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I Love This Kid
DoogCourics
Member Posts: 5,739
Zion you are a fucking boss. Thank you for stepping up after UW lost Tryon and then Latu. Zero drop off, and you are thriving.
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Just makes the kid even more likable. Quick snippet:
It’s quite a turn for a guy who didn’t think he’d ever get recruited when he was a high school player in Pearl City, Hawaii, at a program that rarely gets football recruiting traffic in a very isolated state.
“I got a call from Coach Malloe out of nowhere, and I’m just talking to him and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, this is weird. This is weird,’” ZTF told The Athletic this week. “And then he offers me. I actually cried while on the phone. I knew then that this is meant for me. I just had to believe in myself.”
Tupuola-Fetui believed that if he was going make it to major college football he needed to be at one of the top private schools in Hawaii, places he didn’t have access to such as St. Louis High, where Tua Tagovailoa and Marcus Mariota went, or Punahou, the alma mater of DeForest Buckner and Manti Te’o, or Kahuku High, which was too far from his home. “I never looked into the cost (for the private schools) because I just knew that I was not gonna let my parents come out of pocket like that,” he says. “I didn’t want to burden them that way.”
ZTF was a skinny kid who played four sports and had starred in volleyball. He didn’t lift weights in high school and had played receiver until shifting over to defensive end, where he says he found his love for the position. He didn’t break 200 pounds until his sophomore year and was about 215 as a junior. He caught the Washington staff’s attention when they noticed his pass-rushing skills on film going against 6-foot-4, 340-pound four-star prospect Sama Paama. ZTF later attended a football camp at the University of Hawaii where Malloe was able to see him up close and work with him.
ZTF says that within two months of his arrival at Washington, he gained 40 pounds, going from about 220 to 260 after jumping into college weight training and nutrition programs.
The rest is WAM material, or go get a sub to the Athletic.