It’s still dark out when Treyvion Foster leaves his apartment.

Bleary-eyed students wander back to their dorm rooms after pulling all-nighters in Lathrop Library. He pays them no mind as he makes his way to the field alone.

The grass is still wet with dew, but no matter. Brisk air burns his cheeks as he sprints back and forth, back and forth across the field. His heart pounds in his ears, reminding him to breathe. Covered head-to-toe in cotton sweats, he is perspiring despite the chill. As the sky begins to lighten with the dawn, he can see his breath each time he exhales.

One more.

His muscles ache, and another step feels impossible. On the verge of quitting, he remembers why he’s out here.

One. More.

The sophomore stretches his legs and launches into another sprint, his feet kicking up dirt with each stride.

When he is finished, the sun is peeking through the trees to the east. His hands are on his knees as his shoulders rise and fall with each labored breath. He straightens up and walks home, knowing full well he’ll be out here again tomorrow. And the next day. And the next.

When you’re fighting for the near-impossible goal of walking onto a top-10 football team, giving up isn’t an option.

***

Foster, now a college senior, was a latecomer to football in high school, too. His mother didn’t let him play at first, because she was worried about head injuries, so he took up basketball before finally convincing her to let him join the football team as a junior.

His basketball skills translated well to his new role as a wide receiver — he could jump high and had good hands to come down with the football.

When it came time to look toward a future in football, however, Foster was lost.

There isn’t a strong recruiting presence in Idaho, and his high school coaches didn’t help much, so the graduating senior simply waited, hoping college recruiters would reach out to him like he had seen in the movies. Besides, he wasn’t even sure he was good enough to play in college.

Without so much as a ranking on any of the major recruiting sites and with limited football experience, Foster had no idea what to do.

In his first season, his high school had run a triple option attack, limiting Foster’s chances for big receptions, but after a new offensive coordinator overhauled the playbook his senior year, Foster’s stats took off. By the end of his senior season, Foster was named offensive team captain and led the team with 450 receiving yards and 7 touchdowns — a solid performance, but not enough to draw the eye of recruiters from many of the big-name schools.

“I was just behind on the recruiting process,” Foster admitted. “A lot of kids start really young. I thought coaches had to come to you.”

A strong student, Foster decided to focus on his academic interests when it came to college applications, even though he loved playing football. A few schools, such as Air Force and Boise State, expressed interest in the Idaho native as football player, but when Foster received an acceptance letter from Stanford, he was ecstatic — his dreams were coming true.

“I wanted to pursue that bigger part of my future,” he said.

Of course, he would have loved to play football at Stanford, but Foster didn’t know whether he even had the option to walk onto the team without having had any previous contact with the coaches.

When he got to campus, it didn’t take long for him to see what he was missing out on.

As a freshman on the Farm in 2013, Foster began attending Stanford games with his freshman dorm, watching a Rose Bowl-bound team go 10-2 in the regular season. He followed the team closely that year, each week wishing he could go out there and play.

He’d heard about students who had walked onto the team as freshmen, including some who were considered “preferred walk-ons,” having communicated with coaches beforehand to ensure their place on the roster.

“Once I got here, I realized that a lot of it was just reaching out to the coaches,” he said.

After spending half the year cheering in the stands while wishing he was on the field making the plays, Foster knew he couldn’t waste the rest of his time at Stanford wondering “What if?”

He decided to test the waters and wrote an email with his high school highlight reel to the team. Unfortunately, Foster still didn’t know much about the recruiting process, so he wasn’t even sure where to send it.

“I sent it to the wrong person!” he laughed. “I sent it to Coach Shaw, who doesn’t really handle recruiting.”

When he didn’t hear back from Shaw after several months, Foster was sad but resigned, thinking that the coaches must have watched his highlights and decided he wasn’t even good enough to merit a response.

He decided it was time to move on from his football dreams — an easy thing to say in the offseason.

But as soon as his sophomore year — and another football season —  began, Foster once again found himself in the bleachers desperately wishing he was on the field.

“I went to the first game [of the season], and I was just sitting there thinking ‘I have to try because I feel like I can play,’” he said.

Since his first endeavor, Foster had met some members of the football team, and he had wised up to the recruiting process. This time, his email made it in front of the right pairs of eyes, as he sent it to Matt Doyle and Ryan Devlin, who were involved with recruiting, and Tavita Pritchard, the wide receivers coach.

He received an email a few weeks later and got the message he’d been hoping for: We think you can play here.

He was over the moon.

The coaches were going to set up a meeting after the football season ended to talk with him and assign him a position, but one thing was clear: He was going to become a member of the Stanford football team.

Suddenly, the nerves set in. He had no idea what to expect from the meeting, but he knew he had to prepare himself not just mentally, but physically, if he was ever going to have a shot at playing.

“It’s not like I was just sitting on a couch the year and a half I didn’t play, but it’s not the same as training year-round like these guys do,” he said.

Traditionally, when players walk on as freshmen, they’re given a program from Stanford strength coach Shannon Turley that dictates some of the runs and lifts they should do in order to prepare for summer workouts with the team.

Midway through his sophomore year, nearly two years removed from a traditional football workout and not officially a member of the team, Foster was on his own.

He started right away, spending hours in the gym, creating a daily regimen based on his old high school workouts. Foster focused on getting stronger.

After sustaining a shoulder injury in October, he knew he had to improve his upper body strength to prevent any further issues. He built his leg strength with daily squats. His hard work began to show as he put on muscle and cut fat, shedding four pounds in the process.

A few months into this self-made regimen, Foster finally got some guidance. Punter Alex Robinson, who lived near him in the Mirrielees apartment complex, gave him a rough list of some runs and times to get him up to speed, so to speak, for spring ball.

Every morning, Foster woke up before dawn and went out to a small field by Manzanita Park (now the Gerhard Casper Quad) and ran, trying to crack the times that Robinson had given him for sprints.

“I would get up at like five in the morning and go run over there because I didn’t want anybody to see me,” he said. “And I would try to sweat more so I’d be wearing full sweats, just dripping in the morning.”

Foster met with the coaches on March 18, 2015.

It was a brief meeting, and he could tell his preparation had paid off: He felt confident in his body, and he knew he had the drive to keep working harder.

“I wanted to give off the vibe that I felt like I could play. I knew the situation I was walking into was kind of a tough one and that I’d have to work really hard,” he said.

“I was up-front with them, and I told them, ‘Obviously, if you’re a competitor, you want to play, and I’m here. I’m going to work my butt off to try and earn some playing time, but regardless of what role I end up in, I’m going to work hard because it’ll give me something to help the team win.’”

The coaches were impressed that Foster was in such good shape despite not playing for nearly two years. After reviewing his highlight tape with him, Coach Pritchard welcomed Foster to the wide receiving corps.

Just like that, he became the only upperclassman walk-on on the Stanford football team.

He joined the rest of the squad as the second session of spring practice began in late March, spending much of his time watching the drills because he still had to pass his physical exam.

He kept up his workouts in the meantime, but found that he was still struggling to make his goal times.

But when he finally began practicing with the team, he had a welcome surprise.

“Once I got to the practice field, I realized I had been running way farther than they actually run,” he said, smiling. “I way overestimated.”

As it turned out, the Manzanita field he’d been running was far larger than he’d thought, which was probably a good thing, as it prepared him for the ramp-up in intensity of summer workouts.

“My body was pretty worn down after spring,” Foster said. “I spent a lot of evenings in an ice bath or the cold tub we have. I never liked the cold tubs before, but now, they’re my best friend.”

Over the summer, Foster made huge progress both on and off the field. He constantly ran ladder drills and other footwork drills to get quicker feet and spent extra time working with quarterbacks Ryan Burns and Keller Chryst in order to develop chemistry and crispen up his routes.

But by the time summer was over, Foster had made up for his late start and began surpassing some of the veterans.

“When it came to the conditioning tests that we have at the end of the summer, I finished ahead of some people, which was a big moment for me,” he said. “It just showed how far I’d come in my conditioning.”

As if jumping into a Division I athletic program’s conditioning from a near-standstill wasn’t hard enough, there was one more hurdle Foster didn’t see coming.

Every Stanford student-athlete is given a full physical examination before starting workouts with a team, along with several blood tests. To his surprise, the blood tests revealed that Foster exhibited sickle cell trait — a condition that can have deadly consequences for athletes.

Sickle cell trait (not to be confused with its more severe form, sickle cell anemia) is a genetic blood abnormality in which a person inherits a single copy of the sickle cell gene along with one normal gene.

While having the trait generally does not affect a person’s day-to-day life, serious complications can arise as the body struggles to take in oxygen during high-intensity workouts. Without proper precautions, athletes can suffer serious injury or even sudden death.

“I’d had a couple of incidents in high school, actually, that now I know were related to sickle cell,” Foster said. “My high school coaches just thought it was heat exhaustion, so it’s fortunate that nothing bad happened there.”

Football conditioning was exhausting, and Foster had to fight his own body every step of the way.

“My body didn’t really respond super well to the conditioning; [it’s] just the nature of that trait,” he said. “My oxygen intake would get cut down and there were times my body would just shut down, so that was the hardest part for me, just fighting every day to make sure I was hydrated and learning more about the condition so that I could put myself in the best place to push myself.”

Foster learned to manage the condition by keeping well hydrated, increasing his workout intensity slowly and taking longer breaks to allow his body to recover. Intense exertion can cause his red blood cells to sickle, and if enough build up, they will block blood flow to the muscles, causing rapid breakdown and eventually total collapse.

“There were some scary moments in that first spring and the summer,” he added, “but I can honestly say I never thought about quitting. I just constantly wanted to prove to myself and prove other people wrong … anybody who didn’t think that I had it in me or seeing me sometimes struggling in those first couple weeks, any players who didn’t think I was gonna make it. I just wanted to show I was a fighter.”

Despite Foster’s fears, it seems unlikely that anyone questioned his dedication when he came on at the end of his sophomore year. And over the last 15 months, his role with the team has only grown.

“One thing I can say about [Foster] is he just works really hard,” said junior offensive tackle A.T. Hall. “Never complains, just does what he has to do and he gets after it. When you put somebody on a team like this you just integrate him into family.”

“He fit in right away,” said senior wide receiver Michael Rector. “He dove right in, he asked a lot of questions, and right now, I’d say he’s probably one of the guys that has the best hold on the playbook right now on the receiving corps.”

Foster’s hard work and discipline finally paid off last October when David Shaw told him he had made the travel team for Stanford’s upcoming game against the University of Washington.

The travel team is a smaller group of players who are ready to play if called upon in a game situation. The size of the team fluctuates from week to week, with a set core and a few bubble spots available for players who are performing well in practice.

Making the travel team was a huge step for Foster, although he found out about it in the most understated way. Before practice in the week leading up to the game, he was heading over to the sidelines to grab his helmet and pads, when he was stopped by Coach Shaw.

“I just want to let you know that you’re on the travel team this week for the Washington game,” Shaw said, as though it were no big deal.

Foster was taken aback — he didn’t really process the information. Initially, he thought Shaw was talking about the game against Washington State, which was being played in Pullman, Washington, near the Idaho border.

“I honestly thought [Shaw] meant the Washington State game at first because my family could come to it,” he said.

When it finally clicked that Shaw was adding him to the travel team for a home game, Foster couldn’t believe it. He ran back over to Shaw and thanked him profusely.

“It was a sign that I was working hard and it was paying off, and at least they were noticing,” he said.

Just two years earlier, Foster had sat in the Red Zone watching the Cardinal eke out a 31-28 win over the Huskies, but on Oct. 24, 2015, he stood on the sidelines, dressed in cardinal and white, ready to play if he heard his name called.

He hasn’t seen playing time yet, but that’s not stopping Foster. After all, he wouldn’t be where he is now without some stubborn perseverance.

“I’m ready whenever they need me. Every day I’m just coming out here trying to get better at something.”

 

Contact Olivia Hummer at ohummer ‘at’ stanford.edu.