Iris is number 33 in the front row



Athlete Profile-
Iris Butcher: The anatomy of an athlete
Blair Scanlon

She is a member of the National Honor Society, she was on the honor roll all four years of high school, and received Federal Hocking High School’s highest distinguished honor, The Principals Award, as a sophomore. And these were just her academic honors.

Iris Butcher began playing basketball when she was in the second grade. Her father coached her brother Ian’s Bitty League and she attended all the practices. She watched, and absorbed.

There was no team for second grade girls so Iris joined the fifth and sixth grade girl’s team. After just one year, this just was not competitive enough and so she joined the boys. With the boys she felt comfortable and welcome and she felt like she was playing at the level she needed to be. Sometimes others were not as comfortable.

“When I started playing with them, it was no big deal to me but it was the other teams that had a problem with it,” she said.

There was the problem of "cooties". Boys would refuse to guard her for fear they would contract the “disease.” Butcher was also taller than most of the boys and a few concerned parents would argue that she had an unfair advantage. Her mother even made it a point to carry Iris’ birth certificate around with her. Puberty would eventually catch up with the boys and Iris would have to make the transition to playing with the girls again. This was not an easy move, either. In her words it was “horrible.”

The years of playing with the boys taught her not only how to play with them, but also how to relate to them. Unfortunately, she did not make a lot of girl friends in the process. The style of play was slower, too.

Butcher wanted to return to the boys team but her parents insisted that she stick this out.

“You need to make them better is what they said to me, and they were right,” she said.

Eventually the adjustment was made and Butcher transitioned brilliantly.

It would be naïve to think that all of her talent was just something that she developed one day. Iris credits much of her success as a basketball player to her family supportive family.

As a young girl, she could be found dribbling up and down the streets of Amesville, Ohio just trying to get in as much practice as possible. This is when she developed most of her skills, when it was just she and her dad going over the basics. It would be a few more years until he would be her official coach but his influence in the earlier years was invaluable.

You often hear the stories about father daughter, coach player relationships that don’t work out but the one between Iris and her father did. “We would but heads and stuff but we never had a problem and we always worked really well together,” she said.

The car rides home from the game were usually silent. Not because there was tension or frustration but because that was the time both coach and player could collect their thoughts about the game. Then when they were home there was eat, again, and talk about the game. But the dialogue was not between coach and player- this was a conversation between father and daughter.

“When I got home it wasn’t my coach talking to me it was my dad talking to me,” she said.

Her mother has also taught her some valuable lessons off the court that have transitioned into her success on the court.

Butcher suffered some major set backs before her senior season. At the end of July while in Washington D.C. for a tournament, she injured her knee. On the ride home she was convinced it was just a bad sprain.

“None of us thought it was that bad,”her mother Rosemary said.

The news from her doctor was not in accordance- she had a torn ACL and meniscus. Her entire senior year was wiped out in a matter of seconds.

But her strong personality and the strength of her family helped Iris work through the injury.

“I told her everything happens for a reason, you may not know the reason now or even 30 years from now, but you are never given more than you can handle” her mother said, “she is also just very strong young lady.”

Just as she was completing the rehab for her knee, she broke her foot in a fluke accident walking across the gym floor. It took over 150 hours of rehabilitation with the two injuries before Butcher was cleared to train again. But it definitely paid off in big ways.

Butcher made the 2010 McDonald All-American Team, and the Top 25 in the Ohio Class of 2010 for basketball. ESPN ranked her in the top 100 in the nation for shooting guards and Kent State awarded her a full scholarship.

After years of recruitment beginning the seventh grade Iris had narrowed down her choices. She whittled the pool down to three schools two of which were in the Ivy League; Princeton and U Penn. Those schools did not offer Iris exactly what she wanted and in her words she “would have been settling”.

Her background of growing up watching the Ohio University Bobcats compete in the MAC led to a loyalty to the conference. But OU was too close to home. Kent, on the other hand had everything she was looking for.

So Kent State University is the next stop for Iris Butcher.

“There is a family atmosphere that they pride themselves on having and I felt as a player and student I would fit in really well at Kent,” she said.

Butcher’s family in Federal Hocking will miss her, though.

“I’m going to be a basket case,” her mother said.

She has no fears for her daughter in the transition but she does worry that she and her husband will have a tough time adjusting to their first experience as empty nesters.

It will be a transition for all and there a few worries that Iris has but she plans to succeed. “I think I will probably be one of those kids who calls her mom everyday asking, ‘what are you guys eating?’ and I worry about being homesick but I think by the fall I will be ready to go,” she said.