Georgia Tech celebrates two women’s teams on evening tainted by sadness

“I went to bed completely on a high of our women athletes just dominating,” Thomas said.

On Friday morning, however, as she checked her phone, she learned tragic news. Former Jackets football All-American Demaryius Thomas was found dead Thursday night at his Roswell home. Leah Thomas (no relation to Demaryius Thomas) flipped from celebrating landmark moments for athletes she works with, knows personally and gladly holds up as role models for her children to mourning the death of another Tech athlete she likewise had served and admired. Tech supporters everywhere felt the same jolting change.

Tech began playing football in 1892, seven years after the institute’s founding. It would be difficult to imagine another day quite like this in Tech sporting history, when two of its ascending teams reached lofty summits within hours of each other, only to learn that a beloved star had lost his life at the age of 33.

“Just complete extremes,” Thomas said.

Just after 5 p.m., Tech middle blocker Breland Morrissette put down a spike for the match-clinching point for the eighth-seeded Jackets over ninth-seeded Ohio State. Tech volleyball players dashed off the bench, forming a happy pile on the court at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Ky., their advancement to the Elite Eight secure.

Tech earned a regional-final matchup against top-seeded and undefeated Louisville on Saturday, seeking its first-ever Final Four berth.

“We keep asking ourselves, why not us?” coach Michelle Collier said after the match.

Credit: Jeff Nunn

Credit: Jeff Nunn

A little after 8:45 p.m. and about 320 miles to the south, a similar scene formed at center court of McCamish Pavilion after the final seconds expired on the women’s basketball team’s 57-44 win over Connecticut. Young women wearing “Georgia Tech” on white jerseys ran to each other to celebrate one of the more significant sporting accomplishments of their lives, just as their cohorts had done in Louisville less than four hours earlier. They embraced and soaked in the adulation of the rabid Tech student section, the most vocal element of the second largest crowd for a Tech women’s game in McCamish Pavilion history (4,587).

One of the stars of the win, guard Lotta-Maj Lahtinen, said she got goosebumps.

“Every time we got a charge or a stop or a rebound or a score, the whole McCamish just erupted,” she said. “That was an amazing feeling.”

Both teams’ coaches grasped the big-picture significance of what had just transpired for their teams.

“It’s great for us to be here,” Collier said. “It’s the vision that we have always believed that we could create at Georgia Tech.”

Fortner spoke of her own goal for her team, to make Tech a “premier women’s basketball destination program,” one that top prospects in the state of Georgia and nationally automatically consider.

“And so a win like this, sure, it makes waves, it makes noise across the land,” Fortner said.

It was made all the more poignant by the fact that assistant coach Tasha Butts had informed players last week that she was diagnosed with advanced-stage breast cancer. Butts, 39, will be apart from the team at various times as she goes treatment, but was with the team during its pregame shootaround and then was patched into the postgame locker room via FaceTime after the win, one in which the Huskies were without reigning player of the year Paige Bueckers, but nevertheless were held to their lowest point total in a game since February 2006.

Said Fortner of Butts, “She was really happy.”

But not long after Tech’s upset of the Huskies, rumors began to circulate on Twitter of Thomas’ death, fears that began to be confirmed in multiple reports around 11 p.m. Within the Twitter world and beyond, Jackets fans who had been exulting over the success of the Jackets’ basketball and volleyball teams were now disbelieving and grief-stricken. To many, Thomas not only was a superior athlete, but a kind young man, humble and unimpressed with his football-star status.

“(I) just had such a high opinion of him, as everyone else did,” Leah Thomas said. She marveled at how he had overcome difficult circumstances as a child to succeed.

“Such a nice, quiet kid,” she said.

Credit: Curtis Compton

Credit: Curtis Compton

Men’s basketball coach Josh Pastner rode the same wave that Leah Thomas and so many Tech alumni, fans and students did.

The volleyball match was during his team’s practice, but he checked his phone for updates. After practice, he returned home and watched Fortner’s team dismantle Connecticut on television while he cradled his infant son Cason in his right arm and worked through game video of LSU (his team’s opponent Saturday at State Farm Arena) on his laptop. He fired off congratulatory emails to both coaches, women whom Pastner has praised profusely.

“I think it’s an incredible athletic department,” Pastner said. “I am honored to even be a part of it.”