Basketball phenom who nearly lost his life finds new purpose as Butler team manager
INDIANAPOLIS – He was recruited more vigorously than almost any other player in Butler University’s basketball program. Yet his name will never show up in the box score.
At practices, he demonstrates pick-and-roll, uses his 6-foot-6 frame to simulate long-armed defenders or bangs players with pads to mimic contact in the post. On other days, he organizes film clips for scouting reports or moves equipment around.
And he delivers water, collects towels, does laundry. That’s what student managers do.
Kai Bates-Diop, a 19-year-old freshman, is not destined to be one of the greats to play in Hinkle Fieldhouse. His mission can become greater.
The next-best thing
About three years ago, his heart stopped as he played basketball. He nearly died on the court. He survived because an athletic trainer jolted him back to life with an automated external defibrillator.
The diagnosis: hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a disease in which the heart muscle becomes abnormally thick and restricts blood flow. Kai had a cardiac defibrillator surgically implanted, reducing chance of death from a recurrence. Yet life as an active athlete was over.
He could have abandoned basketball but chose to stay involved in the game he loves. If he could not be a player, he said, this was the next-best thing.
“I just try to make every day the best day. Because at one point that wasn’t an option almost,” Kai said.
Butler 'got him in a different way'
Sudden cardiac arrest came toward the end of his sophomore season at University High School in Normal, Ill., at a time when a prospect is closely evaluated. As a sophomore, Kai averaged 9.5 points in 25 games and shot 37% on 3-pointers and 90% on free throws. College coaches from Illinois, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Northwestern and Notre Dame were interested.
Kai’s older brother, Keita, now on the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, was already at Ohio State.
Kai considered following him there. But he wanted to forge his own path, create his own connections. He decided to enroll at Butler, be a manager, do everything he could to help his new team.
It was a journey coming full circle. Butler coach LaVall Jordan has known the family for years. He tried to recruit Keita to Michigan, where Jordan was then an assistant coach. If we don’t get Keita, Jordan told Kai, we’re going to get you.
“Fast forward,” Jordan said. “We got him in a different way.”
The day his life changed
On Feb. 9, 2017, Wilma Bates was driving west from Columbus, Ohio, where she had visited Keita. She stopped at the Brownsburg exit, as she always does, to order from Starbucks. The drive-up line was long, so she decided not to wait and got back on I-74.
Minutes later, University High coach Andrew McDowell called the mother’s cellphone. Kai is down, the coach said, and it does not look good.
“It’s kind of that call that everybody dreads. When they say, ‘where are you?’ “ Wilma said.
She called her husband, Richard, and told him to head to the school. It was all so “scary, surreal,” she said.
Back at University High, Kai remembers finishing a 2-on-1 drill near the start of practice. His heart was beating hard and fast.
“It was beating out of my chest almost,” he said.
Kai looked down and told a teammate how fast his heart was beating. As soon as he spoke, he collapsed.
An athletic trainer, Maddie Biehl, was taping ankles and helping other athletes rehab. Someone rushed to the training room and said, “Maddie! It’s Kai. He’s down.”
The trainer sprinted toward the gym. Another trainer, Emily Martz, gave Biehl an AED. They dialed 911. Kai had no pulse, no breaths. He had flat-lined.
Biehl performed two rounds of CPR, lasting more than four minutes. She shocked Kai’s heart back into rhythm with the AED.
The survival rate of those who have cardiac arrest outside a hospital is 10%. A doctor later told the family that survival rate in a case like Kai’s is more like 2%.
Kai was awake by the time an EMT arrived. He was placed on a stretcher and transported to Advocate BroMenn Medical Center. Meanwhile, his mother was speeding toward the hospital, unsure of what she would find when she got there.
A helicopter was on standby, but medical personnel awaited her arrival. A nurse calmed her before she entered Kai’s room.
“You could see it all over him. What happened, just fear and uncertainty,” she said.
Kai was airlifted 39 miles northwest to OSF Children’s Hospital in Peoria. He was hospitalized for a week.
Here he was at 16, and high school basketball had come to an end for him. College basketball would never begin. There would be no following in the sneaker steps of Richard, who played for Creighton, or Keita.
“That was a hard, emotional conversation,” Wilma said. “We were all in shock at all of it. But quickly, we recognized that Kai was alive. His life is going to look different.”
A friend did not survive a similar incident a year later.
Zeke Upshaw collapsed in a G League game March 24, 2018, at Grand Rapids, Mich., and died two days later. He was 26. A medical examiner ruled it was sudden cardiac death. Wilma became acquainted with Upshaw’s mother, Jewel, while Upshaw was a player at Illinois State.
“It’s hard to just be in this perpetual state of depression or sadness because he knows what happened to Zeke,” Wilma said of her son. “Zeke didn’t live. And Kai lived.”
Months of recovery
Perhaps Kai was destined to be different, beginning with his name. Wilma said the origin of “Kai” means “lovable boy comes again.”
His parents added “Diop” to Bates when both sons were born, naming them for Cheikh Anta Diop. Diop was a 20th-century Senegalese historian and political leader who studied human origins and pre-colonial African culture.
Fifteen days after Kai’s near-death experience, he was back in uniform for a game at University High. The opponent, Pontiac, agreed to allow Kai to make a basket. U-High players reciprocated, standing aside as a Pontiac team manager scored on the other end. The score was 2-2 as the two left the floor to cheers.
All four Bates family members wore T-shirts with Kai’s name and jersey No. 13 outlined by a red heart. Proceeds from the $15 shirts raised almost $13,000 to purchase AEDs in Bloomington-Normal. Fund-raising for AEDs to be placed in schools across the state continues through the Illinois Heart and Lung Foundation.
To honor Kai, friend Griffin Moore changed to jersey No. 13 for his senior season playing quarterback for Bloomington High School. Moore is now a freshman tight end at Illinois.
That is a feel-good part of Kai’s story, but recovery took months. He sought counseling, and the experience influenced him to consider sports psychology as a career. He is majoring in psychology and minoring in neuroscience at Butler.
He wanted to get into condition without imperiling his health. He resumed short workouts, lifted weights, increased activity. He was not around the gym much as junior but was all-in as a senior, demonstrating drills and doing tasks managers do.
He entered a couple of first quarters for one or two minutes. He started on senior night. It wasn’t his play that influenced the Pioneers, though. It was his voice.
McDowell said it was one thing for him to say something to the players. When Kai said it, “those points got through quickly,” McDowell said.
Kai profoundly affected Keita, even if Keita didn’t speak about it. The 6-8 Keita was sitting out in winter 2017 after breaking his leg, but he was a revelation the following season. He averaged 19.8 points and 8.7 rebounds a game, becoming Big Ten player of the year.
Two months after Kai’s cardiac arrest, coach Chris Holtmann left Butler and arrived at Ohio State. Even then, Holtmann could tell the incident had affected Keita.
“He never related to me that ‘I’m playing for Kai,’ but you got the sense he was very mindful of what having a great season would mean to his brother and his parents,” Holtmann said.
The family grew close, and grew by one. Biehl became a trainer at Ohio State, and on Keita’s senior night, she was introduced as the brothers’ sister. She is included in all family group texts.
“When you go through an experience like that, it’s impossible not to get close as a person,” said Biehl, now a basketball trainer at Northern Colorado.
Nor is it possible to be the same trainer. It is not like telling an athlete he has a torn ACL, she said.
“I’ve had to look at someone and tell them their career is over, and their life is almost over,” she said. “There’s nothing that can top that. I don’t get frazzled very often.”
Part of the team
Butler managers have long been treated as part of the team, and that is especially so for Kai.
Certainly, he looks like a player. When Jordan Tucker first saw him, he wondered if Kai was one of the incoming recruits. Coach Jordan said players are drawn to Kai, who is as respected as much as any teammate.
“You can just tell he’s been around the game for a while,” point guard Aaron Thompson said. “He knows what he’s talking about.”
Kai advises coaches of his activity limits. Noah Weiss, a junior manager, said coaches love using Kai in drills. And players view Kai differently from how they do other managers, Weiss said.
Kai knows college basketball.
Not that he asks for privileges. Some new managers want to do the basketball tasks, such as organizing film clips of opponents, but not the chores. Kai will do anything. Every day after practice, he rebounds while Tucker shoots.
“I don’t think we’ve missed a day,” Tucker said.
Wilma said all she wanted was a supportive and nurturing environment for her son. Every time Kai’s parents visit campus, she said, he is more confident than the time before.
Not that what-might-have-been vanishes completely.
That was underscored to McDowell when he came into the University High gym last summer and heard the ball bouncing and “rim rocking.” It was Kai, sweating, shooting, refining footwork.
“That kid right there is one of the top recruits in the nation,” McDowell told himself.
Butler managers sometimes play full-court games before practice, and even at half-effort, Kai is “putting a lot of points on us,” Weiss said. Kai has played at Butler’s rec center and pondered a return to competitive basketball.
Two or three years from now? Maybe. If not, he said he is OK with life as it is, even thought it's not what he thought it would be.
“Don’t take life for granted. That’s something that’s hard to wrap your mind around at such a young age,” Kai said. “You’re not thinking about your life in terms of that day. You’re thinking about what you’re going to get on your ACT or what you’re doing that weekend.
“So in that way I had to grow up and mature really fast. With that, I had to look at life a different way, a much broader picture.”
A box score can’t quantify that.
Contact IndyStar reporter David Woods at david.woods@indystar.com or call 317-444-6195. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidWoods007.
How to give
Contributions for automated external defibrillators (AEDs) can be made through the Illinois Heart and Lung Foundation, 1302 Franklin Ave., Suite 4500, Normal, IL 61761, or online through the ihlf.org link “For the Love of the Game.”