THE STORY OF UIAGALELEI - Part 3
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Steven Lo is an accomplished high school offensive coordinator at 36 years old, but he retired from playing catch with his quarterbacks in the fall of 2018.
Lo walked into a gold mine when he took over at St. John Bosco High School after the previous offensive coordinator took a head-coaching job elsewhere.
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Bosco is a football factory that looks and feels more like a small college than high school. And the triggerman for that factory was a generational talent named DJ Uiagalelei, who was the starter entering his junior season.
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Lo had moved to Southern California from the Bay Area, some 350 miles away. But he had known about DJ for years, having seen viral videos of the kid throwing baseballs and footballs when he was a fifth- and sixth-grader.
And now, on a Tuesday in the middle of the 2018 season, Lo was working with his quarterbacks on a routine sprint-out drill.
"The common practice was for me to go out there and catch for the guys," Lo said. "It was easier for me to do that so we could get as many reps in as possible."
Lo knew the kid who looked more like a defensive end or tight end had a strong arm.
But being the target of one of those lasers brings, ahem, a bit different perspective.
It brought Lo a broken hand.
"He was throwing from 20 or 25 yards away, but the ball didn't rise or fall one inch," Lo said. "That's how hard he threw it. That thing was like a Scud missile coming in."
The ball smashed into the thick tissue at the base of Lo's left thumb and bent the thumb backwards.
"I instantly knew it was broken," he said. "That thing ballooned up to the size of a baseball in like five minutes. It was ginormous."
DJ is just different, and Lo has more than just broken bones to prove it. Lo landed at Bosco when the star quarterback was already a celebrity, but it didn't take him long to be awed by DJ's presence.
After highly successful offensive coordinator Chad Johnson took the head job at Mission Viejo High School, Lo came to Bosco to interview and DJ was the first player he encountered.
Lo knew all about his talent and knew talent alone was going to make running this offense a lot of fun. But after that hour-long introductory conversation, Lo found himself blown away not by what DJ did between the lines on a football field, but by what was between his ears.
"Meeting him, you just get a sense of grounded humility," Lo said. "It's immediate. With him, it's always about others. Most high school kids aren't asking coaches about their backgrounds. At that age, most high school kids are more just waiting for their turn to talk. But DJ was genuinely interested in me and where I was from, and wanted to get to know me.
"After that, I'm like: 'Man, I sure hope I get this gig.' Because I knew this kid was going to be special. I was the luckiest coach in America, landing that job and having DJ as the quarterback. At that point it's like, 'Do I even have to coach? I just have to make sure DJ gets on the bus, and that's the extent of my coaching.'"
Even before Lo arrived at Bosco, he'd spent years studying modern college offenses. Clemson under Tony Elliott and Jeff Scott was front and center in his studies because of the lavish success they'd orchestrated in helping the Tigers become a perennial national title contender.
Bosco's offense under Johnson utilized many of the same principles, but under Lo it took on more the shape of Clemson's offense.
It's one thing to design a high school offense to resemble the sleek machines run by the greatest athletes at the college level.
But without a quarterback who can make it all go, it's probably not going to work well at that level.
That's the part about DJ that Lo is still trying to process: Even as a freshman, he was uncommonly advanced in going through his progressions and adjusting his protections.
"A lot of high school offenses are based on the limitations of the quarterback," Lo said. "You read one defender, and then you pick and choose between two routes surrounding that one defender. And if it's not there, you just tuck it and run.
"Even the above-average, recruitable high school quarterbacks are getting to the college level and there's a learning curve because they aren't used to going to their third progression. DJ was able to progress 1 through 5 on a lot of our concepts, while also adjusting the protection each play before the snap based on the defensive structure. And then he was able to drop the ball into the window that was provided, which was not very big against a lot of the teams we were playing."
The level of competition at Bosco is an important piece of context, particularly after watching DJ have no problem leading Clemson from 18 points down against Boston College in his first start, or throwing for 439 yards a week later at Notre Dame.
When Bosco played rival Mater Dei, DJ was throwing against a secondary that sent all its players to Power 5 schools. When he went through practice every day against his defense, he was facing 10 players in his senior class from that side of the ball who would sign Division I scholarships.
Lo points out that it's exceptionally difficult to throw a sideline route to the wide side of the field in high school because the hash marks are significantly wider than in college and the NFL.
"So a 10-yard out pattern from the opposite hash is probably spending 30-something yards in the air," Lo said. "When the average quarterback throws it, it loops up like a teardrop and comes down. Most quarterbacks in high school wouldn't dare try that throw because of the amount of time the ball spends in the air. DJ can hit that throw with the ball not rising or dropping at all."
At one point Texas had already offered DJ but had yet to see him live. They traveled to Bosco and were shaking their heads after a mere two throws: a deep post route, and the opposite-hash out route that Lo described.
"They're like: 'Coach, we've seen enough,'" Lo said.
Baseball was DJ's first love, and for a time he had plans to play both and was entertaining the thought of going strictly the baseball route. But halfway through his junior season, Bosco torched Mater Dei 41-18 in front of 20,000 fans and DJ seemed hooked on the bigness of it.
Lo remembers DJ telling him after that game: Coach, this feeling just doesn't exist in baseball.
"It's just something you can't recreate," Lo said, "and it's definitely not happening on a baseball field where there's 20 people in the stands and you're chewing seeds and just kind of hanging out waiting on your next chance to pitch."
In those two seasons, as DJ's football stardom ascended to the point that putting baseball aside was almost a no-brainer, Lo never saw the kid change and become impressed with himself.
Children would line the fence after games just wanting to touch him and get an autograph. He'd not only oblige but seemed genuinely curious about them.
"If you let him, he will sign something for every little kid who's waiting and shake the hand of every person who wants to get close to him," Lo said. "He'd be asking all these kids: 'Where are you from? Where do you play football? Who's your favorite player?' He remembers how he looked up to his sports heroes when he was a kid, and he wants to show appreciation for that next generation who looks at him the same way.
"The most impressive parts of DJ are the things you don't see on camera, the things he is doing when no one is watching. People want to play harder for him because he's a good person. He has the leadership qualities that people gravitate toward. Getting college offers when you're in the sixth and seventh grade can go awry very quickly unless you are very grounded and humble. He's very aware of who he is and who he wants to be as a person. That is very rare and refreshing to see in someone who is 16 or 17 years old."
Lo remembers visiting Clemson the first time when some members of the Bosco staff came to observe Dabo Swinney's program. He knew instantly why DJ loved the place so much.
"All those lakes, the campus and facilities and the people working there -- it's a special place," Lo said. "It fits him like a glove. Even though he's from Southern California, he likes keeping to himself. The culture and what they have there fits exactly who he is and what he was looking for in a college."
Swinney first became acquainted with the dangers of DJ's arm strength during Clemson's summer camp in 2018, before DJ's junior year. He was throwing to regular campers and not just the high-level prospects Clemson is normally interested in signing.
Jeff Scott approached Swinney and told him someone was going to get hurt.
"He can't throw the ball to just anybody," Swinney said. "It was just different. He has a cannon and I think he was trying to show it off when he got here. It was a tough sight to watch, some of those guys trying to catch those balls."
Lo knows the feeling. A few months later, DJ broke his left hand with a ball he estimated was traveling between 65 and 70 mph.
"There was a searing pain," he said. "I've never been shot before, but it felt like someone shot me in the hand."
The Bosco staff had to do the same rearranging of its receivers to make sure only the best were in the path of DJ's passes during practice.
"We have a wide range of skill sets here," Lo said. "Obviously we have plenty of kids who are going to play in college, but we also have kids who are just around for the high school experience and want to be a part of something cool. I was envisioning in my head a ball from DJ hitting one of these young, light receivers and watching the receiver get taken away by the football, up into space or I don't know where.
"It was literally always a concern for us for that same reason: He's going to get someone hurt."
Lo went the rest of that 2018 season unable to use his left hand. He said he mostly kept it to himself because it was a little embarrassing.
At present, Lo is still Bosco's offensive coordinator.
But he's retired from catching balls thrown by DJ Uiagalelei.
"I don't think I caught one ball from him after that," he said. "My tenure was done."
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