The Colorado School of Mines men’s rugby team is off to the DII playoffs, but will be without one of their flankers, as Joe Brandenburg has something more important to do.

More important than a playoff game? Yeah, a little.

When he was a freshman, Brandenburg participated in a donation drive run by a fraternity on campus. Get your cheek swabbed and your DNA put into a data base. About half-a-million people are in that data base, which is used to match sick people who need organ and tissue donation with those who can donate. 

“They told me it was extremely unlikely I would even be called, because it’s so tough to match people,” Brandenburg said.

But a while later he got the call. A young child he has never met has leukemia. It’s a life-threatening condition, and the child needs a bone marrow transplant. Specifically, they need Brandeburg’s.

So in about two weeks Brandenburg will take a trip to a hospital on the East Coast and have bone marrow removed from his hip. 

“I’m glad I can do it,” he told Goff Rugby Report. “I was told about six in ten people don’t get the donation they need. They will take about 5% of my bone marrow and I know I won’t be able to play when we have a playoff game four days later. But the team has been really supportive, and so has my family. They were worried that I’d miss rugby, but I think it’s definitely worth it. I hope to play 7s next semester.”

The 20-year-old junior is a Petroleum Engineering major out of Texas. He didn’t play rugby before coming to Mines; instead he was center on for his high school team in Monahan, Texas.

Playing football and rugby, he knows a little about anticipating pain, and he knows donating bone marrow will hurt.

“I have been told it’s like being kicked by a horse,” he said. “I know I will be sore for a couple of weeks afterward, but I’ll be OK.”

And of course, the child who gets the donation will have a much greater chance of being OK, too.

Brandenburg hopes to travel with the Mines team to their first round of playoffs, and if things go well he might suit up later. He’s just proud of how well the team has played.

“We were expecting to be able to compete and do well in the conference, but we weren’t sure how well,” said Brandeburg. “We work hard on keeping the ball - coach tells us, we can’t score if we don’t have the ball. We have worked hard to be one of the more fit teams out there. But now we’re going to be playing teams we don’t know. That’s a little nerve-wracking.”

Right - that’s the nerve-wracking thing he has to look forward to.