THE STORY OF UIAGALELEI

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In 1996, Dave Coggin was in his first season as a professional baseball player after he was selected in the first round of the previous year's MLB Draft.

Riding buses all night wasn't fun, nor was persistent pain in his pitching arm. But living less than three hours from Clemson, playing for the Piedmont Boll Weevils in Kannapolis, N.C., presented its own brand of torture.

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Coggin had spent all his life in Southern California, but his roots were in South Carolina and has passion with Clemson. His father graduated from the school in 1965. And 30 years later, Dave Coggin was a decorated recruit from Upland High School in the Los Angeles suburbs who was going to go to Clemson to play football and baseball.

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He'd chosen Tommy West's Tigers over BYU and its quarterback factory. He told agents that the only way he wouldn't go to Clemson was if he was picked in the first round. He was bluffing, and the Phillies called it by selecting him with the 30th pick.

And now, in 1996 before his first Single-A season in Kannapolis was complete, he walked into his manager's office to tell him he was quitting. He was going to hang up his glove, drive 155 miles down I-85 and fulfill his lifelong passion to play football at Clemson.

Because that's where his heart was all along.

The Phillies' front office got involved and talked him into staying. He later reached the majors and pitched for the Phillies from 2000 to 2002. But there was always an emptiness there, a void left knowing he was this close to playing in Death Valley and it never happened.

He remembers telling folks at Clemson, including former baseball coaches Jack Leggett and Tim Corbin, that he felt terrible for leaving them hanging. He always promised them he was going to find a way to make up for not showing up back in 1995.

And then he was introduced to a sixth-grader from Upland named DJ Uiagalelei.

"It's almost like he's doing what I wish I could've done," Coggin says now.

In 2007, Coggin went back home to Upland and started a baseball training facility called Performance Fitness for Athletes. A few years later, he took a call from Dave Uiagalelei.

DJ's father wasn't big on the specialization craze that had taken over youth sports. He called his son "a baseball player playing football," and as a sixth-grader DJ was going to pursue both sports. Someday he'd have to pick one, but that day was a long way off. He was exceptionally gifted at both, and he was huge.

Coggin's Clemson allegiance is hard to miss upon introduction. For every one of his pupils who goes on to play in college, he places a big sticker of that school on his gym wall and asks that player to sign it. The orange Tiger paw is larger than the others. Coggin wears Clemson gear all the time, and a Clemson helmet sits in his office.

DJ recalls that the first time he took notice of Clemson was back when the Tigers first began ascending under Dabo Swinney, when Chad Morris came to town and Tajh Boyd was throwing all those deep balls to Sammy Watkins.

DJ's mother Tausha said she remembers her son liking Clemson's colors in middle school. She also identifies Coggin as the first real connection DJ made with the school 2,300 miles away, even if it didn't seem like much at the time.

The stock story of how Uiagalelei ended up at Clemson goes like this: Brent Venables is recruiting a linebacker who played with DJ at St. John Bosco. The head coach, Jason Negro, tells Venables there's a quarterback they might want to look at. Venables reaches out to Brandon Streeter, and the courtship begins.

But the presence of Coggin and his story presents a different and more fascinating layer. He said he always bragged on Clemson when DJ was around, but in more of a light-hearted way because he didn't think it realistic that this superstar would really consider going all the way across the country to play for the Tigers.

"I thought he'd go to USC or maybe Oregon," Coggin said.

But then, when DJ was in high school and the scholarship offers were flowing like water through a firehose, Coggin was drinking coffee at a Starbucks when Dave texted him.

The gist from Dave:

All these schools from all over the country are all over DJ, but he hasn't heard from Clemson. That's the school he really likes.

Coggin's closest Clemson connection was Tigers baseball assistant Bradley LeCroy, who recruits California and used his relationship with Coggin to sign former catcher Chris Williams, who's now in the Twins organization, and pitcher Holt Jones who is now at Kentucky.

Coggin immediately texted Lecroy.

The response: Holy crap, really? Let me get in touch with Streeter.

The name Streeter rang a bell for Coggin, because Clemson's quarterbacks coach was a part of that same 1995 football class that West signed. That was going to be Coggin's competition had he followed through and gone to school.

SuperPrep ranked that Tigers' class No. 11 in large part because of the decorated quarterbacks in it. Streeter chose Clemson over Miami. Billy Luckie chose the Tigers over Alabama.

Clemson and BYU were the final cut for Coggin, but he also had offers from Miami and Florida. He remembers visiting Gainesville in 1994 and watching Danny Wuerffel torch Georgia 52-14 in Steve Spurrier's innovative Fun 'N' Gun offense.

On that visit he met 1-on-1 with Spurrier, who had rapidly built the Gators into a powerhouse that would play for the national title in 1995 and win one in 1996.

Spurrier wasn't a fan of Coggin doing the two-sport thing.

"Dave Coggin," he said. "You do understand football is going to be a full-time job here?"

Coggin, who grew up spending his summers back in the Palmetto State visiting family, ended up going with his heart and signing a football letter of intent with Clemson.

He was drafted four months later, and he remembers Leggett calling him from a payphone at the College World Series. Leggett, then in his second season, had seen his recruiting class get picked apart by the draft and was nervous.

West called and was more understanding. He told Coggin if it were his son who'd been drafted in the first round it'd be a tough decision. West and assistant Rick Stockstill flew out to California a couple days later to have dinner with Coggin.

"A few weeks later, I had to call them and tell them I wasn't coming," Coggin said. "Leggett wasn't very happy at all. Coach West probably understood it a bit better than Leggett."

When he was in the minors, Coggin shared a clubhouse with Ricky Williams. Drafted in the eighth round out of high school in 1995, Williams spent parts of four summers playing outfield in the Phillies' farm system while juggling football with the Texas Longhorns.

Williams ended up winning the Heisman at Texas and went on to the NFL. Coggin remembers Williams, back in Kannapolis in that first season with the Boll Weevils, telling him:

You got to play football, man! You're better than our quarterback at Texas.

The tug of football in general, and Clemson in particular, became even stronger when he'd hear chatter from the stands.

"I'd see all these Clemson fans in Kannapolis, or Greensboro," he said. "They'd say: 'Hey! It's not too late to play!' I was having a terrible season and was pretty hard on myself."

Coggin went in and told his manager he was done with baseball. He said he'd give up his signing bonus and do whatever he had to do, but he'd made his mind up.

"All of a sudden, I'm getting calls from the Phillies' management. The GM is calling me. Player-development guys are calling. They told me they were expecting me to struggle, that this was just part of the learning process. That settled me down, and I stayed."

Though his focus in training Uiagalelei was baseball, Coggin still loved slinging the football. So the two would often play catch in his facility.

"I think that a natural trust and relationship was built," Coggin said. "I think maybe a bond was created without my really saying a whole lot about Clemson."

It also helped that the guy who followed Boyd and all those long balls was Deshaun Watson, who lifted Clemson from good to perennially great. By the time Watson and the Tigers claimed the national title in January of 2017 with a last-second victory over Alabama, Swinney's program wasn't exactly an obscurity out in California. And Coggin no longer had to remind Uiagalelei what those guys in the cool orange helmets were doing.

"It was just kind of a perfect storm, really," Coggin said.

DJ bonded with Swinney right away and ended up choosing the Tigers. Though he once talked of playing football and baseball in college, ultimately DJ decided it wasn't smart to put his arm through that much wear and tear and opted to devote himself fully to football. He also didn't like the thought of laboring for years in the minor-league system before reaching the big stage.

The baseball player in DJ is evident on the football field if you watch closely. When he made a spectacular throw at Notre Dame across the field while rolling to his right, it was the same motion, pivot and arm angle you'd see from a second-baseman turning a double play.

He makes football throws from different arm slots similar to Patrick Mahomes, who played baseball at Texas Tech.

"Growing up around baseball allows you to manipulate your body quicker," Coggin said. "Some of the throws he makes in football are foreign to people who play football only because you're told not to do that. But when you've done it your whole life and been successful with it, it's just an instinct."

DJ played maybe 20 innings of baseball over his high school career at Bosco. He was planning to play his junior year but suffered a cut on his non-throwing hand and needed surgery. He didn't play as a senior because he enrolled early at Clemson.

"There aren't many kids in California who play baseball and football," Coggin said. "I encouraged him to do both, just like I did. He just became so good at football that it kind of took over. Even though he didn't play much baseball in high school, I was getting calls from scouts weekly: 'Can we come watch him throw?'"

Coggin said regret probably isn't the word to use when thinking back to what might've been for him at Clemson. He still believes going the pro baseball route was the right decision.

It's more of a child-like longing: He grew up dreaming of playing at Clemson, had that chance, and then walked away from it.

"It's kind of a skeleton that's still there, feeling like I let Clemson people down," he said. "I wouldn't say it has haunted me, necessarily. But I think about it daily."

For years he wanted to help make up for signing a letter of intent with Clemson and then crumbling it up when pro baseball came calling.

DJ's signature on that big Tiger paw in his gym would suggest Coggin did his part.

It's right where his heart has been all along.

"Maybe I'm kind of the secret weapon out here on the West Coast," he said with a laugh.

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