Not one, but two brain tumors.
Now, for two years, there have been none. When Keonilei Akana boards her plane tonight, she will eventually land in Lincoln, Neb., to begin her career as a Cornhusker. She charted her journey long ago, well before the adversity, and just like that, her family will have to let go. Akana will be on her own, buoyed by her faith and toughness.
The Kamehameha outside hitter will be airborne and college-bound just two years after doctors removed her second tumor. It was a secret that only family, coaches and teammates knew about. Akana could have opted to stay close by, to play with older sister Braelyn at Hawaii, just as their mother, Joselyn (Robins), did.
“The easiest would be for her to stay home,” said Brandyn Akana, their father. “We wanted that, but Kaylei has always said she wanted to go. That’s Kaylei. She will never make it easy for her or for us, but that’s something she really wanted to do, so she’s going to be far away from home. This will be a new test. This is what you wanted, so let’s go. Of course, we’re going to support her, but it is going to be a whole new mountain she needs to climb.”
On a hot Saturday afternoon in Hauula, family and friends are cooking under the tents for Kaylei’s graduation celebration. Dad has help from a nephew making his tasty fried chicken — a recipe passed down from his father on Molokai — before other veteran hands take over at two large woks filled with bubbling oil. There are helping hands everywhere as they prepare food.
“My dad likes to cook and he does all the fishing and everything,” said Kaylei, as family and friends call her. “We’re going to make a lot of Hawaiian food.”
The street is festooned with a balloon-filled arch for the coming drive-by of happy faces. The arch is removed to make way for a fire truck ambling through the normally quiet cul-de-sac. Soon, Akana is adorned with lei after lei.
Akana rose up the ranks as a renowned club volleyball player with older sister Braelyn. By junior year, Akana’s mastery at multiple positions led to a No. 3 ranking in the Star-Advertiser All-State Fab 15. Last season, as a senior, she rose to the top as player of the year, closing her final season with 378 kills and 403 digs. She had 22 kills in the state championship match. She was named one of the top 150 players in the nation, an honorable mention selection by Under Armor All-America. In a state with a surplus of outstanding volleyball teams and players, the versatile 5-foot-9 Akana was on top.
Her prep career almost didn’t get off the ground. Akana had just completed eighth grade. She and her sister had returned from a series of tournaments and camps on the mainland. It was summer of 2016 and they were at Kahuku High School, where Brandyn Akana, their father, had his boys basketball team working out in the gym.
The sisters had just finished running 1.5 miles on the track in preparation for a physical education requirement at their school, Kamehameha.
“She came, sat down and I remember them sitting next to me, talking,” Coach Akana recalled. “Then all of a sudden she fainted and blacked out. That’s when we knew something was wrong. That’s kind of what started everything. She seemed fine, but after awhile she blacked out and she went into a seizure.”
Kaylei remembers everything.
“We went to a whole bunch of places. We went to Minnesota, and right after I went to the Texas camp, and after that I went to California and did a couple of camps there. I was gone for a couple of weeks,” she said. “I was already tired going back home after a long trip and so much volleyball. After our run, we were all good. My dad was having practice, so we were watching for a little bit, and I just remember not being able to communicate with her. I was having a really hard time. I couldn’t understand anything she was saying, which started to worry her, and then I ended up fainting forward and I landed my head, which triggered my seizure. The doctor said that triggered the tumor. I woke up in the hospital.”
They rushed her to the hospital, where an MRI revealed a small tumor near her left ear, on the back of her head.
“It’s crazy. The day before, she flew in from Florida on a nine-hour flight. Or she could’ve been at the beach or at the pool. With seizures, that’s not where you want to be,” Coach Akana said. “You can look back at it now and say, man, it could’ve been a lot worse, but it happened and that’s when we found out what was going on and what we needed to do.”
The tumor was removed surgically. Akana didn’t sit still for long. A week later, she was out and about again.
“There’s times when I was scared. It was benign,” Kaylei recalled. “I was back in school a week later. The doctor was surprised, but I was fine.”
She returned to the hardwood two weeks after the surgery. She had missed a good chunk of the tryout period at Kamehameha, but Coach Chris Blake had already taken a close look at the doctors’ guidelines.
“It was never an issue and she never made it an issue. It never affected her performance, never affected team practice or weight training. It was never a barrier,” the longtime Kamehameha coach said.
Kaylei pushed through with plenty of anticipation.
“Coach Chris is a huge part of this. He really helped me get through. My mom was already concerned and she wanted me to be a manager. Coach Chris was saying, ‘It’s OK, she can try out and play.’ That really helped me. He was an inspiration and motivation to me. He thought that having a positive thing, knowing how much volleyball means to me, going into a hard thing like surgery, was important for me.”
After the operation, she got the OK from her doctors.
“My parents and my doctors reminded me that rest is OK, so that was important. A couple of weeks after, I got to practice with the team and that was my tryout,” she said.
Medication does not go hand in hand with the busy life of an elite volleyball player. Akana refused to take a lengthy break. She also knew she needed her family more than ever, especially Braelyn.
Braelyn Akana remembers it all vividly.
“Definitely, the first time it happened, when we got the news about the tumor and everything, all of us were shocked. We didn’t know how to react to it because this is the first incident any of the four of us have had including surgery. All of us were thrown off. Being positive as a family, it wasn’t only me, it was our family being life accepting, we just had to take a different approach on things, focusing on the good. It’s really something to adjust to because she still has appointments and all that stuff. We got super close through it all,” she said.
Freshman season was successful for Akana, all things considered. Braelyn was a sophomore and a key contributor. Kaylei gradually got more reps as the staff kept a close eye on her. Through that year, she wouldn’t say a single word about her experience. Only her family and teammates knew about her adversity. It was a secret she kept all through high school.
“For her, she didn’t want it to be a focal point on that in the world of recruiting, as well as her club and school teammates,” her father said. “She didn’t want anyone concentrating on that because she understands how it’s a team sport. She wanted to keep it kind of low. Her teammates know. Her coaches know.”
Kaylei wanted to move on without a hitch.
“We just decided as a family not to share it because of the whole recruiting process and just the timing of it. It was a hard time for our family and for me,” she recalled. “I wasn’t able to play the sport that I love.”
The sisters had each other to rely on during those long, daily hauls from Hauula to Kapalama Heights. Akana kept pushing herself.
“That was the one thing she went through. A lot of the doctors said, the fatigue, you won’t be able to do what you did in the past,” Brandyn Akana said. “Every day, she gets up at 4:30, goes to church seminary, then she leaves at 6, gets to school little after 7, she starts at 7:30. After school there’s practice and she doesn’t get home until 9 at night. As parents, we’re like, her schedule is like none other. She leaves dark and comes home dark.”
Things seemed back to normal as her first year in high school unfolded.
“She recovered really quick, super quick, like one week, back to practice,” Braelyn said. “It wasn’t even a question for her or anything like that. She kept going. We still do daily checkups on her. ‘Are you OK?’ ‘I’m fine.’ ”
Akana siblings: Braelyn, Tasi, Tausili and Keonilei.
Before summer break, however, a setback. It was during lunch hour when something felt strangely familiar.
“The second time, I was with my friends and we were getting ready for song contest, a week before. While I was singing, I started realizing I was having a hard time listening again, like the first time it happened. I told one of my best friends, Noelle (Sua-Godinet). She helped me through and she called my sister. She stayed with me, made sure I was OK,” Kaylei said.
“I got called down from a class,” Braelyn said. “Her friends were like, Kaylei’s on the ground. I’m like, you’re kidding me! I had to sprint out of class. I was really scared because I don’t really know how to react to something like that.”
Mom and dad, grandparents all rushed to campus. No seizure, but this was deja vu. Kaylei was taken by ambulance to the hospital.
“As a parent, you want to think, OK, it’s over, it’s done, we can move on, we learned from it. But the second time when it’s back, we’ve got to do surgery immediately. Woh, maybe this is not over,’ Coach Akana said.
Doctors found a new tumor, smaller than the first one, in the same location.
“So we had to cope with that and go through it again,” Dad said. “For her, I know going through it again doing another surgery, anytime you do surgery on the brain, there’s a lot of other things that come into play. Luckily, surgery went great. The doctors performed it awesome. You always hear the stories of, it didn’t go well. There’s other things. Could be paralyzed because of this, her senses, memory loss.”
Braelyn wasn’t sure what the future would hold for her sister.
“The second time it happened, we were like, oh, this can keep going. It can continue at any time. It’s not just one and done,” she said.
Kaylei braced herself.
“They told me the first time that if it was to grow again, after the second surgery I would do six weeks of radiation,” she said. “Since then, I’ve done checkups every six months. It was during the end of the school year, so right after school I would have to go to the radiation office and get that done. It was hard having to do school work and having club practice. We were in club season in the beginning of summer.”
She grinded through. She looked virtually the same, aside from a small bald patch behind her left ear where the tumor once was. The chemotherapy took a toll.
“Throughout the process, there were good days and there were bad days, also. But the main thing that I had, something that I really learned was having positive people around me. Having bad days, I would always think like, OK, maybe I’m not going to get through it, maybe I should just stop. Someone who really helped me through it was my sister, Brae. She was always there and my sister is really good at thinking of the positive and seeing the better things in everything, just knowing that I can always do something when I set my mind to it. Having positive people and surrounding myself with that energy was really nice for me,” Kaylei said.
She’d never seen her mom and dad go through this set of circumstances.
“At some point, realizing that I had to go to all these appointments and go to radiation and everything, I worried about my parents. I know they were worried for me, but the payments and everything, them having to work all that out, I was worried about that. That was going through my head at the time,” Kaylei said.
Once again, Kaylei recovered with an almost supernatural speed. After six weeks of treatments, she went with her sister to Arizona for training.
“Throughout the radiation, I would still go to my club practices. My coaches understood if I was feeling tired, I would sit out, but throughout all of it, I was feeling great,” she said. “Having volleyball and being able to work out is therapeutic for me. I knew what was going to happen after the second time. I was a little more comfortable.”
As a sophomore, she made a big contribution as a versatile weapon for the Warriors. In the summer of 2018, she made the rounds again with Braelyn on the mainland. It was enough to open plenty of eyes in gyms across the country. USC came forward and offered her a scholarship before junior year began. She committed soon after that.
“We talked to her coaches about it, explained and were open about it, and they were fine with it,” Brandyn Akana said.
With the Akana sisters providing contributions, Kamehameha reached the state final that fall of ’18 and captured the crown.
The following season, Braelyn was a senior and Kaylei a junior — both were voted All-State Fab 15 — as the Warriors returned to the state final, but lost to powerful ‘Iolani.
Last fall, the Warriors were back on top, earning Coach Blake a 10th state title over a 15-year span.
It was in her essay, when she applied for USC, that Kaylei first revealed her adversity off the court.
“Early on, she didn’t want to. She didn’t want people worrying about her and stuff,” Coach Akana said. “Because of that, Kaylei was able to be who she is her final two years. No excuses. What she went through, she was able to play the sport she loves. She felt it was a gift. She worked twice as hard and it was a gift to play the game of volleyball.”
Kaylei had been committed to USC, but received a release when the coaching staff went to Auburn in early 2020.
Nearly two years have passed since her second surgery. Days go by when she forgets it even happened. She hopes to leave a blueprint with future young athletes who may face a similar hurdle.
“Mainly for me, being a senior and leaving, getting out this story was important for me. There’s a lot of people who don’t know my story, I would like to give people hope that just setting your dream and goal will happen if you work hard. Everything happens for a reason. The path I went through isn’t what I would imagine for myself, but I really do think going through that path helped me to become the person and player I am today,” she said.
Braelyn is still amazed.
“We’re just really grateful how strong she is now. Definitely, there were conversations her not playing anymore, but I think she just defied all the odds,” she said.
The new chapter begins. Kaylei is pumped. She has seen different parts of the country over the years. Dorm life is next. She spent a lot of time during this COVID-19 lockdown learning to make the meals that her mother nourished their family with, particularly lasagna.
One day, quite possibly, Hawaii and Nebraska, which finished No. 5 in the nation last season, will meet on the court as the Akana sisters on opposite sides.
“Honestly, Kaylei and I are super competitive. Against each other or even with each other against anyone else. I’m sure it’s going to be, that’s my sister, but both of us are going to want to win,” Braelyn said. “We’ll be fine afterward. We flip a switch when we start playing each other.”
The Cornhuskers will gather on campus this week. They will work out, eat together, and bond. Expectations will be high, as usual. With no class until late summer, they will become Akana’s new family. Her family back home will cheer from afar.
“Now, she just got her brain scans and stuff again and it’s clear, so ohh, we’re so grateful. It’s just a really great thing. It’s a good feeling there’s nothing in there. Hasn’t been for awhile,” Braelyn said. “I love my sister.”
Dad and mom will try to stifle their natural inclination to worry.
“Now as she leaves Sunday and she starts her college life, she understands the person she is. She’s going to need her rest. She’s not, maybe, like everybody else so she needs to be smart,” Dad says. “We said, if you can live this lifestyle, this schedule, which Joselyn and I know, the schedule of college students with early workouts, you go to class, you have weight training, practice in the evening. you’ve already had a similar schedule.”
Nebraska coach John Cook and staff had seen Akana play in the offseason. In a news release, Cook was stoked about the new addition to one of the nation’s premier programs.
“Keonilei is a big-time get for us. Not only is she one of the best ball-control players in the country in this class, she is the first Hawaiian to play for Nebraska since Fiona Nepo. We are expecting her to come in and compete for playing time in the libero/defensive specialist position from day one.”
Longtime coach and TV analyst Kevin Wong sees the fluidity and instincts in Akana.
“She reminds me of (former Punahou and UH player) Tui Tuileta. Has all the skills, is a great leader,” Wong said. “She will bring a different level of athleticism to the libero position at Nebraska.”
Akana's accolades were not enough to qualify for the Hawaii Hall of Honor.
"I think the committee always has a challenging job to evaluate the multitude of scholar-athletes in our state," Blake said. "Culling that down to 12 is always tough. I don't think it diminishes anything that happens in any season from any of the scholar-athletes left off the list. I just know the work that they have done for their schools and for their teammates, coaches and families is amazing. Many are worth of recognition of some kind. It's tough. Deep down inside, it's always tough. It's always some who are not officially recognized."
Akana's accolades were not enough to qualify for the Hawaii Hall of Honor.
"I think the committee always has a challenging job to evaluate the multitude of scholar-athletes in our state," Blake said. "Culling that down to 12 is always tough. I don't think it diminishes anything that happens in any season from any of the scholar-athletes left off the list. I just know the work that they have done for their schools and for their teammates, coaches and families is amazing. Many are worth of recognition of some kind. It's tough. Deep down inside, it's always tough. It's always some who are not officially recognized."
The Akana ohana is shrinking again. The third of the four keiki, Tausili, just completed freshman year at Kamehameha. The talented defensive end already has scholarship offers from BYU and Utah. Tasi is already 6. Dad doesn’t say it in words, but he has accepted the reality of a future when his concern and worry will linger in mid-air. Kaylei is following her road.
“We knew this from the beginning. It’s what we raised, right? Athletes. There’s going to be a time where they’ve got to go,” Brandyn Akana said. “It is tough for us because we’re still kind of in the early stages of kids leaving the house, but we get it. We’re just happy for her and see what’s in store for her at the next level.”
Kaylei Akana's lockdown staples
Top 3 shows
1. Chicago PD.
2. Law and Order. “The original. I watch it on TV or sometimes on my laptop.”
3. Suicide Squad. “That’s my favorite movie. It has Will Smith.”
New skill
Akana: “I’ve been cooking a lot. When I go up there, I’ll have a kitchen and everything. It’s like a dorm suite, kind of. I’m excited about that. Something that was fun making was lasagna. My mom taught me how to make lasagna, which I love eating. Learning to make that was really cool.”
Shout outs
Akana: “I want to shout out Coach Chris. He was a huge inspiration to me and motivation. Without him, I don’t think I would’ve continued to play volleyball as a freshman. And shout out to everyone who supported me throughout this whole process, through my volleyball, my medical and my academics. Just the amount of support I had from my doctors, my teachers, my trainers at school, definitely my family, my parents. All the support I had is amazing. I wouldn’t have become the person I am today.”
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