Fitzgerald West Jr.'s LSU pledge a validation for maturation, development

Fitzgerald West Jr. arrived to LSU's campus three years ago a big-bodied, but baby-faced eighth-grader wide-eyed at an opportunity farther from reach than he could fathom at the time.

But, behind the scenes, an at-times emotional rollercoaster of tough love, hurt feelings and hard work fueled the development necessary to bridge that gap and bring a lofty goal into real focus.

"He hated me at one time," Lafayette Christian line coach Reggie Williams said, quickly emphasizing the seriousness. "No, he really did. He told me. 'I hate you.' And he's honest, and he's always been honest with me. And he told me, 'Coach, I love you now. But there was a time when I absolutely hated you. Because at the time, I thought you were just too tough on me. But I have to tell you that everything that you told me was come to be, I've lived to see it happen.'"

And Saturday, as West picked the purple-and-gold cap from the table in front of him, he couldn't help but beam at both the opportunity and the validation.

Not at the end of his journey, but at a crossroads of options that had, until the past five weeks, largely eluded him.

"Dreams to reality — that's all," West smiled. "Work for it."

The ideas of "legacy" and "impact" have always loomed large for West.

In the moments following his Knights' latest state championship in December, he was quick to remind reporters of his participation in each of the program's four straight titles.

Already standing over 6-feet and 310 pounds, West was not only among few eighth graders playing varsity football, but quickly among the first athletes in Louisiana's 2022 class to begin garnered college attention.

He will now be the first to admit he didn't necessarily handle the early attention, including offers from Colorado and Tulane as a freshman, as well as he wishes he would have.

"I would just say being too over-excited," he said.

Added teammate and classmate Brylan Green: "Everyone's talking, and it's Power Five, Colorado, and everyone's putting all this pressure on him, so he kind of got big-headed. And I think some laziness started to kick in."

West assumed offers from the nation's elite football programs would continue rolling in as quickly as the Buffalos and Green Wave had just weeks apart that March.

But only McNeese State, Arkansas-Monticello and Austin Peay dotted the remainder of 2019.

"He felt some type of way about it," Green said. "He felt as though he was one of the best in the state, but that he wasn't getting the recognition that he should. Which, I agree, but it took that for him to understand how much harder he had to work to get to what he wanted. And I think it was a great learning process for him."

Williams saw West's high-level potential, but also the long path still ahead to reach it.

And the coach wasn't shy about either.

"I told (LSU) coach (Ed) Orgeron and I told (Alabama) coach (Nick) Saban as well," he said. "I told them before Fitzgerald West finished at LCA that they would offer him a scholarship. I'd always told them that — that before he leaves LCA, LSU and Alabama would offer him. Because I just saw it from the beginning. But I knew it was gonna be a process."

The steps felt like unrealistic leaps at times to the young West.

"For instance, when he ran a 6-something in the 40(-yard dash), and I told him that my goal for him was to run a 4.9 (seconds) at 300 pounds by the time he was ready to leave LCA," Williams said. "He said, 'Coach, that was hard for me to believe when I was running a 6-and-above.'"

But spared feelings weren't part of the game plan.

"There were many times that I would get home and call (head) coach (Trev) Faulk and say, 'Hey, man, I was rough on him today. Can you call him and build him up?'" Williams said. "Not only him, but other kids as well. But there were some rough days. There were days when I told him to go home and don't come back."

Green pointed to a stand-off just before the playoffs their sophomore season as an example and a turning point.

"One practice," said the standout safety with his own college announcement set for later this month. "This is no joke. Coach Reggie was fussing at him, and they ended up getting into it. And Coach Reggie said, 'I don't care how you feel. You can take the uniform off right now.' And he takes the uniform off and dang near almost left. And Coach Trev came and got him back and everything. And more things like that happened.

"One Fitz gets something in his mind, you're not changing his mind. So Coach Reggie told him go to offense and don't come back. So for that whole week, Fitz was on offense and said he was never playing defense again. So that happened, but obviously they worked together and he ended up going back to D-line. But at that point, I'm like, 'Man, what is going on?'"

West didn't appreciate Williams' tough love at the time.

But he wanted to play defensive tackle.

And, above all else, he wanted to win championships in the present and set himself up to play high-level college football in the future.

"My coaches always told me I would be No. 1 in the nation," West said. "He always stood on that. I guess I didn't really believe him toward my sophomore and junior year, but, hey, look at it now."

The COVID-19 pandemic effectively shut down spring and summer football activities in the March following West and Green's sophomore season.

But the Knights, dedicated to growing their fresh three-peat to four, worked to find ways to continue their preparation.

And Williams and others emphasized to West, now at 330 pounds, the necessity of exceeding work expectations.

"I feel like quarantine was my biggest peak," West said. "Quarantine, we couldn't really work out together, so we would do our workouts together on Zoom. But every day after that workout, I would go run a mile. Every day... There was definitely a chip on my shoulder.

"So that really pushed me knowing that this could be something that would help put me above my opponents. And I think that really helped me going into my junior year with my quickness and my endurance to be able to play both ways."

The quickly maturing West had started connecting the dots more clearly and falling in love with the process.

"To watch him grow into the academic person that he is, the Christian person that he is, it's been awesome," Williams said. "And he's worked. I told him, 'Fitz, if you want to be great, you have to love to run. You have to learn to love to run.' So it got to where I would put a 20-pound weighted vest on him and tell him to go run 25 110's, or put a weighted vest on him and tell him go run 50 stadiums. And he would do it."

West played the vast majority of the Knights' offensive and defensive snaps this fall and earned all-state recognition en route to the teams' title.

"There's always something you can be improving on," said Green, who also earned all-state honors. "And that's something I really admire about him is just always taking stuff that people told him and not throwing it back at 'em and lashing out at them, but taking it and working at it and making sure that he was the best athlete possible.

"I really respect him for that. He started putting in the work that he needed to. He took it like a man, and now he's getting the results that he's getting."

South Alabama was the only college program to extend a scholarship offer during 2020.

But on the heels of his junior campaign, the metaphorical floodgates opened.

Louisiana Tech, Columbia, Dartmouth, Oregon, Akron, SMU, Georgetown, Princeton, Northwestern State and Southern Mississippi more than doubled his college options during the spring.

And, on June 1, the NCAA finally reopened in-person and on-campus recruiting after 15 months of extended "dead period" in response to COVID-19.

West returned to the now-familiar LSU football facilities June 5 and unloaded one of the most dominant performances — playing both ways — of the entire month.

The standout rotated back and forth between the offensive and defensive lines for reps at each while his peers awaiting their turns at one or the other.

Just a couple short yards away, Orgeron pumped his fist in excitement and shouted as West spun around one attempted block after another or kept one attempted pass-rusher after another at bay.

"You were right," he turned to Williams at one point to say.

The Tigers and ULM offered that day, the Ragin' Cajuns in Lafayette four days later and Alabama, Memphis and Liberty in a two-day span later in June.

"It's been very rewarding," West said. "It've ben very happy lately to know that the top schools in the nation want me. It's a blessing. I'm finally getting to college. It's been a long time. I'm excited for this commitment... I'm glad to say I'm finally shutting it down."

The long list of options for which West had long waited had finally come.

And the biggest question now was which to choose.

LSU and Alabama, the two most prominent programs with which he had communicated for years, were now primarily intrigued with his potential as an offensive lineman — and particularly at center.

But West still largely preferred the defensive side of the ball and initially wrestled somewhat with how heavily to prioritize the position in his decision process.

"It's like you're a sports writer, but imagine you go in tomorrow and they tell you, 'We think you'll be better as a weatherman,'" Williams said. "And you've gotta make that decision right away. You don't think you'd hit panic mode? So basically I think that's what happened to him. You're telling a kid that's played D-line all his life that you think he'd be a better offensive lineman. And we're not talking about us as grown adults, we're talking about a kid — that's never snapped a football.

"That's a lot of a kid to swallow in 24 or 48 hours. So now as time has passed, I think he's started to settle in. And I told him, 'Man, you're a dog. I instilled in you to be a dog. If they put you at tight end, you will dominate. If they put you at tackle, you will dominate. If they put you at center or guard, you will dominate. Because that's who you are.'"

West began to recognize the number of players who switched sides of the ball upon their enrollment.

At LSU alone, standouts as Joseph Evans, Chasen Hines, Jontre Kirklin and Dare Rosenthal highlighted nearly a dozen recent and notable examples.

"I definitely prioritized my defensive offers, but I started to realize I could really go either way and there's no real problem with going either way," West said, "Because I'm gonna play regardless of which side I play. As long as I'm playing football, I'm happy."

Added Williams: "The advice I gave him was, 'Man, I'm gonna tell you right now. Once you sign with the school and you walk on that campus, you're then employed by that school. You don't get to decide what you want to do or what you don't want to do, unless you hit the transfer portal. That school's gonna play wherever they need you to play most.

"'This is the best advice I can give you: Make sure whatever school you choose, you're gonna enjoy being on that campus every day and, regardless of what position you're gonna play, that you're gonna want to be in that stadium on a Saturday night. Whatever position you end up playing, make sure that's the stadium you want to play in on a Saturday night, because there's no guarantee if you're gonna play on the offensive side or the defensive side of the ball. Regardless of what you're told.'"

And West's heart kept coming back to where, in many ways, his recruiting process first began years earlier as a much different version of himself.

"When I went on my visit, it felt like family," he said. "I love the coaches. I love (offensive line) coach (Brad) Davis for sure. And just an hour away, it's such a relief for my mom."

Even before the recent run of scholarship offers, Green remembered watching West and his mother hold countless conversations about the future.

"You can kind of see his intelligence from the offers from places like Harvard, Columbia and all that," Green said. "But I don't think people realize he really has a plan after football. He has something in his head that he's grinding for. He's planning for life after football right now.

"That's something that he and his mom talk about a lot, just making sure he has a Plan B outside of football. And that's something a lot of people don't talk about going into college. It's usually all football. But that's something that Fitz really harps on is making sure his kids, grandkids have a life better than what he had. I think that's something that people don't realize is how much he not only dedicates himself to football, but how much he dedicates himself to the classroom."

West has pressed recently for recruiting categorization as an "athlete," which has more most frequently been used for wide receiver or defensive back prospects who play both positions or even quarterback for their high school teams.

The distinction stands out as just another example of a versatility on and off the field in which the young student-athlete prides himself.

"He understands what it takes to be not only a great person, but a great student and a great athlete," Williams said. "He came up from a strong, strong background with his mom. His mom always told me, 'If his grades aren't right, he's not playing football.' He didn't come up as just, 'You've got to be this great athlete.' His mom has instilled in him character, discipline, obedience. She's been strong in his life, man."

The coach pointed to mission trips to Mexico that West has taken every summer with fellow students and community members.

West also proudly performed three different roles in his school's production of "The Wizard of Oz" this spring.

"It was a great experience," he said. "I loved it... I've always wanted to do some commercials — kind of like (former LSU and NBA star) Shaq (O'Neal) does Gold Bond and stuff like that. I want to have a chain commercial. That's one thing I really want to do. And, other than that, I just want to own my own business for sure."

All additional reasons he felt home-state LSU could be a great place to continue to grow his legacy.