THE BUILDING SITS just over four miles from Highmark Stadium, on the side of a busy Route 5. The Ten Lives Club has big plans to expand, including an addition to the main adoption site.
Months have passed since January, when attention from all over the world shifted to the local cat shelter in Western New York, and money came pouring in from football fans.
It all started in the hours after a missed kick by Tyler Bass in the Buffalo Bills' 27-24 divisional-round loss to the Kansas City Chiefs.
Bass' 44-yard kick with 1:43 remaining went wide right to end a drive by the Bills that was full of missed opportunities, allowing the Chiefs to keep the lead and eventually beat the Bills in the playoffs -- again.
In the hours after the loss, Bass became the subject of hundreds of negative comments on social media. He deleted his accounts after the game, "just for my sanity, you know what I mean."
"But at the end of the day, as a kicker playing in the NFL, I mean, that's what you signed up for," Bass said. "You're going to have critics from all over. That's just the nature of the business ... There's no one harder on myself than myself. So, whatever they want to say, they can say it, at the end of the day, I just gotta get back to work and keep moving forward."
While Bass began the process of moving forward, the internet got to work in a more positive way. Some of it shouldn't have been a surprise. Bills fans are known for coming together on social media and supporting various causes. The examples are countless from former Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Andy Dalton in 2017 when he threw a touchdown to beat Baltimore and help end the Bills' historic playoff drought to donating to Oishei Children's Hospital in Buffalo after Josh Allen's grandmother, Patricia, passed away. This time it reached far beyond fans of the team.
We want to let everyone know that all of these @TODAYshow national superstars are available for adoption at our main shelter in Blasdell. You can tell all of your friends you adopted a celebrity. 😻 pic.twitter.com/1OoeKt9tpf
— Ten Lives Club (@tenlivesclub) January 26, 2024
As people searched for a way to support the kicker, fans spotted a picture Bass had taken with one of the Ten Lives Club's cats via the "Show Your Soft Side" campaign, which works against animal abuse. Bass wanted to pose with cats for the campaign as he and his wife, Ryan, own two cats.
Marie Edwards, executive director and founder of Ten Lives Club, received a phone call from her daughter, Sallie, who suggested the shelter put something together in honor of Bass after learning of the abuse he was receiving online. Later that day, Kimberly LaRussa, the shelter's public relations manager, posted a message to Facebook on the shelter's account.
"WE STAND WITH TYLER BASS. DON'T BULLY OUR FRIEND. We just heard the terrible news that Tyler Bass is receiving threats after yesterday's game and our phones are ringing off the hook from people who want to donate $22 to Ten Lives Club in Tyler's name.
"Tyler doesn't deserve any of the hate he's receiving. He's an excellent football player and an even better person who took the time to help our organization and rescue cats last year. Leave our friend alone."
The Facebook post alone raised over $53,000 and was shared 2,000 times. The post is littered with comments from cat lovers to fans of other NFL teams to others, expressing their desire to donate for all sorts of reasons. Taylor Swift fans also donated, given the singer's love of cats and her attendance at the game in support of her boyfriend, Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. In the end, more than $400,000 was raised on behalf of Bass.
"It really meant the world to us to see all of the fans supporting Tyler Bass and some of them aren't even cat lovers, some of them emailed us and they were like, 'I personally am not a cat person, but I love Tyler Bass,'" LaRussa said.
As a new season approaches, the reality is that while there was support and appreciation for Bass on social media, the pressure is on to rebound from the 2023 season. Part of his approach for the year is not riding the highs and lows.
BASS IS ON the precipice of his fifth season in the NFL, looking to come back from his lowest field goal percentage since his rookie year.
As a kicker, success or failure comes with all eyes on you and little room for error. During his career, Bass, 27, has learned how to best handle the mental approach to the position.
"You have to really go through it to kind of understand it. I think even after really good games... you're gonna get a lot of people saying you're the best, you're so good. That's just as bad as people telling you that," Bass said. "My approaches are only as good as your next kick.
"And that just kind of, you move that approach to social media, it's just, you just gotta be level-headed with it. Navigate it, and just don't buy into it. At the end of day, use it for what you use it for, but it's not real life."
Bass was drafted by the Bills in the sixth round of the 2020 NFL draft out of Georgia Southern. In his first season, he made 82.4% of his field goals and missed two PATs. From 2021-22, he made over 87% of his field goal attempts each season and made every PAT in 2021 (51). In April 2023, he signed a four-year extension that keeps him with the team through 2027.
But last season wasn't just the one missed kick, leaving questions over how Bass can turn things around in 2024. After making every field goal attempt through the first five weeks of the season, he missed 3 of 4 in Weeks 6-7, made 100% of field goals from Weeks 8-11 and then missed 2 of 4 in an overtime loss to the Philadelphia Eagles. The issues also arose in the postseason, with Bass making 1 of 3 three field goal attempts in a wild-card win over the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Bass worked this offseason on finding some consistency from his new home base in Florida. He got married. He developed a routine there that included looking at everything involving his kicks. With the team now in the midst of training camp, Bass has been up and down in practices, such as going 4-of-6 in Tuesday's practice.
"You don't wish it on anybody to go through the adversity, but the adversity [Bass] had to go through at the end of the season, and just realize that OK, who are the people that are for me, because they're for me, whether the kick goes in or not," Bills special teams coordinator Matthew Smiley said. "And who are the people that I have to realize, see me as an entertainment on the field and I got to potentially block out that noise and really dial into what am I trying to do and who are the people that are helping me do that."
He's also found that waking up and not looking at social media is refreshing for him, allowing him to focus on what really matters to him.
"Once you're past that week, two weeks of that itch, you don't even, you actually kind of resent it," Bass said. "You're like, I don't even wanna be on it. So, I think ... everything happens for a reason."
He has also returned to social media, posting his gratitude for the support. He said that what he's learned will guide him going into the season.
"I learned this in my rookie year," Bass said. "I think [Bills team sport psychologist] Dr. [Desaree] Festa told me, 'Would you wanna wake up in the morning, look at your phone and just see, or have 20 people in your room just saying, you suck, you're bad, you're terrible. You're not this...' Like, that's not a good way to wake up ... why even put yourself through that. Wake up, be grateful. Breathe, just enjoy the morning, enjoy being awake and just being in the moment."
WITH TRAINING CAMP and preseason games ongoing, Bass' attention has turned to the 2024 season and he is ready to turn the page on the way last season ended. But there's one aspect of that playoff loss that will stick with him.
The Ten Lives Club brought in 3,063 cats and kittens last year, and already have had 1,372 adoptions through June of this year.
Bass has continued his work with the local shelter. One family, Peter and Erin Brody from Wheatfield, New York, weren't aware of Ten Lives Club before the attention Bass' missed kick brought. They went to an adoption event at KeyBank Center this year, which Tyler and Ryan attended, and ended up taking home two sister cats, Pearl and Stevie.
"It was just emotional to see all the responses ... I mean, they had record-breaking donations just literally the week that he had missed a kick," Peter Brody said, also noting the need to support other shelters. "To go from, I've never even heard of Ten Lives Club, honestly. ... and since then, it's unreal the amount of exposure and press and money that they raise."
The Ten Lives Club was planning on the $2 million new facility before the events of this year expanded the shelter's outreach and support to another level.
But they did change one thing. It will be named the Tyler Bass Cat Adoption Center.
"We brought [Bass] up here and we sat down with him, and we said, 'We'd like you to be the honorary co-chairman [of the new facility],' him and Ryan, his wife," Edwards said. "That's gonna add more weight to it by having his name on it. Then, you know what? Because of everything that happened with Facebook and all, we got probably another 20,000 supporters because there's people from different countries that sent money in. There's people from all over the U.S."