If it weren’t for the fact that Lisa Stomp was a physically active young lady, she might not have withstood a lumpectomy, a partial mastectomy, eight rounds of chemotherapy and 28 doses of radiation therapy.

“If I wasn’t physically active going into treatment, it might have been a different outcome,” the breast cancer survivor and fourth-year human kinetics student said yesterday. “If I wasn’t aware of my own body and what it was telling me, I wouldn’t have known that I was sick.”

That’s the message Stomp will deliver to more than 150 area high school girls when they come to the university today for Girls in Motion.

Now in its ninth year, Girls in Motion was an initiative launched by retired professor Marge Holman as a way to introduce high school students to new or non-traditional physical activities, and has been mainly targeted to girls who might not necessarily play team sports to stay physically active. The program is put on by Leadership Advancement for Women and Sport, an organization founded by Dr. Holman.

“Physical activity in high school is mostly all about sports,” said Sarah Woodruff, the professor currently heading up the program. “We’re trying to introduce them to healthy activity they may not know about like dance, Zumba and yoga.”

The program consists of physical activities in the St. Denis field house in the morning, followed by a healthy lunch and then a keynote address from Stomp at 12:45 pm in Room 140 in the human kinetics building.

Stomp, who studies movement science and hopes to go to graduate school next year, said she attended the program while a student at Catholic Central High School, when she was still playing soccer and running. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010 and went through her treatment almost immediately after.

These days she’s had to limit her activity due to a post-treatment estrogen-reducing drug she’s taking that can cause cardiac problems if she over exerts herself. She does, however, participate in a breast cancer rehab program which has been proven to help breast cancer survivors manage their weight while maintaining strength and mobility.

This afternoon, she’ll try to impress upon the participants that physical activity can be critical for preventing disease.

“When I was in high school I just thought it was something I didn’t need to worry about,” she said.

Dr. Woodruff said the program also provides a research opportunity for her students. Girls in the program will go through some baseline testing on their physical activity, and kinesiology student researchers will follow-up with them later to find out if they are staying active.