All Graceann Bennett had enough time for was a quick Google search.
As the Georgetown forward hastily looked up the resume of her newly named head coach, Tasha Butts, she became immersed in Butts’ impressive basketball track record. A playing career at Tennessee under coaching legend Pat Summitt. A former pro player in the WNBA and overseas. A 16-year assistant coaching career that spanned several power programs.
“We knew that she was elite as a player and as a coach,” Bennett said.
The day that Georgetown announced Butts’ hiring as the 11th head coach in program history was the same day she met with her team. As the first-time head coach stood in front of her new players, she sensed the anxious nature of the group.
“You can relax,” Butts told them. “I’m nervous, too.”
Excitement around the program’s future under Butts was high, with Butts ready to sprint into a role that had been long-awaited on her coaching journey.
“She was extremely excited about leading this program,” said Georgetown interim head coach Darnell Haney. “She talked about it all the time.”
Butts, however, would never get the opportunity to take the sideline with her Georgetown team. On Oct. 22, just two weeks before Georgetown’s season opener, the school announced that Butts had tragically died after living with breast cancer for two years.
As the Hoyas move through this college basketball season, they’ve done so with resilience and a motivation to honor their head coach with each and every game.
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In one of the first team meetings Butts conducted with the Hoyas, she presented a PowerPoint that laid out her vision for the future of Georgetown basketball. Her expectations, the standards that she expected her players to follow. A program in her image.
Butts began implementing those standards in that first meeting. Make eye contact when she’s speaking. Put your phone away. We sit together as a team. We don’t eat during meetings. She’d run down Summitt’s famed Definite Dozen rules for success and aimed to instill those standards within her own program.
“That was the first minute of interactions, her just setting the standard for how every practice and time together would go,” Bennett said. “She definitely had a vision for where we were going.”
For Butts, coaching was a calling. More than that, it was a lifestyle. She prided herself on being a player’s coach. She was honest, candid, never afraid of telling a player what they needed to hear one minute and be their biggest cheerleader the next.
Most importantly for Butts, she relished the opportunity to serve others, and was excited to have her players succeed not only through her program, but through the life lessons of basketball.
“She wanted to uplift young women and impact young women so that they could impact the world,” Haney said.
During the summer months, Butts, who was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2021, was in and out of the Hoyas’ summer workouts as she managed hospital visits in between team responsibilities. In their final gathering of the summer, she had the team trade in its basketball for a game of wiffle ball and kickball.
When Haney returned to campus for a coaching staff meeting in late August, Butts wasn’t in attendance. Unexpectedly, Butts had to undergo a procedure for her condition. Though she returned to campus shortly after, the effects of the procedure began to visibly take its toll. Butts, however, continued on.
“The procedure made her really weak. She really was struggling,” Haney said. “She needed help with [sitting in] a chair, a lot of different things.”
In mid-September, after going to the hospital for a follow-up, Butts informed her staff that she’d have to check back into the hospital for treatment. Butts checked into the hospital on campus, where staff and players visited her during her stay.
“They were able to talk with her, laugh with her,” Haney said of the team.
Butts never stopped being a head coach.
“We were watching film with her. She was trying to watch film during treatment,” Haney said.
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With her return to the team uncertain, Butts took a leave of absence from the program. As the Hoyas sat on the eve of their first official practice of the season, they did so without their new head coach.
Haney, who joined the Hoyas after being the head coach at Jacksonville for five seasons, was appointed interim head coach of the team. He held on to hope that Butts might be able to return by the start of conference play.
“We told her we had her,” Haney said. “We told her she was going to be just fine.”
In early October, tributes flowed in from programs across the country. Teams posted messages of support for Butts in her ongoing fight, using the hashtag #TashaTough which had been created shortly after Butts’ diagnosis when she was an assistant at Georgia Tech.
The hashtag represented Butts’ perseverance and courage and became an empowering symbol for others with cancer diagnoses. As she lived with cancer, Butts also used her voice and platform to actively advocate for equal access to health care for underserved communities through the Kay Yow Fund.
“To me, Tasha Toughness is as she was — being two things at once. It’s being really competitive and gritty, hardworking, stubborn and being a dawg. It’s also being empathetic and warm and kind and genuine,” Bennett said. “I think oftentimes, for women, society wants you to pick one or the other then shame you for whichever one you are. Tasha Tough is to be all of it at once and to be true to yourself and unapologetic.”
On Oct. 20, 2023, in a team meeting, Haney shared that Butts had returned to her home state of Georgia for treatment and to be with family. Just two days later, Haney gathered the team once more to inform it that Butts had died.
In lieu of the team’s scheduled practice, the players divided into position groups and along with managers and staff made posters in tribute to Butts. They hung the posters up in their practice facility and touch them every day before taking the floor.
“They only spent a short amount of time with Coach Tasha, but that short amount of time was very impactful on them and on me and on our staff,” Haney said. “They were going to honor her in their play, honor her in their academic endeavors and just honor her in everything that they did.”
There was a consensus amongst players and staff that it was important that the team’s next step be a return to play – as it’s believed it would have been what Butts had wanted for the program.
“She would have wanted us to keep pursuing our purpose and working hard, love on each other and get that work in,” Bennett said. “That was what we did next and are continuing to do today.”
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Under the leadership of Haney, the Hoyas (16-9) have managed to put forth one of their best seasons in recent years. With four games to play in the regular season, Georgetown has already surpassed last year’s win total and will finish with a winning record for the first time since 2018-19.
The key to Georgetown’s success has been defense. The Hoyas boast the top scoring defense in the Big East.
“If we don’t play defense, we don’t have a chance. Them being the people that they are, and we feel like defense is something you can control, they decided, ‘let’s try this.’ Then they started to see success,” Haney said. “Chick-fil-A sells chicken, Starbucks sells coffee and Georgetown women’s basketball plays defense. We live by that.”
“I think the staff was really helpful in, along with the standards, identifying as a culture what we do and what we don’t do at Georgetown,” added Bennett, who leads the team in rebounds and field goal percentage. “The players, we really started to understand what it meant to be a Georgetown women’s basketball player.”
On Feb. 4, Georgetown hosted DePaul at McDonough Arena. It was the first Play4Kay game of the year for the Hoyas, who took the floor in their special pink and white uniforms in recognition of cancer awareness.
During warmups, Georgetown wore t-shirts that read “Tash Tough” across the back. The same phrase lit up the LED display that stretched the length of the scorer’s table.
Nearing the end of the game, Georgetown trailed DePaul by a single point with 30 seconds to play. Bennett earned a trip to the free-throw line with an opportunity to give the Hoyas the lead. She missed the first free throw.
As Bennett has navigated the difficulty of the season, she and her teammates have focused on “doing right” by Butts, as they carry on without her. For Bennett, that means continuing to stay in the moment.
In that moment at the line, Bennett knew what Butts’ message would have been.
“For that game, she would have told me I needed to make the second,” Bennett said.
Bennett did, tying the game. The Hoyas went on to win the game 44-42.
After the game, Haney wrote on X.com, formerly known as Twitter: ‘We got one for you Tash!!’
“At the end of the day, our group was tough enough to finish the game out,” Haney said. “I’m proud of them for that, and I know Coach Tasha was extremely proud of them for that as well.”
