LIVE OAK, Fla. — Despite plenty of supporters telling him not to worry during the three days of elections, Kyler Gray still had his doubts.

For starters, the Suwannee High grad and junior at the University of Central Florida, was expecting the three-way race for Student Government Association president to head to a runoff.

Turns out, Gray didn’t need to worry after all. When the election results were announced March 6, Gray and running mate Madeline Mills won the election outright with 4,570 votes.

“I didn’t know,” Gray said about how the election would turn out, adding they received a boost the day before the voting began when they received an endorsement from UCF quarterback McKenzie Milton. “The entire campaign, everybody was like, ‘Kyler, you are fine. You have got this in the bag. Everyone knows you.’

“I told them that didn’t matter, we still had to work hard.”

That hard work meant three long days of staffing tables at the voting sites, with volunteers and friends working from 6 a.m. to midnight each day.

It also meant earlier canvassing the campus to accumulate the necessary petitions in order to be placed on the ballot, with Gray and Mills becoming the first declared candidates.

That allowed Gray’s team to start harnessing the power of social media and the Internet through the campaign website and social media sites.

Still, Gray wanted his campaign to be more traditional while also using those necessary outreach avenues.

“I tried to be more grassroots in our initiatives when it came to being engaged with the student body,” he said. “Meeting them, handing out T-shirts, having tables at meetings, being more face-to-face and personal with them.

“The win was being on the ground, talking to people, engaging the people, what our platform stood for and what we were trying to do.”

What Gray wants to do is to help empower the UCF student body of 68,571 students — the largest in the country.

It was the basis of the campaign slogan of “Ignite our Future.” It will be the focus once he takes office May 6, which also happens to be his birthday.

“A lot of times it’s easy to get caught up in what’s that student’s student ID number, not who is that student,” he said. “What’s their story? Where are they coming from? So it’s about helping students discover their opportunities. Empowering them and being equitable in the pursuit of trying to ensure that everybody has equal access to the tools and resources to be successful.

“It’s not only about helping students discover their opportunities, but also igniting their futures so they become a proud alumni so that when they leave, they feel fulfilled and when they come back, they’re proud to say they graduated from the University of Central Florida. This is where I got my start. This is where somebody believed in me, listened to my story and helped me take flight.”

Gray, who was very active in student government while at SHS, took flight at UCF despite initially having no plans to continue that work.

But that changed during his orientation when a former student body president at UCF met him and told Gray to come talk about the SGA.

That hour-long talk turned into a position on the executive leadership council followed by positions on the SGA cabinet.

And now a chance to serve as president of the student body.

“They sucked me right in and here I am,” Gray said, adding he would like to work in university administration, eventually becoming a school president.

No matter where he goes, though, Gray will take Live Oak and SHS with him. He said his experiences growing up here in North Florida have helped shape him into the leader he has become.

“Realizing that we’re all people and that when it comes to things like this, it’s early student politics, but at the core, it’s people,” he said. “Living in a small town teaches you it’s about those relationships, it’s about constant relationship building. Because I didn’t want to do this just for me. I wanted to do this to affect other people because SGA changed my life in a sense. It connected me to people that I would never have thought I could be connected to.

“At the core of everything, especially growing up here, is about relationship building. Having that human component, and listening to people, listening to their stories and learning how we can help them.”