Basketball team highlights importance of organ donation

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The 2019 Women's Chinese Basketball Association championship concluded just last week. During the games, an unusual team made a special appearance and got the opportunity to play for two minutes with some of the biggest stars of Chinese basketball world.

The youngest player on this team is 14 years old, and the oldest is 53. In fact, none of them have ever received professional basketball training.

Not too long ago, they were feeling lucky to get a second chance at life. Let's meet this team, on today's "Our Story".

"Ye Sha, a 16-year-old boy who loved playing basketball. He left the world on April 27, 2017. He donated his organs and helped seven people regain their lives. Let's welcome the Ye Sha basketball team with a big round of applause," said the announcer.

Five of Ye's organ recipients were organized into a basketball team. They all took Ye's name for their jerseys to symbolize that he is a part of all of them and made their team possible. The members, using different public names to protect their medical privacy, spoke about their shared experience.

"I am also a father and at that time, I heard my donor was a 16-year-old young man who loved basketball and had good academic performance," said Liu Fu (pseudonym), a team member who received Ye's lungs.

"Ye Sha loved playing basketball and he'd hoped to compete in basketball games," said Zhou Bin (pseudonym), a team member who received Ye's liver.

Four months after Ye passed away, a branch of the Red Cross Society in central China's Hunan Province, where Ye was from, organized the team in Ye's name to fulfill his unfinished basketball dream. Last month, the team got to play against a professional team from the Women Chinese Basketball Association.

"Organ donations are gifts to those who are close to losing their lives. If we try to find the meaning behind this basketball team, perhaps we find there is nothing else to say. Perhaps their goal is just to play basketball for other Ye Sha fathers and mothers out there," said He Yiping, the director of organ donation at the Red Cross Society of China in Hunan.

In China, about 300,000 patients need organ transplants each year. The ratio of demand-to-supply for organ transplants is 30-to-1. On an average, only around 10,000 patients get the donations they need.