Kansas players gather at mid-court for a huddle during an NCAA Tournament practice on Wednesday, March 19, 2025 at Amica Mutual Pavilion in Providence, R.I. Photo by Nick Krug

Providence, R.I. — Some of the loudest cheers in Allen Fieldhouse — and in college basketball arenas across the country — rain down in the final minutes of blowout home wins.

Crowds get reinvigorated when fans see their favorite walk-ons come to the scorer’s table to enter the game and, better yet, leave their mark on the final box score.

On Feb. 22, forward Dillon Wilhite, a nonscholarship player from San Diego, who once earned a national championship ring as part of the 2021-22 Kansas team, made his final in-game appearance at Allen Fieldhouse as part of a blowout win over Oklahoma State. Wilhite put back a miss by freshman wing Rakease Passmore, then used an assist by Passmore to score again.

The four points constituted his career high and, as is inevitably the case when a walk-on takes the floor, delighted his teammates on the bench.

Just Wilhite’s fifth appearance of the year, it was a fitting reward for years of working as a member of the so-called “red team” — helping sharpen KU’s starters and scholarship players by battling them in practice on a daily basis, often taking on the roles of specific upcoming foes to help the Jayhawks prepare for key matchups.

“I would say the scout team puts a lot of work in, doesn’t usually get the recognition,” Wilhite said, “so it’s good to get rewarded, get in there and have some fun.”

The cheers may be silenced, and the exuberant bench calmed, beginning next year.

As part of the House v. NCAA settlement, which is set for final approval on April 7 and which will allow schools to pay athletes directly, the NCAA is also doing away with its longstanding system of scholarship limits in favor of roster limits within which any number of players can be on athletic scholarships.

For example, in college baseball, Division I teams averaged a roster size of 41.9 players in 2023-24, according to a recent ESPN article on the settlement, throughout which coaches could only distribute 11.7 scholarships. When the House settlement goes into effect, programs will be limited to 34 players, any and all of whom can be on scholarship. Arizona State has famously already pledged to offer 34 scholarships.

In men’s basketball, the disparity between the present system and the future one is far less drastic, but still notable.

The KU men’s basketball team started the season with 13 players on scholarship and six walk-ons — a tight-knit group that current Jayhawk Patrick Cassidy called “another kind of brotherhood beyond the team itself.” The new roster limit is 15 regardless of scholarship status — and the Jayhawks, who still have to resolve one pending penalty from the Independent Accountability Resolution Process, will only be able to field 14 players next year, head coach Bill Self has previously said. That will be a 26% reduction on the number of players theoretically able to practice as opposed to the start of this season — and if they wanted to use a roster spot on incoming two-sport recruit Jaden Nickens, a receiver for the football team, they’d be limited to 13 for much of the year.

That would mean no walk-ons, if they wanted to maintain the customary 13 scholarships.

“Seeing walk-ons, seeing the legacy behind the ones that are working behind the scenes like the walk-ons do, to me it’s kind of disappointing to see (the rule change),” Cassidy told the Journal-World on Wednesday. “I know you don’t have to use all 15 of your scholarships, so I think in some capacity there could still be walk-ons available in some way, shape or form, but it’s kind of an end of an era for the walk-ons, so it’s kind of sad to see.”

Self went a step further. He recently called the upcoming 15-player limit “a terrible rule, because it doesn’t grandfather in kids that have put two or three years of their heart and soul into a place that guarantees them a roster spot” — i.e. current walk-ons like Justin Cross and Wilder Evers with pending eligibility remaining.

“So it’s a bad rule in my opinion,” he said, “but it is the rule, 15 total.”

He said, as Cassidy did, that he believes there can still be a place for walk-ons in college basketball, and that teams don’t necessarily need 15 athletes on scholarship. But he also suggested teams wouldn’t want to give out walk-on spots before knowing their full range of options in terms of scholarship players.

The calculus might not favor players with backgrounds like those of this year’s seniors: Wilhite, the grandson of longtime KU men’s basketball administrative assistant Joanie Stephens, who grew up going to camps at KU, or Cassidy, a native Kansan who got converted from team manager to walk-on midway through his tenure at the school, the subject of a tearful video ahead of his senior night that recently made waves on social media.

“(If) there’s a 7-footer out there that if he can develop at all he may end up being a player, would you rather have somebody like that and hope like heck you take three of those guys and one of them pans out,” Self said, “or do you take three guys that are Patrick- and Dillon-type players that would give their heart and soul to a place?”

And in the near term, what will happen, in fact, to those types of players?

“I think you’re going to lose a lot of kids — whether they’re Kansas kids or kids that have ties to the program, (they) are going to lose that hope that they might make the team,” said Brad Witherspoon, a Humboldt native who spent two seasons as a walk-on in the late 2000s.

Wilhite had one more year he could conceivably have used to play college basketball, but he said he’s ready to move on, and he gave a speech at senior night on March 8. He’s finishing up an MBA and will begin an internship at a wealth management firm in San Diego this summer.

But what of his four walk-on teammates who retain eligibility and may be out of luck next season?

“I’m not sure whether if that rule goes into effect, maybe there’ll still be like one walk-on and some semi-practice player, maybe type manager-slash-walk-on kind of deal?” he wondered aloud. “Not sure (how) the future looks for that.”

“We’ve gotten so into professionalizing the sport, I think we are going to lose something,” said Matt Kleinmann, a KU walk-on from 2004 to 2009. “It’s not about the sort of novelty of the walk-ons alone, it’s about how do you create space for athletes who really care about a university and just want to make them better?”

Added Witherspoon: “They have so much invested, so many practices, so many weight-room sessions with not a lot of reward or notoriety from playing a bunch of minutes or scoring a bunch of points. I think that adds value to teams.”

photo by: Nick Krug

Kansas guards Chase Buford, front, and Brad Witherspoon look to check into a game against Pittsburg State.

What will be lost?

In a moment of contemplation ahead of his senior night, Wilhite pointed out that in the age of the transfer portal, “new faces are always coming through now, but walk-ons, we know how it goes, how things operate around here.”

Indeed, throughout Self’s tenure, walk-ons have played a key role in setting expectations for the rest of the players in the program — usually in practice, but sometimes that role can extend even to games, as when Self started Kleinmann in an early-season game against Jackson State in 2008 to make a point about effort in practice.

“I was used to light a fire, for a lack of better term, under the rear ends of the Morris twins — and one thing as a walk-on, you learn the offense and you learn the defense,” Kleinmann told the Journal-World in a recent interview. “You are nothing if not able to remember the plays, because that’s most of your job in practice. He used me as an example to them to say, ‘Well, Matt’s busting his you-know-what and he’s going to get the opportunity to start, and that’s because you guys aren’t taking this opportunity seriously.'”

Kleinmann, an Overland Park native, chose the opportunity to walk on at KU over a scholarship opportunity at the University of the Pacific. And with the exception of one semester, the fall of his fourth season on campus when he said a scholarship spot opened up temporarily — “It didn’t change anything, at least on the basketball side, because Coach Self had made sure I was a part of the team” — he remained a walk-on, an experience which he says “redirected the course of my life.”

“It wasn’t just the basketball experience, it was the relationships, the education, the culture, (that) while I was in over my head as a basketball player, I think formed a level of toughness to kind of be on a team where I was the lowest guy on the pecking order for a couple of years,” said Kleinmann, who has recently worked at a health care nonprofit and run for Congress. “It forced me to develop some mental fortitude that has carried with me ever since.”

He played in 70 games in five years with the Jayhawks, including as a member of the 2008 national championship team, and by his final two seasons on campus started to feel comfortable speaking up more, with the mindset that “I don’t need to prove anything anymore, I just want to make the team better.”

Kleinmann said it bolsters a team’s culture to “have leadership who’s not looking for their own minutes and they’re not looking for their own stats.”

“Sometimes coaches can’t really get through to players about culture,” he added. “Sometimes coaches are disciplinarians and it makes it harder to reach a player who is feeling whatever they’re feeling. But if you got a guy on the inside in the locker room who isn’t going to worry about their playing time but they want to see everybody succeed, if you have an opportunity to be a leader in that way, it’s sort of like being a mini-coach.”

It may not come as a surprise, then, that quite a few KU walk-ons have gone into coaching.

That 2007-08 roster with Kleinmann also included Brennan Bechard, Chase Buford and Jeremy Case, who serve in various capacities on Self’s current staff, and Witherspoon, who is now the head coach at Dodge City Community College.

Serving as a KU walk-on, Witherspoon says, changed his life and “jumpstarted my career into kind of what it is now.”

“I think we probably have a unique perspective on practice and scouting reports,” he said, “and having to run certain stuff in practice and having to guard certain stuff in practice, whatever it is.”

Witherspoon, the rare Jayhawk to make the team via tryouts — on his third attempt, as a junior in 2006, which he still considers one of his life’s greatest accomplishments — recalled a blowout win against Colorado in which he and his scout-team peers got in late and started running the Buffaloes’ own offense against them.

“And they were looking at us like ‘What the hell? Are they actually running (our) offense against us?'” he said.

He drew a direct line from that to his work as a coach.

“We have a unique perspective of having to know certain things that they might not have to know,” he said.

The walk-ons pick up that knowledge, of course, in the process of their work on the scout team going against top players in practice.

“When I was there — and I tell even my teams now that I coach, I talk about some of my former teammates — I always tell them, I say, ‘If you asked my teammates back then who played the hardest, who practiced the hardest, who guarded the hardest, they’d always say the walk-ons,” he said.

Witherspoon said he thinks it’s “doable” to practice effectively with slightly reduced numbers — “I almost think 19’s too many,” he said of KU’s current roster size — but Kleinmann expressed some concern about the prospect of increased injuries in the absence of walk-ons.

“When your body is doing more reps, practice can contribute to injuries just like games can,” Kleinmann said. “It’ll create wear and tear (for) some coaches who have relied upon a structure where you want your starting five, really your starting eight, to work as a unit. You need guys to push back against them.”

If you have two big men in your starting lineup, Kleinmann wondered, and two elsewhere in your rotation, “Where’s the other two to four guys that are going to compete against them?”

photo by: Nick Krug

Kansas center Matt Kleinmann wrestles for ball control with Jackson State defenders Grant Maxey (32) and Jeremy Caldwell (44) during the first half Saturday, Dec. 6, 2008 at Allen Fieldhouse.

Where are they?

Wilhite and Cassidy are graduating, but as of Wednesday, none of KU’s other walk-ons — Cross, Evers, Noah Shelby or Will Thengvall — could say for sure what the future held for them when asked by the Journal-World.

“I have no clue,” said Thengvall, a freshman from Wichita whose brother is a walk-on at Wichita State. “I’m just ready to finish off the season strong.”

The rule changes were far from their minds anyway on the eve of the NCAA Tournament.

“For most of us walk-ons, it’s out of our control, so we just try to work hard every day in practice, get better, make the team better,” Thengvall said, “and then when that time comes to make those decisions, we’ll deal with that when the time comes.”

Cassidy said it might be harder with 15 scholarship players to find guys willing to handle “the little things that some people might not be willing to do,” and Shelby, a former high-ranked recruit who played at Vanderbilt and Rice, said the erosion of walk-ons could be a blow to team chemistry.

“A lot of the best guys on the team that get everybody together are walk-ons,” he said, “so losing that would be a big loss for all the teams.”