WOODBRIDGE The best Mother's Day gift for Julie Lehmann was sitting on the sidelines of Singer Field in Avenel on Sunday and watching her 9-year-old son Frankie play with the Woodbridge Wildkats.
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The players in the under-10 Amateur Athletic Union travel league team were thinking of their mothers, too. In a way, they were wearing their love on their sleeves.

When the boys walked out onto the field that afternoon with their blue and white uniforms they also sported bright pink wristbands.

It was part of the team's effort to help raise awareness for breast cancer and raise money for the Susan G. Komen for Cure Foundation, team manager Ezio Tamburello said.

With parents of both the Wildkats and the visiting team matching donations for every strike out and hit, the undefeated Wildkats collected $200 after beating the Tinton Falls Terminators 9-6 with 7 runs in the bottom of the fifth.

Lehmann, who suggested the idea to the team, was inspired by other youth baseball teams her oldest son played with three years ago when he was 9.

"We went to a Mother's Day tournament in Rehoboth, Delaware, one year and saw a few teams wearing pink shirts and pink socks for Mother's Day," Lehmann said. "The next year, I got pink wristbands for the players to wear in that tournament."

Wearing pink wristbands and swinging pink bats has become a Mother's Day staple at major and minor league baseball parks on Mother's Day perhaps making the idea a little easier to pitch to the preteen boys on the Wildkats.

Lehmann is not battling cancer and to Tamburello's knowledge neither are any of the other team mothers. But the team thought it would be a good way for the boys to honor their mothers and "raise their social consciousness," said Tamburello, who is also a Woodbridge school-board member.

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among women.

Last year, more than 182,000 new cases of the invasive form of the cancer, and about 68,000 new cases of the curable noninvasive form, were diagnosed in the United States.

There are about 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in the U.S., according to the American Cancer Association. Death rates for women under 50 have plummeted since 1990, the association says, because of increased awareness among women and screening exams, which women under 40 should undergo every three years, and annually after age 40.

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