas. The shortage was so severe that friends and family members of several nurses and doctors had already began creating their own masks, using fabric and materials from what was inside a normal home air-conditioning filter as well as shoestrings to tie around the ears.

Brower helped organize the shoestring delivery after reaching out to not only Tech's equipment staff but others as well such as head baseball coach Tim Tadlock and his director of operations Joe Hughes as well as athletic trainer Imelda Garcia.

What she discovered was an immediate response, with hundred of shoelaces provided within hours. In some cases, certain sport shoestrings were long enough to produce two masks, only adding to the much-needed collection the group had already produced.
Laurie Brower

"Nurses are pretty tough and going to go in anyways," Brower said of her friends. "I was told some doctors were having to reuse their masks, which is just not safe. That's when the process of making additional masks sort of began. I'm thankful for Tech and the people here for immediately jumping in to assist."

Brower's story is only one of several from the Texas Tech and Lubbock communities looking to assist the medical field during this crisis.

Look at Reagan Collins, for example.

The Lady Raider women's tennis senior has been part of a team in the Honors College that has assembled protective equipment for medical professionals, using 3-D printers to produce facemasks with binding creatively made from Under Armour headbands.

Through the work of the Honors College team, hundreds of masks and other medical equipment have already been delivered in the past week alone to various medical facilities in the area such as a small rural doctor's office in Monahans, a small town in the Permian Basin, as well as in Amarillo.

"I reached out to Zane Perry (Assistant A.D. for Equipment Operations) and really got a quick response," said Collins, who is the daughter of Tech Associate A.D. Sandy Collins. "He was going to look in their stock to see what they had. They ended up ordering some and then Under Armour matched the order as well, so now we have a ton of Under Armour headbands to make even more masks."

Collins will join the medical community, herself, in August when she officially enrolls in the Texas Tech School of Medicine. She'll eventually utilize as a pediatrician the same medical equipment she is helping to create now.

At that point, she'll once again be turning her eyes towards helping others.

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Red Raiders Assist Local Medical Community

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