By: Don Hawkins

The First Aid Services Team, better known as FAST, provides direct patient care at numerous events throughout Columbus every year. In many cases there is only one event per day, however on April 25, the FAST team welcomed a tremendous challenge…a concert with over 97,000 attendees, a half marathon with 11,000 participants plus spectators, and a Big Ten men’s lacrosse quarterfinal matchup all happening within 12 hours of each other. 

The day began with the Cap City Half Marathon. 11 volunteers arrived at the Columbus office at 5:30 a.m. ready to prepare and get into place to provide aid for the race involving 11,000 runners & walkers, plus thousands of spectators. The volunteers packed all sorts of equipment, including AEDs (none of which were needed, thankfully!) and set up at multiple points along the 13.1 mile course spanning parts of downtown Columbus and cutting through the Ohio State campus. When the race wrapped up some of the volunteers went home to rest up before heading out for the big concert that night.

In addition to the three events during the day, our region held its volunteer appreciation event that day and multiple FAST volunteers were recognized and awarded during the event.

At the same time as the recognition event, we had three FAST volunteers working the Ohio State vs Michigan Big Ten Men’s Lacrosse quarterfinal match on campus. For sporting events like this FAST is focused on being ready to provide care to the fans, and luckily no patient care was needed as campus began to fill with the nearly 100,000 people heading to Ohio Stadium to see Luke Combs perform.

Festivities around the concert began with a FanFest outside of St. John Arena at 11:30 a.m., we had five FAST volunteers working the FanFest itself, with four of those volunteers making the move over to Ohio Stadium for the 3:30 p.m. report time ahead of the concert.

For large concerts at Ohio Stadium, FAST provides additional teams on the field for fans closer to the stage - the same field which is normally occupied by the Buckeyes for football games. This specific concert also happened to be record-breaking, as Luke Combs had the largest attendance for an Ohio Stadium show to date! A total of 34 FAST members were on hand for the massive event with teams set up all over the stadium, due to the 360 degree center field stage. The FAST crew left Ohio Stadium a little after midnight with a busy day all wrapped up, but for some of those volunteers – they would be right back at it within days. This single day, April 25, FAST CSOR provided 500 volunteer hours to support our mission.

FAST will provide assistance at nearly 220 events, directly serving over 2,000 patients, and engage almost 190 volunteers in 2026, continuing a long tradition of serving participants and spectators at events in the Columbus area.