For Trey Fairchild, Saturday mornings in the summer of 2011 meant 30-yard interval sprints up the side of the Hoover Dam in Westerville, Ohio.

The weekly runs up the 45-degree incline with long-time trainer Tom Lopresi were more than exercises designed to help Fairchild gain speed and acceleration. They were a way back.

“It’s just straight up. It’s steep. And just the certain things, just the sprints that you have to do up it in certain times,” Fairchild said, “it just gets bad.”

Fairchild is an All-American wide receiver at Division-III Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, near the town he grew up in, Dublin. At Otterbein, the same school both his parents attended, he plays alongside former high school teammates and rivals. He leads the team with three touchdowns and 19 catches for 274 yards.

But college football was once something grander and more glorious. His football-playing dreams were lofty and admittedly naive. Fairchild is playing on his third different rung of the college football ladder. His name alone was bigger than it is today until injuries devastated his early college career and weakened his now-5-foot-11-inch, 195-pound frame.

In 2010, he nearly quit the game altogether.

Two days into Eastern Kentucky’s 2010 preseason training camp, Fairchild packed his bags and drove home. Fairchild was unhappy at the school and wanted to leave. He was done with the Division-I game. Maybe the sport as a whole.

“I was coming back (home) and I just, I honestly wasn’t really sure if I wanted to keep playing just because, you know, it’s so frustrating,” Fairchild said. “I pretty much didn’t get to play my first two years. … It’d kind of really taken a toll on me.”

Fairchild came out of high school as a three-star prospect, recruited by Bowl Championship Series programs such as Louisville, Maryland, Navy and Boston College. He chose Syracuse, but got caught in the crossfire of Greg Robinson’s personnel shuffle and ultimate firing. After a redshirt season with the Orange, Fairchild opted for EKU in the spring semester of 2009.

He also wanted to be closer to home. Most of his friends went to school in Ohio. He missed his family and his girlfriend, too. Fairchild considered going home to Otterbein from SU before taking up EKU’s scholarship offer.

In late summer 2009 while running field sprints at his alma mater, Dublin-Coffman High School, Fairchild felt his right quad coil up. It was a partial tear, one he’d try to play through during a frustrating season in which he’d play just four games.

Though the Eastern Kentucky athletic website lists Fairchild at 185 pounds for the 2009 season, he said the injury caused him to gain about 15 pounds. He lost a tenth of a second on his previously 4.4 40-yard dash time.

But when he fatefully left EKU the following preseason, his career changed permanently.

“I was kind of used to being in the spotlight, like at Coffman,” Fairchild said. “I just really wasn’t happy there so I think that was more important. It was more important that I was somewhere where I was happy, rather than playing in front of that many people or just because of the spotlight of Division-I.”

It was time for Fairchild to enjoy the game again. When he was about to quit, his friends and then-head coach of Otterbein, Joe Loth, convinced him otherwise.

Loth said he knew Fairchild was coming and made it a point to recruit him onto the team. The lack of scholarships at the D-III level meant coaches “couldn’t control (players’) lives” because “they don’t owe you anything.”

Over the prestige of elite college football, Loth’s pitch was exactly what Fairchild needed to hear.

“He just made it sound like it was just going to be fun,” Fairchild said, “You know, and I hadn’t really had fun in the past year playing it.”

He went on to lead the team in receiving touchdowns with six in 2010, but Fairchild said it took him about a year to really get back to peak form. Then, for the first time since high school, he dominated, but not before some heavy mental and physical workouts. In summer 2011, he met up with Lopresi, the same man he’d trained with since his junior year of high school.

Bursting up the side of a 94-foot dam in speed and endurance intervals helped Fairchild return to a leaner, quicker version of himself. It also restored a psychological edge Lopresi said Fairchild needed after the quad tear that left a hole in the muscle.

“When you have a person that’s had some injuries, a lot of times for them to push themselves they always have that fear that they’re going to get some kind of an injury,” Lopresi said. “You never feel good about running up the side of a dam or any kind of physical activity that would make them get winded or have their heart-rate up, I mean no one wants to do that.”

Today, Fairchild plays under the watchful eye of scouts from the St. Louis Rams, the Detroit Lions and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. If professional American football in North America doesn’t work out, Fairchild is entertaining the idea of playing in Europe for a few years.

He’s watched some videos on YouTube and it looks like fun, he said. Nothing too serious, just something to consider. And while Fairchild is enjoying football, he’s applied himself in a way that can see him succeed on the game’s grandest stage.

Said Loth: “When you can dominate the Division-III level the way Pierre (Garcon) and Cecil (Shorts) and Trey did last year, then you have an opportunity to be considered a prospect.”

Published on October 16, 2012 at 1:33 am

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