Cats charity challenge goes nationwide - Tucson News Now

What started as a simple challenge to Pac-12 rivals has gone flat NCAA.

Arizona Wildcats assistant women's basketball coach Calamity McEntire proposed to head coach Niya Butts that the program issue a nice cool summer cold water challenge to some of their conference rivals.

A challenge in which players and coaches would first, sit and have Gatorade buckets filled with ice cold water dumped over their heads and then challenge their rivals to do the same.

Butts, not a fan of getting her hair wet, decided to take the scenario a step further. She declared a donation value be placed on the challenge for coaches and a community service (hours) stipulation for players, with all proceeds going to benefit the Kay Yow Cancer Fund.

Yow, the legendary women's basketball coach at North Carolina State, died of breast cancer in 2009.

The Wildcats issued the first challenges just over a week ago and since that time you might say a tidal wave of challenges have been issued and accepted.

What started as a Pac-12 Women's Basketball thing has crossed over to conferences all over the country, touched the WNBA, encompassed media members and may now land into the ultra competitive college football world with Butts' challenge Wednesday issued to Arizona Football coach Rich Rodriguez and the Wildcats Football Program.

What has made this movement flow is video and social media. Each challenge is required to be recorded and team's then uploaded the videos to their website's or You Tube Channels.

The videos are then tweeted and retweeted and facebooked and shared. McEntire indicated Thursday that the hashtag #Chillin4Charity has been retweeted over 80-thousand times on Twitter and been viewed by 31.4 million people.

Copyright 2014 Tucson News Now. All rights reserved.