It was along the coast of Puget Sound, three summers ago, when Fotu Leiato learned how hard the path to playing college football would be for him. Knee-deep in gardens, hands aching from moving furniture all day, Leiato was doing everything he could to make some extra cash. To generate as much interest in himself as possible, he took the money and spent it on Greyhound bus trips to football camps at Eastern Washington and Montana.
“On the bus trips, I would just think,” Leiato said. “I would think about all the jobs I had to do to get to where I was — all the dirty work.”
Small schools showed interest. His hard work yielded an offer from Division II Central Washington, but major programs balked at the no-fear, free-flying football player from Steilacoom, Washington.
Then, almost instantly, things got easy. The family’s house phone was ringing nonstop. Every day it was another college coach, another major media outlet, wanting to get to know the kid behind the legendary highlight film.
Today, Leiato is at the University of Oregon, sticking out on the team’s kickoff coverage team with his long black hair hanging over his jersey. While he’s adjusting to the speed and discipline of college football, Leiato’s goal is simple: he wants to become more than the player with a hard-hitting video that went viral.
“It’s over,” he said. “That’s in the past. High school was high school, and this is college. I just need to be in the moment now, all the time.”
It got to a point, during Leiato’s senior season at Steilacoom High School, where every game was a spectacle. Fans waited for his next awe-inspiring act, when he’d knock a player from the opposing team clean off his feet. When it happened, one view wasn’t enough to satiate the people in attendance.
“You wish you could pause, rewind and replay his hits over and over again,” Steilacoom assistant coach Kyle Haller said.
It was these moments — when Leiato could invoke one uniform reaction from an entire crowd — that he loved the most.
“I feel it, when it happens — boom — the whole crowd — ooh!” Leiato said, stomping his foot for emphasis. “When you do it, and the whole crowd goes ‘ooh!’ you feel hyped. You think, ‘Man, I just did that.’ ”
The ability to hit as hard as Leiato does is a combination of physical and mental skill. He learned to be fearless, which — combined with his speed — allowed him to run through defenders as if he were trying to run through walls.
“My family taught me to have no fear, to never hesitate,” he said. “If you hesitate — think, ‘Oh, this guy is going to crack me,’ then it might happen, or you might get hurt. So I don’t think.”
But while Leiato — who Oregon head coach Mark Helfrich labeled “a human-highlight reel” — was making big hits seemingly one play after another, Division I colleges weren’t showing interest.
Leiato and the coaches at Steilacoom decided to make a mid-senior season highlight film, showcasing the hits he was putting on opposing players. They created their own internal database with as many college coaches’ email addresses they could find and pushed out the highlight film on social media.
“We wanted to put it together so after one minute of watching it, you wanted to watch the rest,” Haller said. “Not because it was a player running all over the field on another team, but because it was big-time hit after big-time hit.”
On Dec. 8, 2014, Leiato’s highlight film was published on Bleacher Report.
Leiato didn’t know what Bleacher Report, a major sports website, was until he looked it up. After the post was published, the views on his highlight film rose exponentially. As of Oct. 14, the highlight film, which is hosted on Hudl – a database for film of players and teams – had over 750,000 views.
One of the viewers was Oregon special teams coach Tom Osborne. And, like Haller had hoped, the highlight film did its job.
“The hits went on play after play,” Osborne said. “It seemed like it went on for hours.”
Osborne and the Oregon staff came across Leiato’s film before his video went viral. The staff liked the way Leiato played and decided to monitor his performance during his senior season.
Other schools, like Washington State, Michigan State and Oklahoma, started offering scholarships to him after the video went viral. Oregon joined the group shortly after.
At Oregon, the biggest adjustment for Leiato has been learning the nuances of playing defensive back after playing linebacker in high school. It was one speed and one direction for Leiato at Steilacoom. He had free range to blitz — a lot — and run as fast as he could to find the ball, while hitting anyone in his path.
One thing has separated Leiato from other players at Oregon. Senior wide receiver Zac Schuller went up against Leiato a lot during fall camp, and he says he’s never seen a player hit the way Leiato does.
“Definitely not at his size,” Schuller said. “It’s different from hitting a bigger dude because they don’t need to be coming that fast to feel that impact – but for him, definitely not at that size.”
Back at Steilacoom, the legend of Leiato lives on. He’s turned into an inspiration for players at the small Division 2A school — perhaps they too could go from high school straight to Division I college football. One of those players is Fotu’s brother, Anthony “Sesa” Leiato.
Anthony, a junior at Steilacoom, is a mirror image of his brother, with the same long flowing back hair and a hard-hitting highlight tape of his own. Fotu has set a path that Anthony hopes to follow.
“He was the first to go to college from my family so it was big for us,” Anthony said of his brother, Fotu. “It opened my eyes a lot too … Now I hope to follow in those footsteps and [be] the second from my family.”
As for Haller, he jokingly wishes “that the Oregon kicker would stop kicking so many touchbacks” so the people of Steilacoom could watch Leiato shine.
Leiato hopes to have the playbook and his reads down so that he could make it on the field as a defensive back. But while he’s waiting for that to happen, he still has the skill that made a simple highlight film go viral.
“There are not many guys that are going to sprint 50-55 yards down field, going full speed, and take on a guy that is 300 pounds and try to split his sternum in half,” Osborne said. “Those kind of guys have a unique mindset … It’s hard for some guys to cut it loose and Fotu really knows how to do it.”
Follow Joseph Hoyt on Twitter @JoeJHoyt.