Mitch’s twin Luke and older brother Josh are spearheading an ambitious public awareness campaign through the game they all loved - rugby league.

The MItch Day Memorial Bears will be sentimental favourites at the A Plus Contracting Hunter Valley Nines at Kurri Kurri on Saturday as they kick off what they plan to be an annual tradition of spreading an important message through the game of the people. 

“Mitch passed away at the beginning of last year with bowel cancer. He didn’t have it very long as it’s very aggressive,” Josh, who is the Kurri Kurri Bulldogs fitness and conditioning coach, said.

“When he was alive he really wanted to beat it and we had a few ideas and conversations about getting around to schools and work places and creating awareness.

“Before his diagnosis, he didn’t know what bowel cancer was and neither did any of us. We had no idea what the signs and symptoms were.

“Unfortunately, he didn’t beat it but we can carry on his legacy on wanting to raisie awareness about the signs and symptoms and what bowel cancer is.

“We thought a perfect platform for that would be creating a rugby league team.

“Creating a team we can play in local tournaments, the boys who play for us do social media posts.

“Before Mitch died one of the guys who was involved in the discussions piped up he had a bowel cancer testing kit at home and that he should use it.

“He did the test and it turned out he actually had bowel cancer  That was six months ago and he has been given a clean bill of health.

“If it wasn’t for Mitch’s ideas and getting this out there, who knows where he would be.

“It’s amazing the number of people who have those tests at home and don’t use them.”

Josh and Luke, the new captain coach at Aberglasslyn Ants with his and Mitch’s mate Chris Walters, said one of the most confronting things they learned about bowel cancer was while it was on the way to be Australia’s No.1 cancer killer, if detected early it is one of the most curable types of cancer.

“We were shocked and wanted to know why there was this gap between the death rate and successful treatment," Josh said

“It seems there is a bit of a stigma about it and hopefully having rugby league players out there talking about it and posting messages about it it will help lose that.

"It affects younger and older people. Testing kits are sent out to people when they reach 50 but it affects younger as well as older people

“One of our end goals is being able to go to workplaces and talk about it, quickly hand out testing kits getting everyone to get tested and pass the kits onto specialists.

“It will take a lot of money and we know it will take time, but in the interim we can raise awareness far more.”

Any type of blood in your stool, recent unaccounted for back pain and any pain in your lower abdominal area are some of the symptoms which can be associated with bowel cancer.

Josh said it had been a lot of hard work to get the team up and running.

“We had a few of his mates agree to play and then we decided to put together a really good team which could win some tournaments and had players with high profiles.

"We’ve got players like Laim Foran, Harry Siejka  who played NRL with the Panthers and Super League. Local blokes like Mark Taufua and his brother Baz we’ve got a really good team."

The Mitch Day Memorial Bears will have their official launch with sponsors at Kurri Kurri Sportsground on Friday night.

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