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Control the Controllables: Tariq Speights’s journey through football

Story by Jordan Rogers

PHOENIX – Tariq Speights rolls with the punches.

Though he is now playing football at Eastern Michigan University, his path to a Division 1 school was littered with roadblocks.

Through suffering a serious injury, being constantly overlooked, and enduring setback after setback, there was a time when playing college football didn’t seem like an option.

But his ability to persevere and battle adversity has led him to realizing his dreams as a football player.

Starting out at the flag level, Speights has been playing football since he was four years old.

“When I was younger, football was a way in which I could just get my energy out,” Speights said. “It was just fun, but as I started to grow up, I found a way to appreciate the art of the game.”

As football began to get more serious for Speights, he found his way to Valencia High School in Santa Clarita, Calif. To date, the school has won 11-straight Foothill League titles, including all four years Speights attended the school.

Though he got called up in both his freshman and sophomore seasons for playoffs, he did not play full time varsity-level football until his junior year. Valencia head coach, Larry Muir, was impressed with what Speights brought to the table.

“He (Speights) really exceeded expectations in the intangibles,” Muir said. “Obviously, physically he was a good player. He was aggressive, tough, strong, and just a really good athlete. But what really set him apart was his leadership.”

Speights was putting together a good junior season in his first full year at the varsity level. After earning his way onto the starting lineup, Speights recorded 52 tackles through just six games, which at that point lead the league in that category. Game seven brought an opponent he had extra anticipation for: Saugus High School.

“Saugus and I had kind of a personal rivalry because I played with all of those guys during my eighth-grade year,” Speights said. “Those were all of my boys, so it was a big game for me.”

Speights answered the bell. By halftime, he had recorded 11 tackles, one sack, and one forced fumble. And although he didn’t know it at the time, the career game he was putting together came at a very good time.

“My junior year is when I started to get college attention,” Speights said. “Someone had told me that one of the colleges I was talking to was at that game, but I didn’t know that until after the fact.”

Two plays into the second half, Speights was running towards the play to help out on a tackle. As he drew closer, a Saugus offensive lineman rolled into his knee and he collapsed. Speights said he felt a warm sensation in his leg.

Team trainers rushed to Speights’s location, and not thinking too much of it, he walked off the field under his own power. He did not return to the game.

“My knee just felt super loose,” Speights said. “It didn’t really hit me that it was actually hurt until after the game.”

Getting MRI’s are normally a process that is scheduled out weeks in advance, so Speights had to wait a month until he could learn exactly what happened to his knee.

“I had been rehabbing a sprained MCL in my other leg during the weeks before then,” Speights said. “It had literally healed right before the Saugus game. In my mind, it was the same thing that I had. I was like, ‘Oh it’s just a sprain, I’m going to be good.’”

Unfortunately for Speights, he was wrong. The MRI revealed that Speights had suffered from a torn his ACL, MCL, and meniscus.

Instead of making the situation about him, Speights told Muir about his injury and specifically asked him not to tell the rest of the team. He wanted the team to focus on the upcoming game.

“His communication, and his influence on the players around him, is incredible,” Muir said. “He’s just a guy that understands the meaning of teamwork and team chemistry. He’s not going to allow the people around him to slack off.”

When he learned of his injury, it was difficult for Speights to come to grips with it all. He decided to get another opinion.

He took the injury to the team doctors at Valencia and after they did their due diligence, they had decided that the initial MRI was correct.

“I was shocked,” Speights said. “I was starting to get college attention and I thought I was going to get a scholarship offer. Stuff was really going good, and then that hit and sent shock waves over everything. Colleges really started backing off of me.”

After having surgery, Speights’s junior season was over. But he realized he had another season to showcase his abilities, so he did his best to stay positive.

“Especially with injuries like that, if you don’t adapt and keep a positive mindset through this whole thing, that is when you see situations where guys don’t come back from their injuries,” Speights said. “It’s just as much a mental injury as it is a physical injury.”

Speights got to work on his recovery right away. But nothing would come easy to him. When the meniscus gets torn, the leg has to stay completely stationary in order to heal, so Speights had to keep his leg in a cast for a month.

Keeping that positive mindset he stressed, Speights did whatever he could to stay in shape, including lifting in his free time at Valencia in his free time.

Six to nine months is the timeline it takes for the knee to recover, and in six months Speights was ready to begin strengthening his knee. But just like many others, Speights had to learn to trust his knee.

“That was the hardest thing,” Speights said. “It’s something that my physical trainer really helped me do. If you don’t trust it, you’re going to lose that quick step that makes people so great. It was a whole other mental process for me aside from letting my knee heal.”

After his recovery, Speights came back and was handed third-team reps. He would have to earn his way back onto the starting lineup. Valencia had other talented players, so he wasn’t going to just be handed his spot back upon his return.

Speights took it as a challenge. To this day, he believes having to work his way back up made him a better football player and allowed him to appreciate the game even more.

“He just came back on a mission,” Muir said. “He just had laser focus to getting back to playing at a high level. There was just no question he was on a mission to come back from that devastating injury.”

That laser-like focus didn’t end in the offseason. After re-earning his starting spot, Speights had yet another good season and was compensated with a First-Team All-Defense selection.

Despite his successful time on the field at Valencia, Speights still was still navigating through the recruiting process. He had some interest, but nothing serious.

“I knew in my heart that I could play at the Division 1 level,” Speights said. “It was something I was stressing to myself since my freshman year. But especially after my ACL injury, getting to play at a FBS school was kind of a far reach. Realistically, FCS football was probably my best bet.”

Speights, along with Muir, sat down and emailed every FCS school in the country, attempting to showcase himself in a way that a team would be interested. Northern Arizona University responded, saying they would come by for a workout.

“[My family and I] had actually visited all of the Arizona schools earlier,” Speights said. “So even before football became an option, I loved NAU.”

The special teams coordinator showed up to a practice in the spring. After he and Speights exchanged some contact info and ended up choosing to go to NAU with a preferred walk-on spot he was told her would receive.

Unfortunately for many student-athletes, they get told things that aren’t always true. Speights’s case at NAU was no different.

“He didn’t promise anything, but he eluded to things in a way that he probably didn’t have any authority to elude to,” Speights said. “Once I got there, the situation wasn’t what I was told it would be.”

That previously offered walk-on spot would not be given to Speights upon his arrival at the school. But like Speights had done at Valencia, he continued to push through when things got rough.

Speights was strung along. He was basically told week-by-week that he would be added to the roster, but that never ended up happening. What made things even more difficult was that he was sharing a dorm with other guys on the football team, but he was not playing. Speights had hit a low.

Much of the relationship between a college coaching staff and its players is built on trust, and after spending an entire year not playing football, Speights had no trust for the coaching staff at NAU.

But Speights wasn’t done playing football. He decided to go back home and walk on at College of the Canyons, a junior college located in Santa Clarita.

Luckily for Speights, Canyons was more than happy to have the opportunity to have him, as they had recruited him out of Valencia and lost out on him to Northern Arizona.

“He actually had practiced with us once or twice during his senior year,” Canyons coach Ted Iacenda said. “We were just ecstatic, I mean, we were so excited to have him. We wanted him badly.”

Junior college football is often fantasized and carries many stereotypes. The show “Last Chance U” was made to highlight all of those. But Iacenda, who is entering his eighth season as head coach of the Cougars, knows it is nothing like that.

“Our program couldn’t be any further from what that show depicted,” Iacenda said. “The one common denominator you see at our level is you see young men that are hungry for an opportunity. You see young men that are hungry to be coached, to be taught, to be developed, and to get to that promise land and chase those dreams.”

At 5’10”, 230 pounds, Speights has been slapped with an “undersized” tag since he started playing football. He’d been overlooked and undervalued. He fit Iacenda’s “common denominator” to a tee.

As soon as Speights got to COC, he got to work. He knew moving home de-motivates a lot of people, so he got into a routine. Whether he had classes that day or not, he would go to campus and knock out his homework early so he could spend more time working on his game, whether that be working out or watching film.

“In the back of my head, I knew it was a sink or swim moment,” Speights said. “For me, I had the mindset that COC was going to be the steppingstone for the Division 1 college that I want to play at. If I don’t give my all right now, I might not play this game ever again. I was going to work my butt off and I was going to put myself in the best position to have an opportunity to play at the next level.”

Speights’s hard work was again rewarded. As the heart and soul of a defense that allowed just 9.5 points per game and ranked No. 1 in the state of California, Speights lead COC to an undefeated regular season.

He was named National Division, Northern League Defensive Player of the Year and received an All-American selection. Speights recorded 76 total tackles, four sacks, two forced fumbles, and two fumble recoveries.

Iacenda found his time at the school very efficient. To him, Speights carried traits that are not normal for most people to have.

“He just had a tenacity that most kids or most human being in general don’t have,” Iacenda said. “Most people don’t possess one-tenth of his persistence and his ability to push through adversity. He had the positivity and the optimism to see that even though this was a bump in the road for him, he was still going to go chase his dreams.”

Again, despite his personal success and accolade-filled season, he wasn’t getting a lot of recruitment attention.

“Especially after the year I just had where I showed that I could play, I think people were just scared,” Speights said. “I think people were just worried about the height issues. I saw a lot of schools come in and not talk to me because that’s all they saw.”

But late in the game, Eastern Michigan University stepped in and took a closer look at Speights and his body of work. The school had just lost one of their linebackers and needed to fill that void. They thought Speights may just be the one to fill that void.

“Through recruiting, our linebackers coach went and saw a practice,” Eastern Michigan coach Chris Creighton said. “He called me up and said, ‘I’m not saying the talent level is the same, but this guy might be Mike Singletary junior.’ He was just running the whole defense and running the practice.”

It finally seemed as though Speights’s dream of playing at a Division 1 school was coming true. But when Eastern Michigan was looking at Speights, they were out of scholarships at the time, so Speights had to make a decision to go to the school and bet on himself by waiting for one to come his way.

After taking it upon himself to tour the school, he decided to go to Eastern Michigan. To this day he is very happy with the decision he made, and Creighton believes Speights has fit right in with the team.

“He’s been a perfect fit,” Creighton said. “He’s an outstanding human being. He really cares about other people and about this team and is obsessed with getting better. That’s what makes him a perfect fit.”

Two weeks into being with the team at Eastern Michigan, Speights was awarded a scholarship. He had finally reached a goal that meant so much to him.

He had always wanted to find a way to pay his parents back for everything they had done for him, and he could now do that.

“They have my brother and sister that they have to put through college,” Speights said. “It’s the reason why my injury in high school was such an emotional shock. I had always thought that if I could use my athletic talents to help out my parents then I would. Having that happen was a really big moment for me.”

After appearing in eight games a season ago for the Eagles, Speights has worked his way into the opportunity to receive starting reps this upcoming season. And for him, everything he has worked for will be coming to a head when he gets that first start.

For others who are facing adversity such as Speights has, his advice is to keep a positive mindset.

“If people would step back and understand that a lot of this stuff that is happening is completely under their control, it will change so many things in people’s lives,” Speights said. “Just control the controllables.”