Just a year after he started chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, Gulf Shores senior Tyler Burkett officially extended his football career to the collegiate level after he made his commitment to Miles College on Thursday.

Burkett got his diagnosis not long after the Dolphins won the 2023 Class 5A state championship and began chemotherapy sessions at the start of February 2024. Midway through this February, he committed to the Miles Golden Bears.

The 6-foot-3 offensive lineman announced his first collegiate offer on Wednesday evening following a conversation with Miles offensive line coach Andre Smith, the sixth overall pick in the 2009 NFL Draft who played at Huffman High School in Birmingham before he suited up for the Alabama Crimson Tide. Just 26 hours after he announced the offer on social media, Burkett revealed his commitment to the Golden Bears in a Thursday post.

Burkett worked his way back to Gulf Shores’ practice fields in August then got a cancer-free designation on Sept. 23, 2024, before he made his season debut against St. Paul’s on Oct. 4, 2024. After his senior night game against Theodore on Oct. 22, 2024, Burkett said he weighed in at 254 pounds which might have been 10 pounds fewer than he was during the state championship game, but it was also 14 pounds more than when he first returned in the summer.

He’ll be set to join a Miles team that bounced back from losing its first two games of the season and entered the Division II playoffs on a nine-game win streak. The Golden Bears finished 10-3 overall with a loss to Valdosta State, who went on to be national runners-up, in the second round.

Miles competes in the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, where it went undefeated in eight games last season, and recently received a new head football coach. Chris Goode took over on Jan. 3 for his first head coaching job at the collegiate level. A 10th-round selection in the 1987 NFL Draft out of Alabama, Goode played seven seasons for the Indianapolis Colts before he stayed involved in the game.

Goode served as defensive coordinator for the Arena Football League’s Birmingham Steeldogs before he launched a prep school, Goode Elite Prep, with his brother Pierre to give high school athletes an extra chance at college exposure. After the school started in 2016 in the Tuscaloosa area, it moved to Baldwin County in 2020.