COLLEGE PARK — Three years ago, Maryland women’s basketball standouts Angel Reese, Diamond Miller and Ashley Owusu sat for an interview inside Xfinity Center with program legends Marissa Coleman and Crystal Langhorne. The 2021-22 regular season had been a mild disappointment for the Terps, marred by injuries, illness and an inconsistent defense, but there was hope for the future, near and distant.

Maryland was a No. 4 seed in that NCAA tournament, and Reese, Miller and Owusu all had at least another year of eligibility. Coleman and Langhorne, members of the Terps’ 2006 NCAA title-winning team, had been unlikely champions themselves, reaching the sport’s mountaintop in a lineup with two freshman and two sophomore starters. They regaled the Terps’ trio with stories of their own playing days. There were laughs and regrets and cautionary tales.

“Because you’re young, sometimes you take things for granted,” Langhorne said. “Your college career is going to be gone in a second, and nothing’s ever going to be like it again.”

Three weeks later, everything had changed in College Park. Reese and Owusu were in the transfer portal, their Maryland careers over, bound for LSU and Virginia Tech, respectively. The Terps, eliminated in the Sweet 16, were ill-equipped for the arms races of the sport’s new name, image and likeness era. The coaching staff was reckoning with a generation of players transformed by social media, by the coronavirus pandemic, by the sport’s burgeoning popularity and player empowerment era.

Assistant coach Kaitlynn Fratz remembered how much of a resource Betsy Butterick, a communication specialist and former women’s basketball coach, had been for her over the years. “There’s people out there that professionally know more than we do,” Fratz said Sunday. She’d mentioned her expertise to coach Brenda Frese. One day, Frese asked to put them in touch. Frese and Butterick connected in the summer, as Maryland was welcoming nine newcomers to its team.

“I think the timing was perfect,” Frese said Friday, a day before the fourth-seeded Terps’ NCAA tournament win over Norfolk State moved them into a second-round matchup Monday night with fifth-seeded Alabama in College Park. “She’s been nothing short of amazing.”

Butterick’s role on the team is not full time — she meets with Maryland about once a month for a couple of days — but Frese said she’s “like having another assistant coach.” The impact of her messaging, according to players and coaches, has been far-reaching, facilitating communication and fostering self-improvement.

Frese has twin 17-year-old sons and a coaching staff with a handful of young assistants, but she was wary of a widening communication gap with Generation Z, the demographic cohort born from the mid- to late 1990s to the early 2010s. Butterick said Frese was “looking for every advantage that you can create in order to really work toward collaborative success as quickly as possible,” even if it meant changing her leadership style.

“For someone who’s achieved the success that she has, for someone who’s been at the top of the game in their field for as long as she has, she’s not someone that needs to be open to learning and development,” Butterick said. “But she is, and I think that’s part of why she’s seen the success that she’s seen for as long as she has. Brenda lets me coach her. She lets me tell her hard things, unpopular things. She trusts me to provide whatever’s needed every time I meet with the team. She lets me play. …”

She added: “So much of my work over the last five years is helping coaches figure out why what they’ve historically done is no longer resonating in the same way.”

The internet has a lot to do with it. Maryland’s roster grew up in the age of social media; Instagram was launched in 2010, Snapchat a year later and TikTok in 2016. Butterick said some coaches she’s worked with have tried to regulate phone use, and Fratz said the Terps’ staff at one point considered taking their players’ phones away. Then they realized they all had another phone, iPad or laptop anyway.

Butterick and Maryland’s staff see more value in educating the team about responsible phone use and accounting for the broader hazards of technology. Fratz said they remind players about the link between athletic performance and a good night’s sleep. Butterick looks during the season for opportunities for face-to-face interactions, which have dwindled in an increasingly isolated — if increasingly connected — digital realm.

“Being a student-athlete in 2025 has its perks,” senior forward Christina Dalce said, “and it definitely has its downfalls.”

Some of the good: the NIL deals, the nationally televised platforms, the social media attention. Some of the bad: also the NIL deals, nationally televised platforms and social media attention. Dalce said she tries not to get caught up with any of it, even if some noise slips through her firewall. A weeks-old trolling comment on one of her Instagram posts after Maryland’s blowout loss to Michigan in the Big Ten Conference tournament quarterfinals this month was still on her mind Friday.

“I think a lot has really changed since we’ve been out of COVID,” Frese said. “There just seems to be a lot more stress, and there’s a lot more pressure. I mean, you look at these kind of television stations, print and radio, all of it, that wasn’t even here when I got here [in 2002]. So just to see how much the game and the pressures have changed, having that empathy for them, each and every day, of what they’re juggling and then having a staff that is here for all of them, [is important].”

But the internet can be an unkind place. Butterick said young people have been “disproportionately conditioned to value the opinions of others,” leading to a rise in depression and anxiety. Gen Z is also often viewed as the most emotionally self-aware generation. “We’re very empathetic,” Dalce said, before pretending to wipe away a tear. “Maybe some of us, a little too empathetic.”

Dalce, a Villanova transfer who started almost every game for the Wildcats last season, was struggling with her self-image when she first met with Butterick this season. Her confidence was low as she worked through inconsistent playing time and free-throw struggles. She didn’t know why Terps coaches had such belief in her, she said, “because I don’t have it myself.”

Butterick worked with Dalce on breathing techniques and started a dialogue about how she could help the team. In her work with Maryland, Butterick said, Frese has embraced a language centering “good choices”: that making good choices — from how coaches address the team in practice to how players respond to adversity — supports better outcomes, on and off the court.

“Our job is to inform, and then they obviously make decisions,” Fratz said. “But, if you’re always making the decisions for them, you’re not really learning anything.”

In late February, Butterick traveled with the team to Bloomington, Indiana, for the Terps’ regular-season road finale. Maryland hadn’t won at Indiana since 2020, and a victory would be crucial to the team’s bid to host NCAA tournament games.

Before the game, Butterick met with players and coaches individually. One message she shared with the team was written on its locker room whiteboard ahead of tipoff, rendered as an acrostic for the word “STOP”:

Start with self

Take ownership

Offer solutions

Positive intent guide

Butterick watched from the bench as Dalce took the court with the Terps’ starters. She’d urged Dalce in their morning meeting not to get too high or too low, to create opportunities for herself and for others, to live in the moment. But, the first shot Dalce took, she missed. The first offensive rebound she collected, she turned over. The second, too.

Then Dalce took over. She hit a jumper and converted a three-point play. She made a layup. Then another. She would finish the game with 11 points, her most since mid-January, and eight rebounds. After the 74-60 win, Dalce recalled, players said it was the most fun basketball the team had played all season. “A whole collective, one-unit win,” Dalce said.

“That was the conversation afterward in the staff locker room,” Butterick said. “Brenda was saying, ‘I’m so glad you’re here because you got to see this is what we get to do together.’ And they were so proud of the team. The team was so proud of each other.”

Added Fratz: “At the end of the day, it is a basketball game, and you’re trying to have the best experience that you can out of it, so at times, it’s really hard to just say, ‘Have fun.’ But it is, really. When you don’t put as much pressure on yourself and you allow yourself to enjoy those moments, good things happen.”