This Sentell’s Intel rep on Georgia football recruiting has the latest with 3-star IOL signee Zykie Helton of Carrollton High. He’s the nation’s No. 41 IOL and No. 517 overall prospect for 2026 on the 247Sports Composite. The Rivals Industry Ranking has him as the No. 43 IOL and No. 468 overall.
Zykie Helton moved to Athens last Friday to go through bowl practices. The 2026 signee did so with remarkable self-awareness.
That was evident by the way he answered this question:
Where would you be today if you never met your fourth-grade teacher?
“My life would definitely be about or about a woulda, coulda, shoulda,” Helton said. “If you know what that means. Well, I coulda went to this place. Or I woulda went to this place.”
Helton faced long odds growing up in foster care. Those close to Helton believe he is now the first in his immediate family to graduate from high school.
“A young man who had all the cards stacked against him from the beginning,” Carrollton coach Joey King said. “To see him about to graduate. About to play for one of the top teams in the country. Just to see him make it is awesome.”
“When I came back to Carrollton to coach, he was in the eighth grade. I went over and met with him in ISS one day.”
Now Helton will. Helton can. Helton shall.
That’s because his fourth-grade teacher, Kimberly Perry, saw something in an angry boy. She didn’t let his “30-something” referrals to the principal’s office in third grade cloud her view of his potential.
“He’s an overcomer,” she said. “He truly has worked hard to be where he is today. To me, he’s just strong. Strong-hearted. Strong-willed.”
It started with tagging along to a football game. Her husband was coaching football for an area private school. Perry got permission from Helton’s caregivers.
“From then on, I just started helping him a lot,” Perry said. ‘We took him to church with us, took him to a lot of ballgames. I started having him over for the holidays. His grandmother was raising him at the time. Then life just got hard for her at that point, and she ended up having to put him into foster care."
Helton now lives with Perry, her husband and her family. He moved in with them while he was in the tenth grade and committed to Alabama.
The Perrys have three grown girls, but a family with its share of Alabama fans will now root for the Dawgs.
“Mrs. Perry is like my second Mom,” Helton said. “She is my Mom. I love her to death, and without her, none of this would be possible. I promise you that.”
Helton has done so while still staying in touch with his blood relatives.
“He was just so angry,” Perry said. “There were just a lot of skills he needed to learn about coping and dealing with his anger and ways to cope with it. I just had to find an outlet for that.”
“I signed him up for 9-and-10-year-old football that year. It was his fifth-grade year. I signed him up for baseball and basketball. He played all the sports. And to be honest, I was thinking, oh my lord, would he even make it? He could get mad easily. He didn’t like to take discipline. Especially from men. So every time I signed him up for a sport, I would have to talk to the coach.”
Zykie Helton: An “Overcomer” with a sweet heart
There are so many stories here.
“He’s always been a loveable kid, but he was hell on wheels, I’ve heard, at times when he was in the fourth grade,” King said.
There’s the time stamp when Helton met Perry. He had been placed in foster care in her neighborhood.
The address was on Perry Street. That’s the last name of the family who would eventually become his legal guardians.
“I always thought about that when I was living with Mr. Billy,” Helton said of his foster parent before he moved in with the Perrys. “I lived on Perry Street. I had a teacher named Mrs. Perry. She’s coming to get me.”
“It sounds like a coincidence. It seems like a coincidence, but it isn’t. God put Mrs. Perry in my life for a reason. God knew I needed her.”
It started when she gave him rides to school events. Or church. The trust built slowly, but she eventually decided it would be easier if he just lived with them.
That was when Helton was committed to Alabama. He was a freshman starting for a Carrollton High team that played for the state championship.
There’s the matter that Perry’s youngest son, Kai, shares the same March 15th birthday as Helton. The UGA signee is one year older.
“I feel like it was a God thing and I do feel very honored that God did place ‘Z’ in our lives so we could just help him,” Kimberly Perry said.
Kai Perry has Down’s Syndrome, but the way Helton interacted with him made it clear she was doing the right thing.
“Zykie always has a very sweet heart,” Kimberly Perry said. “I have a son with Down’s Syndrome whom I adopted. Zykie was always, to me, very sweet to the underdog a lot of times.”
Those two have a bond.
“Oh my gosh,” Helton said. “Kai is my hero. I look at my little brother Kai and I smile. He’s a really joyful person. There’s never a dull moment with him.”
Their names were so similar the Perrys, at Kai’s request, had to start calling Helton “Z” because every time someone said “Zykie” it sounded like they were talking to him.
“He got mad one day,” Helton said. “He said that his name is ‘Z’ from then on. Because every time they would say ‘Zykie’ he’ll look up and say ‘What’ but the whole time they were talking to me.”
“That’s where I got my nickname from.”
His grades were once a concern, but he was on the team’s all-As and Bs checklist this year.
If we had to distill all of this into just one pivotal moment, there is one more story.
Zykie Helton: A prayer on the side of the road
Helton thinks back to getting to know the Perrys in the fifth grade.
“It was hard to trust her at first,” Helton said. “Because she was a different color than me and I really didn’t know what she wanted from me.”
There was a morning fishing trip after he started going to church with the Perrys.
“He just started crying,” Kimberly Perry said. “He just said ‘I need to be saved’ while he was crying.”
Her husband pulled the truck off to the side of the road. He taught him how to pray to accept Jesus Christ into his heart.
“That moment, I remember every bit of it,” Helton said. “That will never leave my mind.”
Helton points to that truck stop as the pivotal moment of his life. Kimberly Perry also believes that.
“I really cherish that moment,” Helton said. It was one of the best moments of my life. That I accepted Christ. That Saturday morning at five o’cock in the morning on the way to Wedowee to go fishing."
Helton was nine years old. He caught God, along with four or five fish, that day.
“That is one of the highlights of my life that most people don’t know,” Helton said. “That of how I accepted Christ into my life at a young age. Just a little boy going fishing.”
The Perrys will never forget it.
“When he got saved, my husband said it was the most sincere prayer and that [Zykie] asked God for a good life,” Kimberly Perry said.
Look where he is now. Woulda? Helton will walk one day as the first high school graduate of his immediate biological family.
Coulda? The 3-star IOL can become a great Georgia Bulldog one day. Georgia’s Kirby Smart has told him it will be hard to keep him off the field.
Shoulda? “Z” shall now have the opportunity to earn a college degree at one of the top 20 public universities in America.
“That prayer has definitely been answered,” Helton said. “God gave me two people in my life that was together that know how to love kids. They had a mother and father in their life so they know how to parent.”
“When God gave me them, it was the best decision of my life when she asked me that day, ‘Do you want to live with us?’ and with no doubt in my mind, I said, ‘Of course.’”
That was when he was in the tenth grade.
“4-star,” Helton said. “The No. 1 center in the country. Committed to Alabama.”
And still in foster care.
“I was bad then,” Helton said. “I was still a lot to handle. I was living in a foster home with seven other people. I really wasn’t getting any attention. It was just school. Homework. Eat. Sleep.”
“I don’t really call those days a low moment. It was just a storm that I had to get through. I cherish everything. I am grateful for every moment that happened in my life.”
“I’m glad they happened. That’s what made me into what I am today. Without those moments, I wouldn’t be as solid as I am today. Those moments made me think I could get through anything at any time. Doesn’t matter when it is coming. Or how it comes. I can get through anything.”
Helton is strong on that “second mother” stuff. Perry gets a card from him on Mother’s Day.
“She took me into her home,” Helton said. “She didn’t have to do that. I was just a lost kid. Really didn’t have the best at-home life with my real parents.”
“She just took me one home one day after a football or a basketball game. She’s loved on me ever since, like I was one of hers. At the time, I didn’t really know what love was because I hadn’t ever been loved that hard.”
They’ve taught him a lot.
“My parents, Mrs. Kimberly and Mr. Jamie, they always told me it doesn’t matter what you have done in your past,” Helton said. “It matters who you are outside the helmet. I want to walk around with a good image. I want people to know that I am not only a good football player but also a good person. I’m somebody that you want to be around all the time. I will probably make you laugh here and there. ... I don’t want to be known as ‘He’s that good football player but with a mean attitude’ who doesn’t like talking. That’s not me.”
Zykie Helton can, he will and he shall
Helton was recently honored by the Touchdown Club of Atlanta as a first-team All-State player as an OL and DL.
We don’t see that often. Not even every few years. His offensive line coach in Athens has told him to calm down on the defensive highlights each week.
“Every week I send him my film,” Helton said. “It is mostly defensive film. I mean, I finish blocks. That’s who I am. I’m the type of person who is going to finish blocks, but I come up in big-time situations like on third down.”
“He’ll be like ‘Gosh dangit son, we know you can play defense, but that’s not what you are coming here for’ all the time.”
King feels Smart should steal him away for the defense.
“It would be very smart,” King said. “There should be fights over him in those rooms, trying to figure out where he is going to play. Just from a defensive standpoint, his athleticism and what he put on tape this year, he’s a freak.”
He had been diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and needed treatment to regain all that weight.
When the staff turned over, the Tide forgot he was a commitment. Georgia never did. Not even when the once 330-plus-pounder dropped the equivalent of a fifth-grader’s worth of weight. Helton repaid the program’s faith in him. Searels said he only needed to see him get back to 290 pounds.
That’s a good football story. It wasn’t the real Helton story.
“I was a lost boy,” Helton said. “I think they saw something in me I didn’t see in myself at the time. This was long before the football. This was long before I was even playing sports. I was just a regular kid going to school and going back home.”
“I didn’t start football until I was nine or 10 years old. That was rec ball. Mrs. Perry signed me up for it.”
They were talking in the car one day about playing.
“She said, ‘Well, you know you can use all your anger you have built up on the football field’ and I was like ‘Momma, I don’t want to hurt anyone,’ but she said, ‘You don’t have to hurt them, but you can hit them, though’ and I told her she was totally right. Sign me up.”
The rest is history.
He’d still be good at football, but his life wouldn’t be the same without the Perrys.
“I wouldn’t be nearly as good as I am right now,” Helton said. “Because this support system I have is the biggest support system I’ve ever seen.”
Have you seen this week’s “Before the Hedges” weekly recruiting special on YouTube yet? Check it out below.
SENTELL’S INTEL
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