Much more than a manager: 'Kyle shines in everything he does'

OXFORD — On Tuesday night, in the midst of Ole Miss’ win over Mississippi State, student manager Kyle Wakefield briefly stole the show.

At an official's request, Wakefield, 22, raced with his mop from his station beneath the basket to dry a wet spot on Craddock Court. When he realized he was going to need more towels, he sprinted back to his station, collected the needed materials and then booked it back to the trouble spot.

As fans cheered and players looked on, Wakefield enthusiastically eliminated the danger and then waved the aforementioned towel in the air to pump up the Ole Miss student section.

It was a viral moment, one that garnered national attention, including an appearance with Ole Miss coach Chris Beard at a Thursday press gathering in Oxford.

“Kyle shines at everything he does,” Wakefield’s mother, Brandi Wakefield, said Thursday, in a phone interview from Katy, Texas. “It is kind of neat to see him getting some of the viral comments that are sweet.”

Beard joked on Thursday that Ole Miss had “gotten about 700 calls” since Tuesday’s game trying to get access to Wakefield, who began his career as a student manager in 2020 after an invitation from then-Ole Miss coach Kermit Davis.

Wakefield’s brother, Cole, was on the Texas Tech staff with Beard in the 2010s. Cole is now as assistant coach at Louisiana-Lafayette. Turns out, the connections really didn’t matter.

“It didn’t take us long to understand we had greatness here,” Beard said. “Wake is special. Everybody sees it on game night but we see it every minute of every day. I tell the players all the time, ‘The motivation to be great is right in front of you.’ …Wake inspires us all, every single day. He’s never in a bad mood. His work ethic is unquestionable. He impacts winning.

“People talk about culture and stuff and that’s what we’re trying to do here. When we get players that perform like he performs, we’ll be ready to roll. Maybe this year. I’ve got a lot of confidence in our team and we’ll see how February shakes out, but that’s what we want to be like — unselfishness, love of the game, work ethic, sacrifice. This guy is kind of like what our culture is.”

Davis posted on X late Thursday that Wakefield is “one of the very best stories in college basketball.”

That, while true, is an understatement. His is a story that goes well past college athletics. His is a story of perseverance, patience, determination, grit and love.

Wakefield, Brandi said, is on the Autism spectrum. He didn’t speak until he was five years old.

At a very early age, Kyle was diagnosed as PDDNOS (pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified).

“It means nothing, but it’s on the spectrum,” Brandi said.

“He was putting sounds together but he wasn’t audible,” Brandi said. “He wasn't with us. ...He’s quite amazing.”

Wakefield took questions from media Thursday. He answered thoughtfully, his deep, booming voice dominating the room. The journey from diagnosis to Thursday was a long one, but it couldn’t be more inspirational.

“When he was three years old, a specialist told me he needed to be institutionalized,” Brandi said.

“My husband was devastated," Brandi said.

She, on the other hand, was emboldened.

“I will send him to college if it kills me," she told anyone who would listen. "It wasn’t easy, but it didn’t kill me.”

Obviously, she refused that professional's advice, instead making up her mind, right then, that her son would one day attend college. She assembled a “great team” and sent Kyle to two different private language specialists schools.

“He needed more work with language,” Brandi said. “We got him to understand language had power.”

At one point, a specialist asked Brandi and her husband, Glenn, how Kyle asked for water or juice. He didn’t, they told the specialist, adding that they just put the refreshment in front of him and he drank it. From that point forward, they made Kyle vocalize his request.

“There were tears, but it worked out,” Brandi said. “We caught him in an early window. He was the busiest 2 1/2 -year-old. He had 45- or 50-hour work weeks. His work ethic started there.

“He just started making gains. When he was five, he started throwing his voice. I prayed that he’d speak and now he’s the most powerful voice in the room.”

After a year at the Westview School, Kyle was enrolled in The Parish School, a private language school he attended for 3 1/2 years. The classrooms feature a 10:2 student:teacher ratio and the head teacher is a licensed speech pathologist.

During his time at Parish, “We spent the equivalent of four years of college at an out of state private school.”

In addition, he had twice-weekly occupational therapy sessions for sensory-related issues.

“One time, he put his hands on a outdoor grill and didn’t pull them away for a couple seconds,” Brandi said. “He got third-degree burns because his brain didn’t register that it was burning in time.”

He went to physical therapy twice a week for motor skills — from gross motor skills to fine motor skills such as pencil-holding, shoe-tying and buttoning. He had speech therapy three times per week.

Those extra therapy sessions continued through the eighth grade.

The Wakefields celebrate accomplishments, and Tuesday’s viral video was far from Kyle’s first. He was born on June 8, 2001, while the Houston area was being hit by Tropical Storm Allison. Allison dropped heavy rainfall along its path, peaking at more than 40 inches. The worst flooding occurred in Houston, where most of Allison's damage occurred. Twenty-three lost their lives, 30,000 became homeless after the storm flooded more than 70,000 houses and destroyed 2,744 homes.

“Little did I know that day, his life would be a lot like the weather,” Brandi said. “Sunny days with his bright smile reminding us of all the good, dark days when he was angry and frustrated and things were hard, rainy days when there lots of tears, mostly Kyle’s, and the best days, of course, the cool, breezy days that sometimes you take for granted.”

After all of the countless hours of therapy and tutoring and work, Wakefield graduated from Taylor High School in May 2020 amid the COViD-19 pandemic that shut down gatherings.

“They were threatening not to have a graduation,” Brandi said. “I invited 150 people to front-yard cul-da-sac and I got a stage and a podium and everything.”

Kyle said Thursday his time at Ole Miss has been “a wild ride.”

“I’ve really enjoyed it and I love Ole Miss basketball,” he said.

On Tuesday, he said, he was just trying to get the floor dry as soon as possible.

Wakefield has long been a Pavilion favorite. His enthusiastic clean-ups and arm-waving cheerleading has been a staple, even during some trying times for the Rebels' program. On Tuesday, however, as Ole Miss improved to 18-3 overall and 5-3 in the Southeastern Conference, very much putting the Rebels in the NCAA Tournament conversation, Wakefield got national attention. The SEC Network crew discussed his pregame stretching routine.

“I’ve always had like a pregame ritual that I’ve always followed for four years now,” Wakefield said. “It just seems to work for me every time and it really just impacts winning, and that’s what I’m here to do. I really want to win and I want to be a part of a winning organization.”

On Tuesday night, Wakefield said, he didn’t focus on the attention he was getting. He was far more focused on doing his part to defeat Mississippi State.

“I’m not in this for me,” Wakefield said. “I’m in this for the whole entire organization and the whole entire university.”

Beard said Wakefield’s attitude is inspirational to players. It’s hard to be in a bad mood, Beard said, when guys like Wakefield are around.

“We’re trying to get as many elite people in our organization as we can,” Beard said. “Obviously, the top priority is the players. We’re trying to get the players who have the heart and unselfishness and competitiveness with what they do as Wakefield does. We have some of those guys on the team this year. We’ve got some guys who are still kind of on that fringe of ‘Do they want to just completely buy in? Do they want to do this?’ Wake is all in. There’s no bad days. There are no bad moments. He’s all in.”

After Tuesday’s game, Wakefield did his postgame duties and then checked his phone.

“Everything was blowing up,” Wakefield said, laughing. “It was a crazy ride. I’m just so thankful to be here and have a part of this great experience in my life.”

Brandi wasn’t surprised that Kyle won over a crowd of more than 10,600 basketball-crazed fans.

“He loves a crowd,” Brandi said. “He loves people. He never gets nervous. One of his best gifts is he cleans the slate every day.”

However, Tuesday wasn't Kyle's 15 minutes of fame. Oh, no, Brandi said Thursday night, he's been in the spotlight for years.

“He has struggled his entire life and worked harder than other people to become the story," Brandi said. "He’s been famous since he was four years old. He wasn’t supposed to go to public schools. Kyle was the first student in KISD (Katy Independent School District) who was enrolled into schools and given services based on private testing. …He walked into all of these good role models and hit the ground running."

In the fifth grade, he was elected student body president. But there was loneliness caused by his being somewhat different.

"Kyle was always very well-liked," Brandi said. "Everybody thinks he’s kind of cool. He’s always had that engaging, happy, give-125-percent personality. He was well-known. He was liked. But he didn’t have friends. He didn’t have a group of friends who were kind of his guys."

Thankfully, Brandi said, he had his brothers -- Cole and Brett (now a sophomore at Texas A&M). They were his friends away from school, filling a void that wasn't fully filled until Kyle got to Ole Miss.

"Kyle is an Honest Abe," Brandi said. "We still to this day where we have family meetings where we talk about things that need to stay private and then we have family meetings for Kyle. He didn’t have a filter. He didn’t have a privacy circle. He didn’t have a pragmatic language. He didn’t read social cues. …He had to have structure. I’m going to tell you — it was hard. There were a lot of no’s. The good news is now we get to have a lot of yes’s.”

Kyle’s story is one his mom isn’t even a little hesitant to tell. It's one she hopes other parents, at the beginning of a similar life journey, find inspiration and hope in.

“If you don’t have a diagnosis, no one can help you,” Brandi said. "If you don’t have a label, no one can help you learn."

Four years later, Wakefield is so much more than a diagnosis. He’s become an inspiration. By Thursday evening, Walker Jones, the head of The Grove Collective, Ole Miss' NIL fund to compensate student-athletes for their name, image and likeness, was asking on X/Twitter if he needed to add Wakefield as a client.

“I really just want to get out there and do the best possible job I can,” Wakefield said. “I just want to impact winning as best as I possibly can. If my job is to fire up that crowd to win a ball game, I’ll be the one that does it.

“Honestly, I really feed off of them. The more they feed me, the more I bring. I’m already so intense as it is and it’s just an amazing feeling being out there for the players. Even the players feed off of my energy. They see me working hard down there. I’m really just there for them. I want them to have a clean floor to play on. I take a lot of pride in that.”

Wakefield is more than a student section favorite, too. Lee Harris, an Ole Miss fan and the owner of Funky’s Pizza and Daiquiri Bar on the famed Oxford Square, is a season ticket holder with court-side seats. Over the years, he’s gotten to know Wakefield.

“He’s just an all-out wonderful guy,” Harris said. “I genuinely enjoy being around him and his will to please and help others is unmatched. He’s as one of a kind as anyone I have ever met and had the privilege of knowing and calling my friend.”

Wakefield has another year at Ole Miss. He’s on pace to graduate in 2025 with a degree in journalism. Wakefield received services throughout high school and carried them into college. At Ole Miss, he frequently goes to the testing center. He always goes to professors' office hours. His professors, Brandi said, know he cares. Kyle hasn’t decided what he wants to do after Ole Miss but he knows he wants to “go on and win in life.”

“I really want to stay involved in sports and just put my foot in the door in the sports world,” Wakefield said. “I just want to impact winning in my life.”

Brandi and Glenn, of course, were watching on Tuesday night. On Saturday, when Ole Miss entertains No. 16 Auburn at 5 p.m., they'll be in The Pavilion, cheering on the Rebels. Brandi's phone, like Kyle's, lit up. Text messages, direct messages, you name it -- they flowed in.

"That is why he is who he is," his ninth-grade biology teacher, Kelly Savoy, messaged Brandi. "He went through the blood, sweat and tears, and instead of folding up, feeling sorry for himself, giving up, all the negative choices he could have made about himself and future, he worked, he didn’t make excuses, he attacked life! And that is what is so inspiring.“

Brandi and Glenn, meanwhile, sat back, smiled and enjoyed the rest of the Rebels' victory.

“We thought, 'That’s who he is. He embodies everything God wants us to be. He sees no ill will in everybody. He is there for his organization, his guys, his school,'" Brandi said, referring to she and her husband's thoughts on Tuesday. " I would put him up against anybody else from a standpoint of determination, passion, work ethic. He’s amazingly focused on what’s important right now. We’re just going to sit back and enjoy it and enjoy what God has planned.”