Huntingdon borough, Mount Union borough

CHAMP: The Student Dance Marathon That Began in 2015

CHAMP stands for Creating Hope and Making Progress. It is a yearly campaign by Huntingdon County high school students that raises money to help local families with the cost of medical treatment, and it closes with a dance marathon.

It started with a request to a school board. In February 2015 a member of Planet LoveJoy, a Mount Union group, asked the Huntingdon Area School Board for the use of the high school for a first dance marathon, hoping to bring here the idea of the THON he had danced in as a Penn State student. Planet LoveJoy had already organized a Hike for Hope at the Thousand Steps in 2012, which raised $7,700 for four county children fighting cancer.

The first CHAMP ran from 7 p.m. on March 21, 2015, to 7 the next morning at Huntingdon Area High School, with students from Huntingdon Area, Mount Union Area, Southern Huntingdon County and Juniata Valley. The paper's staff report counted nearly 300 teens, and a student reporter counted 250. Planet LoveJoy organized the night with the four school districts and three dozen sponsors. It raised $20,000 for seven local children and teens fighting cancer.

By that December the campaign had widened to families, and county residents were invited to nominate them by letter. The second dance, in February 2016, raised over $42,000 for 11 families.

CHAMP's four-year total stood at $140,000 in 2018, and the county commissioners' minutes give the same figure. The commissioners' minutes for February 26, 2019, list a proclamation making March 1, 2019, CHAMP Day, and the paper reported that the commissioners joined the student captains on stage to sign it. That year's dance was at Juniata Valley High School. Student reports in the paper name five schools: Huntingdon, Juniata Valley, Mount Union, Southern Huntingdon and New Day Charter School, with captains from each organizing the all-night dance. The final tally was $61,547.35, for a five-year total of more than $200,000.

In March 2025 the paper put the 11-year total above $800,000 and said more than 100 families had been helped. The 2026 campaign closed on February 27, 2026, at Mount Union Area High School with $259,631.54 for 23 Huntingdon County families. The Daily News reported another fundraising record and a total past $1 million over 12 years.

Checked against the record. We checked the Huntingdon Daily News reports on CHAMP from 2015 to 2026 and the county commissioners' minutes for February 26, 2019. Without a subscription, the paper's site shows only the opening paragraphs and photo captions of these articles, so those are what we read. Some reports came from high school student reporters on the paper's Press Club page. The children, the student captains and the organizers are not named. Some things stay open. The 2019 minutes say CHAMP was founded five years earlier, which would point to 2014, but the earliest report we found is from February 2015, and the paper counted 2019 as the fifth year. The 2019 reports name five schools, and a March 2025 photo caption lists six, adding the county career and technology center; we did not see when it joined. We left out 2019 attendance because the reports differ, and we have not charted every year's total or family count.

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