'When can I play again?': Inside Bryce Steele's journey back to football after battling cancer

BEFORE CANCER, BRYCE Steele loved to run.

He became a prized recruit for Boston College as a linebacker, but as a kid, he played receiver, reveling in any chance to put distance between himself and a defender. He was on the high school track team, and he still follows the drills his coaches taught him. When COVID-19 scuttled his senior football season, he'd wake at sunrise most mornings, pop in his earbuds and run a few miles through a nearby park in his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, taking breaks only to dash off 100 situps or pushups.

After cancer, running was hell.

It was December 2023, just two months removed from his latest cancer surgery, and Steele was determined to rebuild his life, to return to the form that made him one of BC's best prospects. Instead, he emerged from a hospital bed with nearly a half-dozen incisions twisting around his rib cage "like bullet hole wounds" where chest tubes had been inserted into his abdomen. They'd healed over by the time he started running again, but the scar tissue still burned as he pumped his fists in a wide ellipse with each stride, just the way his track coach had taught.

He could run in quick bursts, but afterward, he'd gasp for air.

"It felt like I was suffocating," Steele said, "like someone had a bag over my head."

Still, he kept running, first in short stumbles, then up and down the stairs outside his apartment in Chestnut Hill, then back at practice with the rest of his teammates at Boston College, a little farther and a little faster most days until this spring, when he'd reached something close enough to his old pace to work with the first-team defense again.

"This offseason, I hit it as hard as I possibly could, literally to the point of nearly passing out," Steele said. "I want it that bad, and any way I can push myself to get back to what I was before, I'll do it."

Sometimes when Steele runs, he's chasing a ghost. He'll thumb through old highlight videos on his phone and catch a glimpse of the player he was, the player he thinks he should be again if he keeps working.

At times he's chasing a dream. He has wanted to play football since he was old enough to hold a ball, and though cancer has often clouded that image, he still sees its contours, a little sharper with each stride.

Sometimes, though, it's as if he's running in place, caught between gratitude and regret, unsure whether to measure the miles from where he began or the steps left in front of him.

Steele wants to move forward. But cancer is like his shadow.

Still, he believes there's a life beyond cancer, if he can just outrun it a little while longer.

STEELE STARTED PLAYING football when he was 4 years old, and he fell in love.

"You could just tell the way he planned for his games," his mother, Nicholle, said. "He'd lay his uniform out the night before a game. He was meticulous."

At Episcopal High, the boarding school he attended in Virginia, he blossomed into a star. At 6-foot-1, 230 pounds with a relentless work ethic, he had nearly three dozen scholarship offers by his sophomore year, and that summer, he took a bus tour to work out at camps across the Midwest, including at his dream school, Ohio State.

It was during those camps he first sensed something was wrong. He'd deliver a hit on a ball carrier, and it would take a moment or two longer than usual to recover. And there was that cough -- a dry, hacking, full-body lurch. It had been nagging him for weeks, and when he went home to Raleigh in July, his mother sent him to urgent care. He was prescribed an antibiotic. When he returned to Episcopal a few weeks later, the cough still hadn't gone away.

Steele's parents, Wendell Steele and Nicholle Steele, visited for Episcopal's season opener in late August. They insisted he see the campus doctor, who sent him for X-rays and an MRI. The family was eating dinner near campus that evening when Nicholle's phone rang.

"We're all laughing and joking," Bryce said, "and immediately her face fell."

Nicholle stepped outside to talk. When she came back, Bryce said, it was obvious she'd been crying.

Bryce didn't pry. Instead, Wendell and Nicholle dropped him off at his dorm where he played video games with his roommate, then grabbed his scooter and went for a ride around campus. When he passed by the medical center, he noticed his parents' SUV in the lot.

Then his phone buzzed.

"We need you to come see the doctor right now," his mother said.

When he arrived, Bryce found Nicholle doubled over and sobbing. Nicholle still feels guilty for not recognizing the severity of her son's symptoms earlier, she said, but Bryce was young and a high-performing athlete. Who would think of cancer?

The doctor showed Bryce his chest X-ray, pointing out a dark splotch just beneath his heart. That shouldn't be there. More tests were needed, but the splotch could be a tumor.

"Can I play tomorrow?" Bryce asked.

The answer was obvious to everyone except him, and when it finally sunk in that he'd miss the game -- maybe the season -- he broke down.

His parents tried to console him, wrapping their arms around him, but Bryce pushed them away.

"I was angry at the world," Bryce said. "I heard the term 'possible cancer,' but I didn't care about that. I wanted to play football."

That night, Bryce went back to his dorm room and said a prayer.

"God," he asked, "whatever you do, let me play football tomorrow. I don't care what happens in the future. Just let me play in the game."

STEELE WAS DIAGNOSED in September 2019 with thymoma, a rare form of cancer -- particularly for someone his age -- that develops in the thymus gland in the upper chest. From there, things moved fast.

Steele had surgery at Duke Medical Center in North Carolina, where doctors removed a 13-centimeter tumor, then he underwent proton radiation at Georgetown Hospital in Washington, D.C., to avoid chemotherapy. Doctors expected he'd make a full recovery, but they warned that, due to the tumor's size, there were no guarantees cancerous cells wouldn't be left behind. He missed his entire junior season, but he kept the diagnosis private. What had been a steady stream of coaches texting and calling dried to a trickle.

Steele ended up with a half-dozen offers he seriously considered. He'd settled on South Carolina, but just weeks before he planned to enroll, head coach Will Muschamp was fired, so Steele reconsidered. That's when he got a call from Jeff Hafley, who'd first met Steele as Ohio State's defensive coordinator and was now the head coach at Boston College.

"We knew of his diagnosis, but he fit BC," Hafley said. "He was made of the right stuff. Smart guy, great person. We recruited him really hard."

Steele flashed potential as a freshman, then saw his role grow as a sophomore, racking up 51 tackles, a pair of sacks and a forced fumble. But after each season, the cancer came back.

In 2021 and again in 2022, doctors removed a small amount of cancer cells that had shown up on routine scans. The surgeries were relatively minor, and each time, Steele was back at practice within a few weeks.

By the spring of 2023, he was on the brink of a breakthrough.

"The Bryce Steele we knew was coming came that spring," said Boston College general manager Spencer Dickow. "He'd come into his own and there was a thought for us that he'd be an All-ACC player."

A few weeks after spring practice ended, Steele went in for a routine scan, where he always approached doctor's visits pragmatically.

"If I go in here thinking I'm going to walk out fine, and they hit me with cancer, it'll be that much more emotional," he said.

So when Steele met his oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in May 2023, he expected bad news.

It was worse than he'd imagined.

THE APPOINTMENT UNFOLDED like the three before. His doctor held out a chest X-ray, and Steele stared at it blankly. Instead of a large mass or scattered cells, however, his doctor pointed out a maze of grim markers.

"This conversation was a little different," Steele said.

His doctor spoke, and Steele nodded, not fully understanding. Then he asked the same question he'd asked each time before: When can I play again?

"Honestly," the doctor said, "I don't know if you'll ever be able to play again. Not at the capacity you want."

Steele had two options for treatment. The first, which doctors recommended, involved splitting his sternum and removing cancer cells that had spread throughout the lining of his chest wall, a procedure invasive enough to likely end his football career. The second, riskier alternative was to try chemotherapy, hoping it would kill enough cancer cells to allow for a less invasive procedure that would give Steele a shot to pick up football where he'd left off.

The decision was simple.

Steele's first chemo session came in July 2023. Given his age and otherwise good health, doctors had recommended a maximum dosage, and as the final drops drained out of the IV, Steele was amazed at how good he felt. As he left the hospital, he texted BC's then-head strength coach Phil Matusz that he planned to lift with the team the next morning.

"Let's see how you do overnight," Matusz replied.

Steele awoke around 1:30 a.m., dizzy and nauseous. He ran to the bathroom vomiting and wrapped himself around his toilet. He spent the next few hours sprawled on the cold bathroom floor with his rottweiler, Remi, curled next to him.

Three days later, Steele was back working out.

"We'd say, 'Hey Bryce, you don't have to do this, man,'" Hafley said. "But there's no stopping him. He's driven to have no regrets."

Steele had one more round of chemo in August, and near the end of summer, he returned to Dana Farber for new scans. The news wasn't encouraging. They showed no significant improvement, his oncologist said. The surgery would be invasive, debilitating and, quite possibly, career-ending.

"I'd have to relearn how to breathe," he said.

IN THE WAITING room at Dana Farber, just before doctors delivered the grim news of his latest diagnosis, Steele sat alone working on homework, wearing a gray BC T-shirt with his Eagles backpack slung alongside his chair.

It was the backpack that Matt Moran first noticed, pegging Steele as a football player. He was struck by the image of the muscular athlete with Steele's relaxed demeanor in a place filled with anxiety and fear.

Moran was 54, from Orchard Park, New York, and he was in the late stages of a nearly 10-year battle with renal cell carcinoma. Doctors had just given Matt and his brother, Bill, news that the latest treatment hadn't worked.

Bill excused himself to collect his emotions, leaving Matt alone in the lobby. When Bill returned, he found Matt chatting with the football player like old friends.

"They're talking like they'd known each other for 10 years," Bill said.

They had a lot in common. Matt was a football fan, and one of his good friends had a son on BC's team. They were both outgoing, making easy conversation. And they both had stared into the abyss of cancer.

Matt left Dana Farber that day knowing his odds of survival were dwindling, but in Steele, he saw hope. He texted Steele that evening, a simple "Nice to meet you, hope the scans went well." A little while later, he got a reply.

"It was just something polite," Bill said, "and no mention of his scans. You can kind of guess what that could mean."

The brothers didn't want to pry, but their brief encounter had cemented something for Matt. He had always focused on small moments of gratitude and encouraged his brother to do the same.

"I was just so taken by Bryce," Bill Moran said. "And Matt always said, if you have a chance to send a note to say thank you to someone, you should do it."

So Bill scrawled out a few pages of appreciation and an offer to be a sounding board if needed, then dropped the letter in the mail. It took weeks to reach Steele, however, and by the time he read it, Matt had died. He was 54.

During the eulogy, Bill talked about Matt's chance encounter with Steele. It had been a perfect reminder, he said, of Matt's knack for finding blessings even in the worst of times.

That's the message Steele found in Bill's letter, too. As he considered the dark and winding path ahead, he was looking for some inspiration. Bill's note offered optimism from a stranger he'd met in a hospital waiting room just moments before hearing the worst news of his life.

The letter is now framed, sitting on a mantel inside his front door.

"Any time I'm feeling down," Steele said, "I look at it, and I'm immediately reminded of who he was."

Last Christmas, Steele's girlfriend, Madi Balvin, gifted him a pair of cleats with a phrase from Bill's letter inscribed on the side, a phrase that has come to define Steele's journey: "You never used your situation as an excuse, but used it as motivation."

STEELE'S SURGERY WAS performed on Oct. 3, 2023. It lasted 15½ hours. Afterward, he was unrecognizable.

"He was so pumped full of fluids," Nicholle said. "He looked like the Michelin Man."

Steele had been tireless in his workouts leading up to the surgery, theorizing the better he felt going in, the less work he'd have to do afterward, but when Hafley and Dickow saw him just a few days later, they were stunned.

"The Bryce Steele I knew was this 235-pound, rocked-up, whale of a man," Dickow said. "And I walked in and saw this kid, and I couldn't believe it."

During surgery, doctors found the chemotherapy was more successful than initially thought, reducing the scope of the procedure a bit. Still, Steele's body was ravaged. He'd lost the use of a sizable portion of his diaphragm, making breathing difficult. He spent a week in the ICU, sleeping more than he was awake.

Steele took his first steps just a day or two after surgery. He couldn't shuffle more than a few feet without losing his breath -- "like teaching a baby how to walk," he said -- but nurses encouraged him to keep moving.

He did laps, with chest tubes, a chemo port and IV lines tethered to his wrist, hand and neck, inching his way down the hallway, dragging a caravan of medical tubes and bags in his wake. But he kept going.

"There would be times I'd come into the hospital," Balvin said, "and he'd be doing laps alone."

After nearly a month in the hospital, he was allowed to go home. A month later, he was cleared to resume noncontact training at Boston College, to attempt to run again.

Matusz had developed a plan to help Steele rebuild his strength and conditioning metrics while closely monitoring his body's response, adjusting Steele's effort as needed, but always looking for small victories.

"I'd tell him, 'You've never done this post-chemo,'" Matusz said. "You could tell the fight never left him."

Steele met with breathing experts and private physical therapists, nutritionists, speed and agility specialists. He cut out any foods that weren't optimized for energy or recovery. If he felt the slightest tweak of a muscle, Balvin would book him a deep-tissue massage or time in a cryotherapy chamber. Steele estimates he has spent hundreds of dollars per week on his body since surgery, using his limited NIL income and support from his parents to make the finances work.

At the end of January 2024, Hafley abruptly resigned. Bill O'Brien took over as head coach, and his new strength staff, helmed by Craig Fitzgerald, put a significant emphasis on conditioning. Under the new regime, the Eagles would run -- a lot -- and Steele wanted to prove he could keep pace.

"At times, I hated it," Steele said, "but it's exactly what I needed to teach my body to work with what it had."

In August, O'Brien gathered the team for an announcement: Steele had been cleared to return to full practices.

"They went nuts," O'Brien said. "That was a cool moment."

Steele struggled to hold back tears, but before he snapped on his helmet and jogged onto the field, he had a message for his teammates.

"If you look at me differently," he said, "I'm going to be pissed off at you."

What he didn't say, however, is that he harbored his own doubts. The chemotherapy had wreaked havoc with his focus, and it would be more than a year before he felt the fog begin to lift. He'd be exhausted after chasing down a tailback. He'd deliver a hit, and for a moment, he'd be dazed.

"That was my telltale sign I should not be out there," he said.

After a handful of snaps in BC's first two games of 2024, Steele came to a decision: He wasn't ready to play football yet.

NICHOLLE HAD ALWAYS dreamed of spending Christmas in New York City, and so Boston College's date with Nebraska in the 2024 Pinstripe Bowl was something of a celebration.

What she'd really come to see, however, was her son, back on the field.

Bryce's redshirt status allowed him to play in two late-season games and BC's bowl. He played sparingly against SMU and North Carolina, but the bowl game would be his most game snaps in two years.

In the stands, Nicholle whooped, hollered and cried, and when Bryce made his first tackle, she shouted, "Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord."

"I know the people around me thought I was crazy," she said.

For Bryce, however, it wasn't a moment of triumph.

The previous months had been an emotional slog. He'd gone to every BC practice, willed his body to heal through relentless workouts, and he'd attended each Eagles game, stalking the sideline in a jersey and sweatpants without a chance at action.

"He'd come home after games and tell us, 'I just want to be out there so bad,'" Balvin said.

Steele built a relationship with former BC linebacker Mark Herzlich, a fellow cancer survivor who'd played seven seasons in the NFL, and he talked often with other patients such as Chuck Stravin, a 57-year-old BC alum and a friend of Matt Moran's. They offered Steele a sounding board.

"I was always goal focused, and I think that's the hardest thing about cancer," Stravin said. "Guys like me and guys like Bryce, we're used to being in control. And cancer takes that all away."

Eventually, Steele formulated a plan. He afforded himself a few minutes every day to be angry, to let out the frustration, regret and sadness. And then he'd flip the switch.

"Those thoughts aren't going to make you better," he said. "Just work. Work until you can't work anymore."

When coaches approached him about a return to the field late in the season, he felt almost obligated. He owed it to his coaches, teammates and, most of all, his mother.

"I pushed through a lot for her," Steele said. "She was always saying she wished she'd gotten cancer instead of me. I knew it had been tough for her, and I really wanted to see her smile."

By the bowl game in New York, BC's linebacker room had endured so much attrition, Steele was put into the regular rotation. He played 18 snaps and made two tackles. When he watches that film, however, he doesn't see a player who'd overcome nearly insurmountable odds. He sees a blurred vision of the player he wants to be.

"Did I feel good enough to play? No," Steele said. "And I feel like that wasn't really me out there."

Who Steele wants to be after so many years battling his way back to the field was still a question though.

When he first had cancer, Steele recovered at Duke Children's hospital. He'd walk the hallways and peek into the rooms, finding kids no more than 4 or 5. Steele would think, "How lucky am I to have gotten 17 years?"

The last time he had cancer, Steele shared a room with men nearly three times his age, some of whom he still keeps in touch with. They talked about life, faith, hope and death. Steele walked the halls there, too, and he found enough empty beds in once occupied rooms to understand just how closely he'd flirted with the end.

"It made me appreciate being alive, regardless of the pain I was in or not being able to play football with my brothers," Steele said. "I was grateful to be there at that moment."

He still feels lucky. He's still grateful.

Does that mean he must be satisfied, too?

"It's one thing to look at small victories, but he wants more," Dickow said. "And it's tough to deny him, because he's always beating the odds."

AFTER THE FIRST day of Boston College's spring practice in March, Steele came home beaming. He hadn't been perfect, but he felt reinvigorated

"You could tell he was proud of himself," Balvin said. "He just had a giddiness about him."

Steele built his recovery around the football maxim of getting 1% better each day -- progress accumulated over time. He is still a half-step slower than he was before cancer, and he might need an extra beat to recover after a big play, but he's smarter, more refined. He can sniff out a play before the snap, cheat two steps toward a ball carrier's intended destination, and accomplish the job better than how his body worked previously.

O'Brien said he expected Steele to nab for a starting job in the fall, and his position coaches raved his spring performance was "like night and day" from just a few months before. This, Steele said, was the best he'd felt since the surgery.

The better he felt, however, the more he started to believe he could recapture more of what he's lost.

On April 26, the final day of the spring transfer portal, Steele announced he was leaving Boston College. He thanked BC, his coaches and teammates for supporting him, but said he also understood how easily an opportunity can slip away. He didn't want to miss any more.

Steele thought about life before cancer, when the biggest programs in the country wanted him. Wasn't it only fair that, after all the pain, effort and determination, he should get the chance to script his own ending?

"My mother's always told me, 'It's up to you to achieve your goals,'" Steele said. "Nobody determines your future but you."

Within a few days, he reconsidered.

If cancer is a journey, Steele thought, the path isn't supposed to loop back around to the beginning. Cancer took a lot from Steele, but maybe, he thinks, this is what it has given him. There is no ghost to chase. There is only some new version of himself to discover each day.

On April 30, Steele met with O'Brien for the second time in less than a week, asking to return to BC.

Whatever awaited on the other side of the portal was something the old Bryce Steele wanted, he said. He wants to be someone new now, a football player who had cancer but not one defined by it.

"I've changed my perspective," Steele said. "If things don't work out the way I think they will, I'm just grateful for the opportunity to be back on the field with my teammates. I'm more than just a football player, and it might've taken me a while to realize that, but now that I do, it's made this whole journey a lot easier."