Cade Whitehead first asked his uncle Todd about his wheelchair at the family Christmas party, with the bluntness that’s only acceptable as a toddler because they’re too young to know different.

Why are you like this?

"I’ll show you," Todd said.

After a while, Cade’s parents realized he’d wandered off and went searching the house. They found him in Todd’s room, sitting on his uncle’s lap, watching a VHS game tape of the night Todd was paralyzed from the neck down. 

In the video, Todd is a sophomore wide receiver at De Leon High School. When the ball is snapped, he’s a 15-year-old kid in a man’s body, 6-foot-4 and fast, a stud athlete with the world in front of him. When the whistle blows, he’ll never walk again. Todd catches the ball and fights for extra yardage as three defenders hang on his waist. He’s exposed and vulnerable, and the safety hits him high. Todd drops and doesn’t get up. A care flight to the hospital reveals the hit pinched his spinal cord and rendered him a quadriplegic.

Cade’s parents never told him he couldn’t play football, but from that moment on, he knew their stance. He grew up in Stephenville, a town that loves football and its six-time state champion Yellowjackets. For the longest time, Cade’s father, Wade Whitehead, blamed the game for upending his family’s life. 

“Everybody is like, ‘That’s a one-in-a-million accident,’” Wade said. “Yeah, it is. But guess what? It happened to us.”

What Wade didn’t know then, and he still has a hard time believing now, is that his family would experience a second one-in-a-million football event. In one year as a full-time kicker for Stephenville, Cade converted 69-of-70 extra point attempts and all eight of his field goals, earning 2024 Whataburger Super Team honors. He’ll sign to Nelson University in Waxahachie, Texas, a college athlete in a sport he never thought he had a future in.

To be clear, Cade was always an athlete. His parents pushed him toward soccer, basketball and baseball. He was so good in all the other sports that his middle school coaches were confused about why he didn’t play the one sport the town revolved around. Once coach Matthew Etters learned the story, he approached Cade about going out for the eighth-grade football team as a kicker so he wouldn’t have to tackle.

“If it wasn’t for Coach Etters, I wouldn’t be kicking,” Cade said.

When Cade told his dad about the plan, Wade contacted Bob Cervetto, who’d worked with Stephenville kickers for 30 years before retiring in nearby Dublin, for kicking lessons. Cervetto was instantly impressed with Cade’s concentration level and determination. Cade would call him to practice at the middle school even in the bitter cold with a biting north wind and never ask to go inside.

Cade got the go-ahead and never looked back, pouring himself into becoming the best kicker possible. That first eighth-grade season, he booted a 32-yard field goal in a game. The other team shouted to watch for the fake before the ball was snapped. No middle schoolers kicked that far.

But his dad would spend the next five years of his son’s football career wavering on the decision, praying in the middle of games. He knew Cade’s friends badgered him about playing, and he wanted him to be part of the team. And yet his brother lived a quarter-mile away on the same property, a constant reminder of how dangerous the sport is.  

“To battle what went on with his brother, then to battle whether you do that with your own son, you can see the conflict,” Cervetto said. “When we first started doing this, Wade was like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

Todd had long ago accepted his paralysis as a freak accident. He’d met with the safety that hit him and told him he knew he didn’t mean for this to happen. He still liked football and never discouraged Cade from playing. But Wade was mad at the world, especially football. Football robbed his brother and prevented his mother from going anywhere because she had to care for him 24/7. And every time Todd couldn’t get through the door of a restaurant or wheel around the grocery store because the shelves were too close together, Wade would go down the wormhole asking why him?

“My brother is still here,” Wade said. “He’s still mentally the same person, just physically, he’s not. He can’t feed himself. He can’t get himself out of bed. None of that, because of an accident in football.”

Now, he was sending his only child onto the field.

As a compromise, Cade agreed to kick extra points and field goals only and not kickoffs. Kickoffs could put Cade in a position where he had to make a tackle, and Cade would do it for his team if he was out there. He kicked for the freshman team and then Stephenville’s top JV team as a sophomore. 

Cade had opposing coaches telling him he could be a varsity kicker on their program as early as ninth grade. But his chances for playing time as a junior at Stephenville were slim. The Yellowjackets have had four consecutive Whataburger Super Team kickers. Senior Diego Chavarria was coming off an all-state season.

Cade competed hard and was pulled up to the varsity because of it. But the most action he got in his junior season was in the pregame warmups. He rarely saw the field with Chavarria in the fold. 

“It taught me that even going into college, you’re not going to be the only one,” Cade said. “You’re always going to have someone that’s a little bit bigger and stronger. It pushes you to be the absolute best you can be.”

He leaned into his training instead of withdrawing in the face of competition. In addition to his private lessons with Cervetto, Cade would trek to nearby Tarleton University over the summer to kick with Stephenville grad Corbin Poston and all the collegiate snappers and holders. The older guys taught him not to fall to his left on deeper kicks, a habit he’d picked up from soccer.

Maybe he’d only have one season kicking, but it was one more season than he thought he’d have.

“Delayed gratification in today’s society isn’t always welcomed,” Stephenville head coach Sterling Doty said. “There’s a lot of pressure on these kids to perform. For his window of opportunity to come later than what he originally anticipated in his freshman, sophomore, and even junior year, that’s a feather in his cap in terms of what type of character he has. He maximized his opportunity his senior year and had a phenomenal year.”

Cade was the heir apparent for place kicking duties, but Stephenville needed a kickoff specialist. Cade felt more torn the deeper preseason practice progressed with no obvious choice. 

“This whole time, Cade is wanting to do whatever he can for his team,” Wade said. “But Cade is also trying to be understanding of how we feel as his parents.”

One morning, Wade woke up to find a one-page letter from his son slid under the bedroom door. 

“Dad, my team really needs me,” Cade wrote. “I understand why y’all don’t want me to kick. I promise I’ll kick it out of the endzone.”

Wade gets choked up when he remembers that letter. How proud he was of his son for writing it didn’t change how difficult that decision was to make. 

Cade did kick 51 of his 79 kickoffs (64.5%) out of the endzone for a touchback. On most of the ones that were returned, the Stephenville gunners made the tackle. But in the sixth game of the season against Louisiana’s Ruston High School, the return man caught the ball in the endzone and ran it past all 10 Stephenville defenders, leaving Cade on an island. Cade tracked him down on the sidelines, shoved him out of bounds, and got his first turf burn. A rite of passage.

Cade was named District 4-4A DI Special Teams MVP and Big Country Preps Special Teams Player of the Year. Nelson University offered him a scholarship after he posted highlights from his first game of the season. While the accolades are cool, Cade didn’t start kicking for them. He just wanted a way to experience the Friday Night Lights while honoring his family at the same time.

“It gave him a way to be part of the football program without having to be in the trenches,” Wade said.