‘I need to be here’: Tylee Craft goes from wide receiver to assistant coach after cancer diagnosis

Mitch Mason sat in his mother’s hospital room in Tampa. It was June 11, 2024 — his birthday — and his phone buzzed with text messages. He’d flown to Florida from Chapel Hill, where he has served as UNC football’s team chaplain for 13 years.

“How are you holding up?” friends texted as Mason sat with his mother. She was unconscious and on a ventilator. And she was dying.

One player had sent a steady stream of messages throughout the day.

How you doin’, OG? UNC wide receiver Tylee Craft wrote.

Chap, I always got you, and you got me.

“That meant a little more, because I knew he was dealing with sickness,” Mason says.

Tylee was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer on March 14, 2022. He has undergone numerous treatments, but the cancer still spread through his body and brain. He has endured multiple ER stays. Arriving at UNC at a healthy 200 pounds at 6-foot-5, Tylee has lost more than 20 pounds, gained weight back, and lost it again.

“To be facing that, and yet to be more concerned with telling everyone else, ‘Keep fighting, I got you,'” Mason says. “That’s just Tylee.”

Tylee has refused to let cancer take over his life. He is enrolled in graduate courses toward his master’s in applied professional studies after graduating in May with a bachelor’s degree in exercise and sports science/sports administration. He wore a TyleeStrong T-shirt under his gown as he walked across the graduation stage.

Football is what brings Tylee joy. He shifted from active player to student coach this summer. He is at almost every meeting, workout and practice, sometimes walking directly to the facility from the hospital. He was elected to the team’s leadership council this season.

His diagnosis is one no one wishes for. And yet, it has given him a new purpose, a platform and the ability to make an impact he had never imagined.

Tylee first played football at age 7. Long and lean, he always seemed taller than everyone else, his mother, September Craft, says. Initially, his coach put him at quarterback. But he wanted to play receiver.

“I love catching passes, scoring touchdowns, running,” Tylee said. “Just having fun with my teammates, making memories.”

He totaled close to 1,000 receiving yards and 11 touchdowns in his last two high school seasons. He also excelled in the classroom, taking honors classes and graduating high school a semester early.

“Tylee was always a guy we could count on,” Sumter High School football coach Mark Barnes said. “[A] 4.0 GPA, an overachiever in every aspect. These are comments that we tend to embellish when people are going through hardships. But Tylee was that guy.”

Tylee and September visited Chapel Hill on a Friday in March during his junior year; that Monday morning, UNC wide receivers coach Lonnie Galloway called Tylee and offered him a scholarship. Two days later, he called Galloway and told him he wanted to be a Tar Heel.

“It was just a different feeling here,” September said. “Like we’d known each other for years.”

Tylee played in seven games in the 2020 season, primarily on special teams. He struggled with turf toe before fall camp and appeared in four games in 2021.

In December of 2021, Tylee returned home to Sumter for a few days before Christmas. He told his mom he’d been having a lot of back pain, which worsened over the next month. Tylee always smiled. He was easygoing, calm and steady. The only time September had seen him cry was after losing a playoff game in high school. But on a FaceTime call on March 9, he was crying.

Later that day, Tylee was riding in an elevator at the UNC football facility alongside Sally Brown, head coach Mack Brown’s wife. Suddenly, he doubled over in pain. Sally opened the elevator doors and called for help. Defensive line coach Tim Cross was standing in the hall and helped Sally lift Tylee. They rushed him to the ER.

Dr. Jared Weiss, the section chief of thoracic and head/neck oncology at UNC Chapel Hill Hospital, was not scheduled to be on call. But an oncology fellow asked him to come in and examine a young patient who had just arrived.

“What struck me most was how incredibly supported he was,” Weiss said. “I don’t think I’ve ever before or since seen a little ER space so packed with people.”

Five days later, Weiss told Tylee and September that Tylee had metastatic Stage 4 cancer in his lungs, liver and spine. He would need to start treatment immediately.

“The doctor said that if Tylee didn’t come into the hospital, he would’ve passed away in less than a month,” September said. “He was basically dying and he didn’t know it.”

The median lung cancer patient is 70 years old. Despite the stigma around lung cancers, many of those diagnosed are not regular smokers or, like Tylee, have never smoked. According to the American Lung Association (ALA), the five-year survival rate of metastatic lung cancer patients is about 18.6%.

Tylee took the semester off from school. His initial treatments were once every three weeks. Aside from a rash on his hands and feet, hiccups and fevers, Tylee says he has felt fine.

But each time he ran a fever, September had to rush Tylee to the hospital. He needed to stay for five days to ensure he didn’t have an infection. The hospital was still crowded due to COVID. Sometimes they had to wait 36 hours in the ER for a bed to open up. The beds were short, and Tylee was often uncomfortable.

After two treatments of four drugs (two chemotherapy and two immunotherapy), the cancer shrunk dramatically. But that summer, his cancer grew again. From August to December 2022, Tylee underwent a new type of chemotherapy. He focused on classes and football, attending every game he could. Though he wasn’t able to play, he still participated in drills when he felt well enough.

“You wouldn’t know to this day that he had cancer if you didn’t know,” Galloway said. “He carries himself greatly as far as, he comes to practice, he goes to meetings, he goes to get treatment, he comes back to practice. I’ll say, ‘You know, Tylee, you don’t have to be here.’ He’ll say, ‘Coach, I need to be here.'”

At one early-morning practice, Tylee stood on the sidelines, throwing up from his chemotherapy.

“Why don’t you head back to your apartment?” Mack Brown said. “I’ll get someone to drive you over there.”

“No. I need to be here, Coach,” Tylee told him.

His teammates knew he had cancer. But Tylee didn’t want it to be a focal point.

“He’ll have chemo at 6 a.m. and then be at practice,” wide receiver J.J. Jones said. “To see that was like, OK, his determination, his resilience — that spread throughout the team. He is such a motivational leader for everybody.”

Sally Brown and Tylee talked regularly. Tylee rarely asks for help, but sometimes, Sally says, he’ll send a subtle message. “If you happen to be near Cook-Out today, I’d love a Snickers milkshake,” he’ll text. “And I’ll just happen to be near there,” Sally Brown said, smiling.

Throughout 2023, Tylee underwent immunotherapy treatments. Initially, the results were positive. But by the fall of 2023, his cancer had grown again. Weiss found a clinical trial for a drug that sounded promising, but which had yet to receive FDA approval. Weiss and Tylee appealed to the company for use, and Weiss wrote an entire protocol for Tylee, who was the first patient to receive compassionate use of the drug. It, too, worked — for a time.

At each turn, he was calm, measured. He has not screamed or lashed out when scans show the cancer has spread. “Every patient is entitled to break down sometimes,” Weiss said. “To fall apart, to reconstruct. There’s nothing wrong with that — that’s human. But that’s not what Tylee did.”

In May of 2023, scans revealed the cancer had spread to his brain. That fall, Tylee took chemotherapy pills that had a higher chance of reaching the brain. Still, he was at practice, offering advice to the receivers when he didn’t feel well enough to play.

And then, he was asked to give another kind of advice. On Jan. 31, UNC tight end Cal Tierney underwent surgery for abnormal lymph nodes. Five days later, doctors diagnosed him with nodular lymphocyte-predominant Hodgkin lymphoma. Tierney was shocked — his biopsies that fall had returned as normal.

He began four rounds of chemotherapy in late February. Before he began treatment, Tierney talked to Tylee. Brown said that in 36 years of head coaching, he’d never had an active player with cancer. Now, he had two. Tylee talked about what to expect in terms of side effects and offered to help in any way. “That gave me a big sense of security,” Tierney says. “Here’s a guy in our family, and some of the things he’s done, give or take, are what I’ll be going through.”

Tierney returned to his home in Charlotte for treatment. Scans on May 2 revealed the chemotherapy had worked and he was in remission.

“The biggest lesson I have learned from cancer and from Tylee is the silver lining,” Tierney said. “How much more opportunity can you find in what you’re going through? He’s the king of that, in how much he has made an impact on others. The easiest thing is to lay down and fall into despair. And that is the opposite of what he’s done.” Tylee finished a round of off-label chemotherapy over the summer, which shrunk the tumors in his body, but not his brain. The next step, Weiss says, is tumor-treating fields, where Tylee will wear a head covering to help control the cancer in his brain.

Like his prior treatment choices, which he has made in collaboration with Weiss, Tylee has repeatedly opted for non-standard therapies. Even if it means he is the first person to try this approach to cancer treatment.

“He’s making smart gambles, and they are paying off,” Weiss said. Or, in football vernacular, “he has connected Hail Marys at least three times.”

“And,” Weiss added, “that’s why he’s alive.”

Teammates said that once you know him well, Tylee is a jokester. “It’s like peeling back an onion one layer at a time once you get to the root of Tylee,” Jones said. “He’s just an amazing person.”

Tylee is introspective, his big, hazel eyes taking in what is happening around him. He loves movies, especially “Bad Boys.” He loves history and traveling. This past spring break, he visited Spain with his girlfriend.

But football remains his passion. Earlier this month, as the temperature hovered around 80 degrees at 10 a.m., the Tar Heels ran from the practice facility’s covered field onto the open-air turf. Players divided up by position group. Mack Brown wore a headset and spoke as he walked the field. “How can I get better today?” Brown encouraged his players to ask themselves.

As the receivers stood in one corner near an end zone, Tylee, dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and a bucket hat, shadowed a catching drill. He talked with several receivers, motioning with his hands as he gave advice. He sometimes took a knee as the sun beat down. “I wish I was playing,” Tylee says, when asked what he is thinking as he watches games.

Brown walked over just before fourth-quarter drills. He put his arm around Tylee’s waist, smiling and talking.

“What I’ve told him is, we have so many young receivers, you be their coach,” Brown said. “We’re hoping he gets to play again, but I think after he gets cleared, he has to have a year to get his body back. So it’s a long road to play.”

September, who works as a deputy sheriff, frequently drives from Sumter to Chapel Hill. She and Tylee stay at the SECU Family House, an extended-stay home that provides housing, meals and transportation for UNC Hospital patients and family members dealing with serious illness. Mack and Sally Brown host a women’s football clinic each August, and they chose the SECU Family House as this year’s beneficiary. Both September and Tylee spoke at the Aug. 19 event, and several items were auctioned, including a framed jersey signed by Tylee. Sally said they hoped to bring in $30,000 total. They raised $93,000. (Tylee has also raised money for his own treatments through the sale of bracelets and T-shirts.)

Tylee is often asked to speak, whether to a group of young football players, a fellow cancer patient or in accepting an award. (He won the Disney Spirit Award in 2022, among others). “It’s just something I do,” Tylee said of speaking. “I wouldn’t say I like it. But I do it because I guess it makes [others] feel good.”

He has numerous tattoos which, he says, help tell his story.

One on his right shoulder reads, “Let Your Faith Be Bigger Than Your Fear.”

Mason, the team chaplain, met Tylee when the latter was a recruit. “The most soft-spoken and the biggest smile,” Mason said of his first impression.

He called Tylee “Cadillac” because “once he gets going, good Lord, he can go.” The two have remained close ever since. Some of his favorite moments, Mason says, have been praying together with September and Tylee. “No doctor has a timeline on what Tylee is going through — only God knows that,” September says. “It’s not up to us. And he is still fighting.”

Four years ago, Mason was diagnosed with idiopathic small fiber polyneuropathy, a rare disease where the body’s nerves break down. While the disease is not fatal, it affects his quality of life. On some days, Mason cannot walk or even move. He takes 20 medications daily and has infusions every 28 days.

In 2022, Mason was watching a baseball game on TV. As he watched the player standing in the batter’s box, he thought of Tylee. “Keep swinging,” he thought. Keep swinging has become a mantra for them both.

“But when I think about me, no, I think about what Tylee has to go through and his fight,” Mason said. “That is what gives me the encouragement to keep swinging.”