MORGANTOWN, W.Va — Sometimes even Asani Redwood doesn’t believe he made it this far.
As the redshirt sophomore defensive lineman continues to earn snaps for West Virginia, he still finds time to reflect on the unique journey that brought him to Morgantown.
“My dad always talks about it. Every time like ‘did you really expect this to happen or could you write this down because if somebody told you earlier in the years that you’d go play football at West Virginia with a full scholarship ride, would you believe it?’ and to this day, sometimes I still don’t believe it,” he said.
Redwood was born in the Jamaican capital city of Kingston, spending his childhood there before a dream his father Abez-Ike Redwood had long held came true. Receiving a visa at the age of 15, Redwood moved to Suwanee, Georgia with his mother Nancy McDowell and enrolled at Collins Hill High School.
Despite what he would eventually become as a college prospect, Redwood entered his first year of American high school with little knowledge of gridiron football, let alone a desire to line up in the trenches. Not yet grown into his now-6-3, 290-pound frame, his focus initially turned to the soccer field.
“I didn’t know much. I watched (football) on TV so I always said if I was going to America, I’d be a receiver,” he said, “I came over here, I was 5-11, 190 at the most so I wasn’t really big but when I was registering for class, I met coach (Lenny) Gregory, our head coach at the time. I met him and I played soccer growing up so he asked if I wanted to be a kicker.”
With spring football practice already underway in Georgia, Redwood elected to wait until his junior season to give football a shot. Instead, he spent the winter of his sophomore year on the mat under the direction of Collins Hill wrestling coach Hayden Gregory, the head football coach’s son who doubled as Collins Hills’ offensive line coach.
It was a decision that proved to be life-changing for Redwood as he struggled adjusting to life as a teenager in the United States. The combination of assimilating into American high school, leaving close family members behind in Jamaica, and trying to communicate with an accent proved daunting until wrestling open doors both athletically and socially.
“With my accent and stuff, people don’t really understand me so I had to speak slower. I had to repeat myself a lot so it put me in a place where I didn’t want to talk to anybody and then I started wrestling,” he said.
“Relationships started getting built out of wrestling. Relationships from wrestling go to football and then football goes to other sports because you know athletes always stick with each other and then I also played soccer as well so that was a different group of friends so I leaned on the sports and my teammates and that’s where my confidence got built in just like talking to people and stuff like that,” Redwood added, “I went from being very anti-social, not talking to anybody because it was frustrating to repeat yourself five times, to being that guy that everyone can lean on, being the comedian and a goof sometimes or just having fun with each other.”
Now more comfortable in his surroundings going into his junior year, he returned to the idea of joining the football team following a growth spurt that helped grab the attention of Collins Hill defensive line coach Cory Beck.
Beck, a Huntington native who served as head coach at Lincoln County from 2007 to 2012, proved instrumental in molding Redwood from a junior varsity player at the start of that season into a prospect worthy of Division I scholarship offers.
“I played JV my first three games and then the fourth game at Lowndes, one of our players, he went through some family stuff so he wasn’t available so I got called up and I can say that game was bad for me,” Redwood said, “I got put on the ground a couple of times but after that, I started to learn the game a lot. I realized just listening just teaches you a lot about the game.”
After finishing as Georgia Class 7A runner-up in 2020, Collins Hill put together a 15-1 season in 2021 on route to a state championship with Redwood teaming with Colorado star Travis Hunter to lead a defense that held opponents to just 7.7 points per game. As Hunter and now-Missouri quarterback Sam Horn drew college recruiters to Suwanee in droves, he found himself wanted a piece of the pie at the next level too.
“Everybody else was getting offers and stuff so I thought it is my first time playing the sport but I would love to continue playing it so I started really focusing on that, getting an offer, and then I got my first one from East Tennessee State, my first DI offer, and from there on it was just joy of playing and then a lot more started rolling in,” he said.
As the opportunities grew, the reality of playing big-time college football set in as Redwood not only now plays on national television every week but is also the first member of his family to attend college. Now in his third season at West Virginia, he is firmly in the rotation on the Mountaineer defensive line and has registered six tackles and 1.5 tackles-for-loss after appearing in 14 games across his first two years.
When those memories return of just how far Redwood has come from being a 15-year-old soccer player from Jamaica just trying to get his classmates to understand him, he uses his experiences and his gratitude as motivation to go even further.
“That’s why I put my all into it and I try to make my dad proud and I try to show coach (Neal) Brown I appreciate the opportunity he gave me,” he said, “Coach Brown and coach (Jordan) Lesley, coach (Andrew Jackson), they gave me this opportunity and I appreciate it so I go hard and try to show them.”