When I enter the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house on a chilly Friday in mid-February, I can tell the brothers are expecting company. The aroma of stale beer is faint, baked into the hardwood floors over decades of social engagements for a chapter that’s been at University Park for a century. But the place is clean, floors swept and tables clear, not a Solo cup in sight. Tucker Haas ’23 H&HD stands in the middle of the vast, empty main room, the first guest of honor to arrive at this place he’s considered a home away from home for 19 years. That’s how long the Haas family has been “adopted” by ATO and their THON partner, Zeta Tau Alpha sorority. Tucker was a 5-year-old Four Diamonds child with a heap of challenges ahead of him when he first bounded into this huge house, greeted by a hundred new big brothers who doted on him and his sister, Taylor, while they raised hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years to help Four Diamonds families like theirs.

But he’s been more than a guest here. Haas is an ATO brother and recent Penn State alumnus himself, a grown man who’s had, in technical terms, “no sign of disease” for 17 years.

A current brother walks through the front door and smiles broadly at Haas, only mildly surprised to see him. It’s just a few hours before the start of THON 2024, and Haas, the young alum wearing an orange T-shirt and an impish grin, has been to every THON for 20 years. Of course Haas is here, up for the weekend from Ocean City, Md., where he’s been trying to settle into his first full-time job after college. It isn’t going so well, but he doesn’t mention that now.

 

 

“What’s up, player?” Haas says to the student, junior Matt Geroulo, as they clasp hands for a quick dap between old friends.

“What’s up, handsome?” says Geroulo, who met Haas when they were high school students from different towns, both crashing in the room of Geroulo’s older brother Ryan Geroulo ’21 Eng during weekend visits to University Park. Haas knows multiple generations of ATO brothers like the Geroulos, has been to their weddings and met their children. He followed in their footsteps to Penn State, to this house, and ultimately, to the THON dance floor. For a long time, that was as far as he thought of going in his life.

“As a young twentysomething, it’s hard to find your path,” says Matt Holloway ’20, ’20 MAcc Bus, another ATO brother who considers Haas a close friend. “And as someone who’s had a lot of their path decided for them and built into who they are, that’s even more challenging for Tucker.”

 

In November 2002, Lisa Haas was a kindergarten teacher living in York, Pa., who coveted evening cuddle time with her 2-year-old son. She was rocking him the night she found a lump on the right side of his face; she kept pushing it with her finger, but Tucker did not seem to be in pain. This, Lisa knew, was not a good sign. Within a week, she and her husband, Chad, were facing a murky diagnosis of “undifferentiated sarcoma” for their little boy. In addition to the tumor on his face, the easygoing toddler had cancer in one of his right ribs.

The couple had found out they were expecting their second child a few weeks before this grim news. “They talk about your world stopping at the drop of a dime, and it truly was for us,” Lisa says. “I left work that Friday teaching, and I never went back for two and a half years.”

The cancerous rib was removed at Penn State Health Children’s Hospital in Hershey, and doctors attacked the tumor with 31 intense radiation treatments to the side of Tucker’s face, the likes of which, his parents say, oncologists had never tried on a patient so young. “They told us they really didn’t know what was going to happen as a result,” Chad says. “They thought it likely would kill the bone growth.” It did, but at the time this was the least of their concerns. A second opinion at Boston Children’s Hospital had resulted in a devastating prognosis of two years to live. The Haases refused to believe it.

The radiation burns were brutal, as were the relapses—at 10 months, then 11 months, then six months after getting clean scans. “We couldn’t get to the year mark,” Lisa says. Each relapse was to the right lung, which meant more radiation, more chemo, and more complications. All told, in five years of treatment Tucker endured 77 radiation treatments, hundreds of chemotherapy treatments, two thoracotomy surgeries that removed half of his right lung, and a stem cell transplant.

 

 

 

But Four Diamonds swooped in on day one, paying all of the family’s cancer-related bills and providing plenty of welcome distractions. At Penn State Health Children’s Hospital, there were weekly music classes and bingo games, unexpected presents and high-profile visitors for the sick little boy and his baby sister, Taylor, born in July 2003. And then in 2005, ATO and ZTA entered their lives, making the family part of their own and giving Tucker a more detailed road map for his future than anyone could have imagined.

Longtime THON partners ATO and ZTA have been the event’s top Greek fundraising duo since 1996. Every Sunday, ATO brothers wear orange THON shirts in support of their biggest philanthropic endeavor; Tucker’s favorite color was—and still is—orange. It felt, Lisa says, like fate.

At the time, Robby Schweitzer had been the fraternity’s only THON child. Diagnosed at 2 with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, he was a year into remission when Tucker came on the scene, stealing hearts and sympathy wherever he went. There was plenty to go around, of course, but Schweitzer, then 7, was wary of this new rival who would soon become a best friend.

“I don’t think I was very much a fan of Tucker at first,” says Schweitzer ’21 Lib, now 26 and also a Penn State alumnus and ATO brother. “I was the main priority of ATO and Zeta, the golden child, and then he came in, the cute little kid with the world’s issues on his back.”

The intensity and effects of his treatment, coupled with the support the Haases experienced with Four Diamonds and in their hometown of York, turned Tucker into a pseudo-celebrity. He was featured in People magazine, on the Today show, and on Fox & Friends after his uncle Matt Baker, then an assistant football coach for Central York High School, dubbed the football program “Tucker’s Team” during his nephew’s first relapse. The team sold T-shirts to raise money for the family, and he was given his own locker and a uniform to wear to games.

When he returned to school after an extended absence, his first-grade classmates all wore “Tucker’s Team” T-shirts to welcome him back. Everywhere the Haases went around town, people called out to Tucker and asked the family how he was doing. “It just got so big,” Lisa says. The year he relapsed for the third time, hundreds of Valentine’s Day cards showed up in the Haases’ mailbox.

At THON, Tucker and Taylor became known for their karaoke skills during the annual talent show, belting out hits such as the Black Eyed Peas’ “The Time” and “Boom Boom Pow.” In the performances, immortalized on YouTube, Tucker is at home on stage in front of tens of thousands of strangers, and the rows of smiling college students dancing behind the kid with the cherubic face and sideways ball cap are evidence of his solidified identity as a beloved THON child.

“I grew up in a spotlight, essentially,” he says. “All these people I didn’t know wanted to see me and talk to me and take pictures with me. I was the cute kid with the bald head running around.” For years after he was cancer-free, a sign with his picture on it was hanging in the entrance to the hospital in Hershey.

Throughout his cancer treatments, Tucker heard well-meaning people offer words of encouragement such as “I can’t wait to see what your purpose in life is going to be!” and “God is getting you through your journey and setting you up for big things.” The platitudes meant little to him as a child, but the weight of them grew heavy over time. “At one point when he was about 12, he really broke down and said, ‘Mom, what is my purpose?!’” Lisa recalls. “I said, ‘Honey, that’s gonna come. You just keep being you.’”

In February 2007, scans showing “no sign of disease” finally stuck. By then, the Haas and Schweitzer families were close friends, both hosting ATO and ZTA members multiple times a year for fundraising weekends and other get-togethers, and caravaning to high school Mini-THONs all over the state.

The college students continued to road-trip to York to celebrate the birthdays of both Tucker and Taylor, who’d “kidnap” the sorority sisters to her bedroom, soaking up some of the attention usually designated for Tucker. “They’d play anything I wanted,” Taylor, now 21, says of the Zetas, who made her feel as special as her big brother—unlike people the family ran into in their everyday lives, who routinely referred to her not by name but as “Tucker’s sister.” “I always felt heard and understood and never had to explain myself [with the Zetas].”

As eager as Tucker was to leave cancer behind, the treatments that saved his life left permanent damage that he would have to learn to live with. Radiation obliterated the bone structure in his jaw, stunting the growth on one side of his face, where burn scars are still visible. He has restrictive lung disease in the remaining lung tissue, extreme scoliosis that makes lifting and carrying things difficult, and lingering chemo brain fog.

The changes to his appearance and stamina made it impossible to blend in with peers. By middle school, the bullying started. “I didn’t have friends,” says Tucker of his junior high years. Between eighth and ninth grade, all his teeth were removed—the radiation had killed the root system—and he had to relearn how to eat using dentures affixed to a plate on the roof of his mouth.

The family moved to a different school district for high school, hoping that attending Central York High, where he’d been treated so kindly by strangers as a child, would make a difference. It didn’t. As their son battled loneliness and depression in addition to his lingering physical ailments, Lisa and Chad would sometimes text one of their ATO “kids” and ask them to reach out to him. They knew that the one place besides home where he felt seen as a whole person, not just a cancer story, was a fraternity house two-plus hours away. As soon as he had his license, Tucker started driving to University Park on the weekends.

Allowing their teenager to hang out with a bunch of college students might sound crazy to some. But the Haases trusted them as if they truly were Tucker’s big brothers. “We really knew those kids,” Chad says. “And we knew that he’d probably be the safest one in the house because they would have his back.”

Matt Holloway, who hosted Tucker many times at Penn State, recalls that it was even more important for the brothers to not be too protective in certain ways. “The bigger thing was letting him be him, let him embrace being just another one of the guys,” he says. “We didn’t want to protect Tucker; we wanted to show him ‘your life is bigger than your diagnosis and treatment.’” Together the friends played Fortnite and Call of Duty, watched basketball and football games, and “ate too much Chipotle, that I regret now,” Holloway jokes.

 

 

When it was time to apply to college, Tucker had a one-track mind: “Penn State, THON, and the Four Diamonds are what saved my life.” Moving to University Park and settling into college life was a game changer; on the days he struggled with his appearance, pulling a baseball cap down low to try to hide some of the scars, he knew he was at least surrounded by students who supported THON and, by extension, him. Here, he was a Four Diamonds success story with a built-in friend group of ATO and ZTA members who regularly crossed his path. His confidence surged.

Tucker pledged ATO the spring semester of his freshman year, turning down the brothers’ invitation to become an honorary member and skip the rushing process. “I wanted to join with a pledge class,” he says. “So in the spring, I went from the guy who always was here, to being the low man on the totem pole.”

He navigated the expansive University Park campus with the help of an electric scooter, electric skateboard, and as a senior, his own car. “I just wanted to be normal,” he says. “I didn’t want any handouts, I didn’t want any advantages. I wanted to do it on my own.” Each year, he worked his way up the ranks of ATO leadership positions for THON. As a junior, he served as family relations chair and helped to bring a new THON child, 3-year-old Gus Bomgardner, into the fold.

“To be honest, I was not really looking to be paired with a giant organization, just because that’s overwhelming,” says Greta Bomgardner, Gus’ mom. “And I wasn’t big on the Greek scene, so I didn’t know how I felt about [his] being around frat boys. But I said, ‘We’ll try it.’ As soon as we started meeting them, it became a non-issue for me.”

For Tucker, who doesn’t have clear memories of his own treatment because he was so young at the time, bonding with Gus offered a new, heartbreaking view of what he, too, had endured. And in Lisa Haas, Greta found a resource and support system for how to walk her young son through the horror and hope of cancer treatment and its aftermath.

Between his junior and senior years, Tucker—who was majoring in commercial recreation management with loose plans to become a golf pro—scored a six-month internship at the iconic Pebble Beach Golf Links in northern California. He cut it short by three months, eager to get back to campus in hopes of securing the position of THON chair for his fraternity, and with it, a coveted spot as a dancer in THON 2023, his last as an undergrad. Some of his friends were surprised he’d put his chance to participate in a single event over his future career aspirations. Others were surprised he went so far from home in the first place. The choice to return early, he says, was easy: “I wouldn’t have a future if I didn’t have this. I never really had thoughts about life after graduating college. I was just so in the moment and wanted to live that life forever because everything in my life was the way I wanted it to be.”

That fall, producers at CBS reached out, wanting to film a news segment on Tucker and his “full-circle” story of becoming an ATO brother and Four Diamonds fundraiser. They interviewed a handful of brothers who’d known him since he was a little guy singing on stage at THON, and they featured Gus and Greta Bomgardner, too.

The segment aired in late October 2022, and the response to it shifted something monumental inside Tucker. “I knew [my story] meant a lot at Penn State in the eyes of Four Diamonds, and to people in my local area. But I never understood the reach of my story outside of that,” he says. Suddenly, people all over the country were reaching out on social media to tell Tucker what an inspiration he was, many with stories of their own loved ones going through cancer treatment or other hardships. “I was like, Maybe I could use my story to take it farther than I ever thought I could.”

 

 

 

In February 2023, the Haases rented an Airbnb to host a couple dozen ATO and ZTA alumni who came back to State College to cheer on Dancer No. 122A in his 20th THON and first as a dancer. Dan Faust ’13 Eng counted 12 different graduating years among the brothers and sisters there to watch their former Four Diamonds child tackle the 46-hour no-sitting, no-sleeping marathon. Schweitzer was there, as was Holloway, who caught Tucker at a weak moment early Sunday morning and delivered the pep talk he needed. “I said, ‘Snap out of it! This is it, man. You’ve fought harder than anyone I’ve ever met. Let’s go.’”

By 4 p.m. Sunday, Tucker wanted, as desperately as every other dancer, to sit down. But he did not want it to end: “My identity here was being part of ATO and THON.” A nagging question formed in the outer reaches of his exhausted mind: Who will I be without them?

He had a chance to test out an answer the following month, when the New York City chapter of the Alumni Association asked him to speak at their annual Hope Gala, a THON fundraiser. During the speech, Haas told his full-circle story of being a Four Diamonds child-turned-champion—under his leadership, ATO and ZTA had raised a staggering $452,621.76 that year. But he left the crowd with four bits of life advice that added up to a newly crafted identity: Think; be Unique; have Courage; and be Kind.

In short: T.U.C.K.

 

 

Just after that, a serendipitous connection through an ATO brother’s father led Tucker to acclaimed motivational speaker Eric Boles. Their meeting seemed serendipitous for Boles, too: His daughter Madison, a college volleyball player, had recently finished a yearlong battle with cancer.

A single phone call with Boles ended with Tucker scoring the perfect mentor. “It took five minutes and I was like, I love this kid,” says Boles, a former wide receiver for the New York Jets and Green Bay Packers who transitioned after his playing days to be an executive coach, business consultant, and keynote speaker. “He has an amazing story,” Boles says of Tucker, “but his primary purpose is for his story to become a catalyst for other people to embrace their own.” That, Boles knew, was the secret to a great motivational speech: to use your story to bring the audience to a point where they’re thinking about their lives, not yours.

The concept was a relief and a motivator for Tucker, who started using a hashtag on social media, #EmbraceYourStory. But he’d scored a full-time job after college that utilized his degree, so in June he moved into his grandparents’ second home in Ocean City, Md., and started working as an assistant golf pro. It was fun at first, but when summer turned to fall and the beach crowd thinned and restaurants closed for the offseason, a new kind of loneliness set in. He still wore his orange THON shirt on Sundays, but he felt far away—from his friends, from THON, and from the life he loved.

Amid that first year postcollege, Holloway gave him a different kind of pep talk. “What I’ve tried to share with him is, you’re Tuck. You’re not ‘Tucker Haas, the cancer survivor THON kid.’ That is now a different era of your life. Try to do what makes you happy and puts you in a place that you feel like yourself.”

By the time he returned to campus for his first THON as an alum, Tucker had figured out what would make him happy: He was going after his dream of being a motivational speaker, and he was starting a nonprofit, the Tucker Haas Foundation. He’d already gotten official approval from the state, and he recruited friends—among them Schweitzer and Holloway—to help lead it. “It’s gonna primarily help cancer survivors navigate the next chapter of their life,” Tucker says with an excitement typically reserved for his thoughts on ATO or THON.

The money raised through the foundation will benefit cancer survivors in their next endeavors, whether that’s going to college or just trying to get back into a sport they once loved. College scholarships, tutoring services, and adaptive sporting equipment are all among the things he’d like to provide. And he wants his first hire to be a therapist on staff who can help survivors with self-esteem and other mental health issues.

“A lot of these resources are things I wish I had,” Tucker says, pledging to make the Bomgardners the first family the foundation would help. The friends also plan to help fund an existing research lab that focuses on the aftereffects of cancer treatment—chemo to the brain, radiation to the body—and donate to research endeavors aimed at a cure, too.

Schweitzer, who understands the challenge of moving from cancer patient to survivor, is happy to be part of it. “I see something that he can pour his all into,” Schweitzer says of the foundation. “I think he really wants to put into play that next phase for everybody transitioning from being a Four Diamonds child to the real world.”

Tucker took another step in that transition as he watched THON happen without him this year. “It was very surreal in a sense,” he says. “I got to see THON in the final stage of how I’ll ever get to see it. I saw it as a THON kid, as a student, as a dancer, and now I get to see it as an alum. I’d love to see it one day as a parent of a student. But for now, this is the final stage I’ll ever get to see it.”

Three months later, he quit his job, moved home, and threw all his energy into his speaking career and the foundation. Boles let him tag along on a string of keynote speeches he gave in Florida and New Jersey last spring, and watched as Tucker took copious notes and offered valuable feedback to the seasoned pro. “What Tucker is experiencing is actually a very common challenge that a lot of people go through. It’s difficult to retire from something without having something to retire to,” says Boles, who says he shared a similar struggle after he was cut from the NFL. “His identity challenge now is his greatest challenge.”

By June, Tucker had scored his first paid speaking gig, for Boston’s Night of Hope, a Four Diamonds fundraiser organized by the Alumni Association’s Boston Chapter. That night, he left the audience with a gentle, four-part directive: Think about what you’ve gone through and embrace your story; be unique rather than try to fit in just to be accepted; have courage to put yourself in uncomfortable situations to find out what you’re capable of; and always, always be kind.

Identity challenge: Accepted. “I think I’m doing more now for myself and the world than I’ve ever done before,” Tucker says.

 

 

The official launch of the Tucker Haas Foundation was set for July 25—his 24th birthday—but on July 21, 5-year-old Gus Bomgardner died after an unexpected relapse. Fifty ATO and ZTA members, a mix of current students and alums, turned up at the hospital in Hershey to say goodbye to their “little buddy” and support the Bomgardner family. In the weeks after, Haas wrestled with grief, survivor guilt, and the dread of knowing that staying on this chosen career path would likely lead to more heartbreak.

But he also started thinking about ways the foundation might help bereaved families, too.

“It’s still my purpose and it’s still why I’m here,” he says. “And now we’ll do all of it in Gus’s honor.”