Kyle Fetterly stopped a guest walking out of his office with a simple gesture.

‘Just one more quick story and I’ll let you go,’ he said. After more than two decades as the school’s equipment manager, he’s got a million. Name me a person, he says, and I’ll bet I’ve got a story on him.

But on May 9, 2009, with the lights shining on him, dressed in his ceremonial garb, the story, for once was about the 50-year-old Fetterly.

For 15 years, he’d been working non-stop to earn his diploma to tell a new tale, one about the most important day of his life.

‘Walking across that stage, there was that feeling of accomplishment when you hear your name called. I just wanted to do it for myself,’ Fetterly said. ‘I just wanted to say that I was a Syracuse University graduate – and I’m proud of that, too.’

Taking one or two classes a semester, Fetterly was able to complete a degree that started as an undergraduate in 1977. After failing out of the university three times, Fetterly latched on as the school’s head equipment manager in 1983. But as the years passed, a desire to get the once-evasive diploma nagged at him. So in 1994 he began taking classes again toward a degree he started long ago in retail management.

Now, this football season – his 29th on staff – marks his first as a Syracuse alumus.

Sitting in his computer chair, his face brightens when he speaks of his background in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management. Cracking a fresh tin of Copenhagen, he segues flawlessly between stories about the 1993 Fiesta Bowl and market-to-market assessment. From long bus rides and cold-cut sandwiches with John Desko, to the long-term effects of radio frequency identification chips.

‘He figured out over this time interests I don’t think he even knew he had,’ his former academic advisor Amanda Nicholson said. ‘If someone had gone to him 20 years ago and said ‘You’ll take this class and find it interesting’ I think he would have said ‘Nahh.” He is a connoisseur of all the many facets that made up his retail management degree. ‘One time, I even proved in a class that Alan Greenspan was the cause of the financial crisis on an economics graph,’ Fetterly said. ‘It got a lot of boos.’

Over the years, Fetterly’s friends maintain that the only thing that’s changed about him is his moustache. He’s kept his affable demeanor, his booming guffaw and his talent as a brilliant storyteller. However, his appetite for education, he thinks, came a bit later on in life.

Back in the late 1970s, Fetterly was a different kind of student. Entering as an undergraduate in the fall, he had a lot on his mind and a heavy heart. His parents’ marriage was fleeting, and he needed to escape for a while. So in lieu of classes, he chose an option he was more comfortable with.

‘I was going through some tough times in my life,’ Fetterly said. ‘And honestly I was here more to party than I was to go to school. I was here to party and have fun – and I did.’

In the meantime, he saw an advertisement to become a student manager for the SU football team. Having played sports in high school, Fetterly saw it as a way to stay connected and do something he enjoyed. Before long, he’d work his way up to the head of the equipment department.

‘His work ethic was fantastic,’ former SU head coach Dick MacPherson said. ‘When his superior took the job at Michigan State, it was very easy for us to take Kyle. And now what’s happened is, he’s an institution at this place. He knows everything that’s going on.’

MacPherson liked him so much that he would later have Fetterly speak to the team on Thursday nights after practice, a tradition that was continued by Paul Pasqualoni and resumed under current head coach Doug Marrone.

‘He’s one of those great guys that every university has,’ MacPherson said. ‘He’s that guy that’s always going to be here, and when everybody comes back, they have to see Kyle.’

Though his professional career was blossoming, Fetterly’s grades floundered. He said his cumulative GPA throughout his 22 scattered years as a student ended up at 2.8. But from 1994-2009, he carried a 3.8. His first few semesters had provided him with dismal numbers to start.

‘I laughed at our old academic advisor who came in all frustrated that one of our players had gotten a 0.0 (GPA) one semester about six years ago,’ Fetterly said. ‘He said, ‘Do you know how hard it is to get a 0.0?’ And I said, ‘No, it’s actually pretty easy, all you do is sign up for class and not go like I did!”

Today, he says he has few regrets about his first go-round at SU. Would he have liked to graduate in 1981? Sure. But the experiences he’s had were invaluable. Before most of his peers had a grasp on the real world, Fetterly was manning the equipment wing of a Division I athletic program with the help of just one part-time assistant – all the while building it into the small empire he has today tucked neatly into his corner of Manley Field House.

Walking into Fetterly’s office, you see him in command. On any given day there are helmets that need polishing, cleats that need repairing, invoices and budgets to fill out and equipment orders to complete. He does team laundry in capacious heaps, takes calls from corporate salesman and researches new products.

‘He’s always been very steady in going about his business,’ said SU Senior Associate Director of Athletics Rob Edson, a longtime friend of Fetterly’s. ‘He’s been really important to ensuring we put a quality product out there to represent what Syracuse University is all about.’

Assistants flood in and out of his workspace while Fetterly scans 20 sports worth of equipment on his walk toward the locker room. He quietly thinks to himself what needs to be done as he fishes into a giant yellow bin spilling over with practice jerseys – he finds something wrong with No. 13’s uniform instantaneously.

‘We’ll need to stitch this up,’ he says. ‘Lots of practice jerseys need some repair.’

For Fetterly, this is easy. Though at any given moment his job could demand just about anything, he never breaks a sweat.

But school on the other hand…

It was the culmination of one of his sales classes, and Fetterly – donning his suit and tie – was ready to pitch his product to a mock board of potential investors made up of Nicholson and associate professor Ray Wimer.

The 40-something Fetterly had crafted a universal lacrosse helmet, no doubt a product of his decades spent in the annals of the equipment room. But this helmet was way cooler than your run-of-the-mill lacrosse helmet, he thought.

With a plain white base, the helmet’s distinct feature was an interchangeable visor which could support any color in the rainbow. So no matter what color uniform a player wears, he can keep the same helmet and simply change the visor.

‘Our big selling point was: for youth teams you don’t have to buy a helmet every year, you can just buy the visor!’ Fetterly said. ‘If you don’t have a screwdriver (to change the visor with) I said look – you could just use a dime!’

There was no doubt in his mind he could nail the presentation; he rehearsed it at least 10 times. Who knew more about lacrosse helmets than Kyle Fetterly? Nicholson’s background was at Saks Fifth Avenue and Wimer’s at Barnes and Noble – he had this in the bag.

But Nicholson wouldn’t budge. In her sharp British accent, she fired a nonstop barrage of questions at Fetterly to try and spike his nerves.

‘He had me on product knowledge, but I remember doing some research and studying up,’ Nicholson said. ‘My colleague and I usually predetermine where we’re going to take the conversation depending on how they’re doing. So we kept putting up walls in front of him, and he got very frustrated with us.’

At the end of the presentation, Fetterly asked the question he already knew the answer to.

So do you think we can do some business together?

We’ll get back to you.

It’s hard for Nicholson to tell that story without laughing. Like so many other professors who’ve taught Fetterly, he’s become an indispensable part of their memory. Their own version of Rodney Dangerfield from ‘Back to School,’ Fetterly likes to think.

Ask biology professor Marvin Druger what he remembers most about Fetterly, and he’ll likely haul out an out-of-condition football helmet Fetterly handed in as a biology extra credit project.

On one side of the helmet, Fetterly and then-SU fullback Nick Sudano had created a diagram of the plant cell. On the other side, the animal cell.

Druger wore the helmet to the class final that year at Gifford Auditorium and still keeps it today. Fetterly would chase him down at an art festival, years later, just to make sure.

‘He was signing books and I went over and said, ‘Marv, you don’t remember me, but I’m one of the guys who turned in the football helmet,” Fetterly said. ‘And Marv goes, ‘Oh it’s one of my favorite pieces! I still show it to all my classes!”

Wimer, on the other hand, will never forget the time Fetterly and another student in his class found a way into get into his office to express their feelings about the demise of the 2004 New York Yankees.

‘He’s a huge Yankees fan, and I’m a huge Red Sox fan,’ Wimer said. ‘And there was this little ALCS series back in 2004 where the Yankees choked after being three games up. And I came in and he worked with this other student to make this sign that said ‘Boston still sucks, but congratulations on making the World Series.”

These are stories both Fetterly and his professors will be hard-pressed to leave behind. Though he’s had his moment in the sun, Fetterly doesn’t want it to be over yet.

In August, he received a package in the mail from Syracuse University. Finally, his diploma had arrived. But after such a climb, he had to wonder…

‘Here’s the two feelings I had,’ Fetterly said. ‘I thought, ‘Wow, there it is’ and then I thought, ’15 years and this is all I get?’ So I went from that high to a low within seconds. I was like, ‘Isn’t there supposed to be a band and a party?”

He ended up getting his party – a surprise affair thrown by his folks at Megan MacMurphy’s in Liverpool – but there was still something missing.

Then, slowly, a smile cracks across his face as he mentions his next move.

‘Well,’ Fetterly said. ‘I’m probably going to start graduate school in January.’

ctorr@syr.edu

Published on September 29, 2009 at 12:00 pm