Well, this is certainly a new cross-pollination of sports, or at least a relatively rare one.
Sure, we’ve already seen this offseason a lacrosse player from Duke move on to SMU to play football. The son of the great Pat Swilling went from Tulsa basketball to Tulsa football. Hell, just this week Oregon State lost a 2013 signee to track & field. The Beavers now, however, have lost a 2014 signee in what most would view as coming straight out of left field.
In an interview with a Honolulu television station, and as relayed by Gina Mizell of The Oregonian, Fitou Fisiiahi revealed that he was foregoing a football career in Corvallis and will instead play rugby. Specifically, the Hawaii native will play rugby for Kutztown University in Pennsylvania.
Fisiiahi has only been playing the sport exclusively since this past winter, yet somehow managed to put “captain of the U.S. high school All-American team” on his sports résumé. He apparently, in a span of a handful of months, fell head over heels in love with the sport.
“I’m just doing what I love, and that’s just playing rugby,” the athlete said. “I don’t want to do something that I’m not going to be 100 percent at. So I’m just trying to follow my dreams, where my real dreams (are) at, and that’s rugby.”
A three-star member of the Beavers’ 2014 recruiting class, Fisiiahi was rated as the No. 3 player at any position in the state of Hawaii. He signed a National Letter of Intent with OSU this past February.