Completed Event: Men's Basketball at Baylor on October 10, 2025 , Loss , 74, to, 79
M Basketball
at Baylor
L 74-79
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Grand Canyon University Athletics
Photo by: David Kadlubowski
Grant-Foster follows heart's desire to health, wins
12/14/2023 11:55:00 AM | Men's Basketball, Paul Coro
After 2 years out of basketball, guard leads Lopes as national top-20 scorer
Last New Year's Eve, Grand Canyon senior Tyon Grant-Foster was ringing in midnight with his mentor and basketball trainer, Reese Holliday, when they settled on a motto: "2023, we back."
At that point, Grant-Foster already had lost his true love, basketball, for the 14 months since the 2021-22 season opener in which his life was in danger in a DePaul halftime locker room, a long, trying path from heart surgery to becoming the national top-20 scorer that he is this season for an 8-1 GCU team.
Grant-Foster, who had never experienced a worse health problem than an ankle sprain, had capped a nine-point first half with a last-second 3-pointer to give DePaul the halftime lead on Coppin State. He sprinted to the Wintrust Arena home locker room wearing a smile and woke up looking bewildered about his jersey being ripped open and the concerned onlookers urging him to stay down.
Grant-Foster had collapsed and foamed at the mouth before DePaul senior athletic trainer Michael Sommer resuscitated him.
"I just felt lightheaded and that was it," Grant-Foster said. "I passed out, got up and everyone was tripping. I was trying to go back into the game, but they put me on a stretcher. I was fully awake and coherent, so it wasn't really like a big deal to me, but it was a big deal to them."
Grant-Foster's heartbeat was shocked into rhythm three times as he was taken to Chicago's Rush University Medical Center. Back at his Kansas City, Kansas, home, his three younger brothers had lined up a row of chairs in front of the television to watch and wondered why their big brother had not returned for the second half.
Holliday, watching on his phone while on his warehouse operations manager shift, wondered the same until being updated by a DePaul staffer who said Grant-Foster had been resuscitated on the way to the hospital.
"I'm thinking he just got overexcited or overexterted himself," said his mother, Talisha Grant, who also was at home. "I didn't think anything as deep as a heart issue."
But after driving eight hours overnight to Chicago with Grant-Foster's father, Willie, and her youngest son, they spent the next 10 days at the hospital going from the unknown to noticing his changing heart rates on the bedside monitor. On the fifth day, doctors told Grant that her son had scarring on his heart and would not be able to play basketball again.
Still, the 10-day hospital stay ended without a precise diagnosis, an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) inserted by his left ribs and doctors recommending a follow-up with the Mayo Clinic's highly regarded cardiologists in Minnesota.
"I didn't feel different, but if I tried to do something, I felt different," Grant-Foster said of when he left the hospital and went home to Kansas. "I was like, 'I'm gonna be back on a the court and there's really nothing too crazy,' but it was."
While home, Grant-Foster went to an open gym for a pickup game with Christian Braun, a longtime friend, a former Kansas teammate before Grant-Foster transferred to DePaul and now a Denver Nuggets guard. With exertion, Grant-Foster collapsed again.
"That's when he figured out it was serious," said Holliday, a former starting forward at Toledo (2010-13) and Kansas City (2013-15). He met Grant-Foster when he was a teenager playing in a community center run by the father of former NBA player and coach Earl Watson.
By the next spring, Grant-Foster went to the Mayo Clinic and underwent a second heart surgery to repair the scarring. His world had been flipped for a baller whose voicemail said, "Hi, this is Tyon. I'm busy. I'm probably in the gym."
Grant-Foster returned for some DePaul games, where personnel stopped him from even dribbling. He wound up spending the spring semester at home with online studies and occasional team visits. He joined his younger brothers' trips to the gym and limited himself to set shots on the side while learning more about the game from watching it live and on television.
"His spirit stayed high," Holliday said. "He had his days for sure, but 'Yon' is the type of dude where if he's having bad days, he's having them on his own. The majority of days, he was upbeat with a positive spirit. That's his heart, though."
That heart continued to send him to the Mayo Clinic and keep him on the sidelines.
"God gives his strongest battles to his toughest soldiers, so it was something I felt I would overcome," Grant-Foster said.
On March 30, more than 16 months after the incident at DePaul, he had a Zoom set up with a Mayo Clinic doctor for a definitive ruling about his basketball future after a battery of tests.
Grant-Foster took the video call with Holliday on a laptop, where they hung with suspense on the doctor's opening words, "I've got some good news." He cleared Grant-Foster to play basketball again.
"It was an ecstatic moment, the best moment of my life," said Grant-Foster, who was screaming with Holliday in repeating their New Year's Eve motto, "2023, we back!" before he texted his mother.
"MOMMY, WE BACK," it read, causing her to put her watering eyes into desk papers at her receptionist job.
That evening, Grant-Foster and his father went to the gym with his three younger brothers, Holliday and Frank Williams for a court workout. That started a daily regimen of morning weightlifting and shooting and nighttime court work. Two months later, he began playing five-on-five pickup games without an issue other than rust.
Grant-Foster entered his name in the NCAA transfer portal, but many schools were reluctant because of his heart history and the two-year layoff that Grant-Foster would be facing between games.
After starring at Indian Hills Community College in Iowa after graduating from Schlagle High School, Grant-Foster chose Kansas over Florida State, LSU and Oregon. When he transferred a year later, he picked DePaul over Miami, Nebraska, Oregon and Texas A&M.
This spring, he took one campus visit and found the right home at GCU.
Lopes assistant coach Jamall Walker, who grew up in Wichita, Kansas, and played with "KCK" players as a rising prep star, had a relationship that connected him to Grant-Foster and had coached at Grant-Foster's high school in 2001-02. Grant-Foster now considers Walker to be like family, just as Holliday is a big brother to the Kansan with 10 siblings.
On his GCU visit, Lopes head coach Bryce Drew shared the background of a heart scare. Drew had an arrhythmia as an eighth-grader and underwent three surgeries within eight months before resuming his basketball path to college stardom and a six-year NBA career.
Grant-Foster signed with the Lopes in April and lived with his cousin, former Phoenix Suns player Ish Wainwright, until Wainwright was waived and signed with the Portland Trail Blazers. Grant-Foster barely was cleared to join summer workouts when the team was packing for a Bahamas tour in August.
In Nassau, Grant-Foster went from making 2 of 9 shots in the first game to going 10 of 17 in the second game.
The aggressive 6-foot-7 guard kept progressing until his GCU debut, which fell four days shy of the two-year anniversary of that fateful, lone DePaul appearance. Nearly three years after his career scoring high of 13 points for Kansas, Grant-Foster made 10 of 15 shots to score 30 points against Southeast Missouri in front of a sellout GCU crowd.
He has scored in double figures in each game of the Lopes' 8-1 start this season, including two double-doubles and four games of 25 points or more.
Grant-Foster ranks 16th in the nation at 21.3 points per game and adds 6.3 rebounds, 1.8 steals and 1.3 blocks per game. After never having multiple assists in 23 appearances for Kansas and DePaul, he recorded a five-assist game when GCU upset then-No. 25 San Diego State last week.
He does it all with the 2-inch ICD implanted in his left side. The device, which detects and stops irregular heartbeats, prompted his friends to nickname him "Tyon Stark" a nod to Tony Stark's chest-implanted energy source in "Iron Man."
"Sitting out two years and coming back and doing what he's doing, at the end of the day, is really, really impressive with how quick he is playing and doing this well," Drew said. "He's only going to get better as the season goes along."
NBA scouts have begun to watch GCU games in person more often with Grant-Foster shooting 49% from the field, 34% from 3-point range and 74% from the free throw line and progressing defensively. Even nine games deep, Grant-Foster still feels like he will become more explosive with him estimating his legs to be at 80%.
After growing up modeling his game after NBA stars Paul George and Jamal Crawford, Grant-Foster's attacking style in half-court offense, transition and board work has resulted in 78 free throw attempts, the 10th most in the nation.
"I always had the confidence in myself," Grant-Foster said while wearing a "Hi Mom" hoodie. "I have a different appreciation for basketball because you never know when something you love can be taken away from you. So you just cherish, not even basketball, but loved ones and stuff even more that you take for granted.
"It's going better than what I thought. As far as the team and the chemistry, that's obviously going better than I thought because like we have a bunch of new guys here. But as far as how I'm playing, it's going just how I expected."
This may be following his mind's script, but he is being called one of college basketball's biggest surprises and best stories in national game broadcasts as GCU rises to its highest national ranking ever (No. 37 in NCAA Evaluation Tool).
"I'm super proud of him," Holliday said. "We talked about this for a long time. It's exciting to see it happen in real time. It's just beautiful, for real. You always like to see good things happen to great people."
Holliday reminds Grant-Foster, 23, that he has the ability to inspire others with his story and to symbolize hope for people going through trying times, although Grant-Foster said he was never concerned about a risk with returning to basketball.
He is somewhat reluctant to share his story because he wants the focus to be on his team and his future.
"It's not sad," Grant-Foster said. "The sad part is over."
His mother put her faith in prayer and found comfort with Grant-Foster being entrenched in a Christian university and faith-based basketball program.
"I love that he got the chance to play again," said his mother, who attended GCU's two Arizona Tip-Off games in nearby Glendale last month. "I know his love for basketball. Going from playing every day to no basketball and trying to figure out what he was going to do, he still always knew he would be back on the court.
"He's a loving person. He's thoughtful. He's family-oriented. In any way, shape or form, he will be there for a person, I haven't seen many people like him. He has a good heart, no pun intended."
At that point, Grant-Foster already had lost his true love, basketball, for the 14 months since the 2021-22 season opener in which his life was in danger in a DePaul halftime locker room, a long, trying path from heart surgery to becoming the national top-20 scorer that he is this season for an 8-1 GCU team.Grant-Foster, who had never experienced a worse health problem than an ankle sprain, had capped a nine-point first half with a last-second 3-pointer to give DePaul the halftime lead on Coppin State. He sprinted to the Wintrust Arena home locker room wearing a smile and woke up looking bewildered about his jersey being ripped open and the concerned onlookers urging him to stay down.
Grant-Foster had collapsed and foamed at the mouth before DePaul senior athletic trainer Michael Sommer resuscitated him.
"I just felt lightheaded and that was it," Grant-Foster said. "I passed out, got up and everyone was tripping. I was trying to go back into the game, but they put me on a stretcher. I was fully awake and coherent, so it wasn't really like a big deal to me, but it was a big deal to them."
Grant-Foster's heartbeat was shocked into rhythm three times as he was taken to Chicago's Rush University Medical Center. Back at his Kansas City, Kansas, home, his three younger brothers had lined up a row of chairs in front of the television to watch and wondered why their big brother had not returned for the second half.
Holliday, watching on his phone while on his warehouse operations manager shift, wondered the same until being updated by a DePaul staffer who said Grant-Foster had been resuscitated on the way to the hospital."I'm thinking he just got overexcited or overexterted himself," said his mother, Talisha Grant, who also was at home. "I didn't think anything as deep as a heart issue."
But after driving eight hours overnight to Chicago with Grant-Foster's father, Willie, and her youngest son, they spent the next 10 days at the hospital going from the unknown to noticing his changing heart rates on the bedside monitor. On the fifth day, doctors told Grant that her son had scarring on his heart and would not be able to play basketball again.
Still, the 10-day hospital stay ended without a precise diagnosis, an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) inserted by his left ribs and doctors recommending a follow-up with the Mayo Clinic's highly regarded cardiologists in Minnesota.
"I didn't feel different, but if I tried to do something, I felt different," Grant-Foster said of when he left the hospital and went home to Kansas. "I was like, 'I'm gonna be back on a the court and there's really nothing too crazy,' but it was."
While home, Grant-Foster went to an open gym for a pickup game with Christian Braun, a longtime friend, a former Kansas teammate before Grant-Foster transferred to DePaul and now a Denver Nuggets guard. With exertion, Grant-Foster collapsed again."That's when he figured out it was serious," said Holliday, a former starting forward at Toledo (2010-13) and Kansas City (2013-15). He met Grant-Foster when he was a teenager playing in a community center run by the father of former NBA player and coach Earl Watson.
By the next spring, Grant-Foster went to the Mayo Clinic and underwent a second heart surgery to repair the scarring. His world had been flipped for a baller whose voicemail said, "Hi, this is Tyon. I'm busy. I'm probably in the gym."
Grant-Foster returned for some DePaul games, where personnel stopped him from even dribbling. He wound up spending the spring semester at home with online studies and occasional team visits. He joined his younger brothers' trips to the gym and limited himself to set shots on the side while learning more about the game from watching it live and on television.
"His spirit stayed high," Holliday said. "He had his days for sure, but 'Yon' is the type of dude where if he's having bad days, he's having them on his own. The majority of days, he was upbeat with a positive spirit. That's his heart, though."That heart continued to send him to the Mayo Clinic and keep him on the sidelines.
"God gives his strongest battles to his toughest soldiers, so it was something I felt I would overcome," Grant-Foster said.
On March 30, more than 16 months after the incident at DePaul, he had a Zoom set up with a Mayo Clinic doctor for a definitive ruling about his basketball future after a battery of tests.
Grant-Foster took the video call with Holliday on a laptop, where they hung with suspense on the doctor's opening words, "I've got some good news." He cleared Grant-Foster to play basketball again.
"It was an ecstatic moment, the best moment of my life," said Grant-Foster, who was screaming with Holliday in repeating their New Year's Eve motto, "2023, we back!" before he texted his mother.
"MOMMY, WE BACK," it read, causing her to put her watering eyes into desk papers at her receptionist job.That evening, Grant-Foster and his father went to the gym with his three younger brothers, Holliday and Frank Williams for a court workout. That started a daily regimen of morning weightlifting and shooting and nighttime court work. Two months later, he began playing five-on-five pickup games without an issue other than rust.
Grant-Foster entered his name in the NCAA transfer portal, but many schools were reluctant because of his heart history and the two-year layoff that Grant-Foster would be facing between games.
After starring at Indian Hills Community College in Iowa after graduating from Schlagle High School, Grant-Foster chose Kansas over Florida State, LSU and Oregon. When he transferred a year later, he picked DePaul over Miami, Nebraska, Oregon and Texas A&M.
This spring, he took one campus visit and found the right home at GCU.
Lopes assistant coach Jamall Walker, who grew up in Wichita, Kansas, and played with "KCK" players as a rising prep star, had a relationship that connected him to Grant-Foster and had coached at Grant-Foster's high school in 2001-02. Grant-Foster now considers Walker to be like family, just as Holliday is a big brother to the Kansan with 10 siblings.
On his GCU visit, Lopes head coach Bryce Drew shared the background of a heart scare. Drew had an arrhythmia as an eighth-grader and underwent three surgeries within eight months before resuming his basketball path to college stardom and a six-year NBA career.Grant-Foster signed with the Lopes in April and lived with his cousin, former Phoenix Suns player Ish Wainwright, until Wainwright was waived and signed with the Portland Trail Blazers. Grant-Foster barely was cleared to join summer workouts when the team was packing for a Bahamas tour in August.
In Nassau, Grant-Foster went from making 2 of 9 shots in the first game to going 10 of 17 in the second game.
The aggressive 6-foot-7 guard kept progressing until his GCU debut, which fell four days shy of the two-year anniversary of that fateful, lone DePaul appearance. Nearly three years after his career scoring high of 13 points for Kansas, Grant-Foster made 10 of 15 shots to score 30 points against Southeast Missouri in front of a sellout GCU crowd.
He has scored in double figures in each game of the Lopes' 8-1 start this season, including two double-doubles and four games of 25 points or more.
Grant-Foster ranks 16th in the nation at 21.3 points per game and adds 6.3 rebounds, 1.8 steals and 1.3 blocks per game. After never having multiple assists in 23 appearances for Kansas and DePaul, he recorded a five-assist game when GCU upset then-No. 25 San Diego State last week.
He does it all with the 2-inch ICD implanted in his left side. The device, which detects and stops irregular heartbeats, prompted his friends to nickname him "Tyon Stark" a nod to Tony Stark's chest-implanted energy source in "Iron Man."
"Sitting out two years and coming back and doing what he's doing, at the end of the day, is really, really impressive with how quick he is playing and doing this well," Drew said. "He's only going to get better as the season goes along."NBA scouts have begun to watch GCU games in person more often with Grant-Foster shooting 49% from the field, 34% from 3-point range and 74% from the free throw line and progressing defensively. Even nine games deep, Grant-Foster still feels like he will become more explosive with him estimating his legs to be at 80%.
After growing up modeling his game after NBA stars Paul George and Jamal Crawford, Grant-Foster's attacking style in half-court offense, transition and board work has resulted in 78 free throw attempts, the 10th most in the nation.
"I always had the confidence in myself," Grant-Foster said while wearing a "Hi Mom" hoodie. "I have a different appreciation for basketball because you never know when something you love can be taken away from you. So you just cherish, not even basketball, but loved ones and stuff even more that you take for granted.
"It's going better than what I thought. As far as the team and the chemistry, that's obviously going better than I thought because like we have a bunch of new guys here. But as far as how I'm playing, it's going just how I expected."
This may be following his mind's script, but he is being called one of college basketball's biggest surprises and best stories in national game broadcasts as GCU rises to its highest national ranking ever (No. 37 in NCAA Evaluation Tool)."I'm super proud of him," Holliday said. "We talked about this for a long time. It's exciting to see it happen in real time. It's just beautiful, for real. You always like to see good things happen to great people."
Holliday reminds Grant-Foster, 23, that he has the ability to inspire others with his story and to symbolize hope for people going through trying times, although Grant-Foster said he was never concerned about a risk with returning to basketball.
He is somewhat reluctant to share his story because he wants the focus to be on his team and his future.
"It's not sad," Grant-Foster said. "The sad part is over."
His mother put her faith in prayer and found comfort with Grant-Foster being entrenched in a Christian university and faith-based basketball program.
"I love that he got the chance to play again," said his mother, who attended GCU's two Arizona Tip-Off games in nearby Glendale last month. "I know his love for basketball. Going from playing every day to no basketball and trying to figure out what he was going to do, he still always knew he would be back on the court.
"He's a loving person. He's thoughtful. He's family-oriented. In any way, shape or form, he will be there for a person, I haven't seen many people like him. He has a good heart, no pun intended."
Players Mentioned
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