After six years, Fresno State’s Jasad Haynes finally heard it: ‘You’re on scholarship’

In this second in a series of Q&As with Fresno State players, The Bee’s Robert Kuwada checks in with Jasad Haynes, who went from walk-on to Division I scholarship athlete over the summer.

Position: Defensive tackle

Year/hometown: Third-year sophomore/Fresno

You were a walk-on when you got here, but earned a scholarship over the summer. What’s it like to be a Division I scholarship athlete?

I don’t really know what to say, man. It’s good. It’s a blessing. That’s what it really is, a blessing. I’ve been waiting to hear, ‘You’re on scholarship’ since my freshman year in high school and to get that opportunity from coach (Jeff) Tedford was a huge blessing.

I almost cried when he told me that because I’ve been wanting to hear that for six years. It feels real good. It feels like all my hard work paid off, but I still have a lot more.

To make that type of commitment to walk on to a football team, to practice every day, to do the lifting and conditioning and all of it … it’s something. I know you grew up here, went to Clovis North. Was being a Bulldog just something you had to have?

I’m from Fresno. I’ve grown up in the whole Bulldog era. Pat Hill. David Carr. Everybody that was here. The Red Wave was big when they were here, so that drew my attention. As for a particular game, it was 2005 when they played against USC. I was a huge Reggie Bush fan and then I saw them, the underdog, Fresno State, the WAC against the Pac-12, and they put up a real good game, a real fight, and that drew my attention even more. ...

And I always wanted to play for my hometown. A lot of kids here, they feel like the only way to make it out with football is to go somewhere else. They try to get out of Fresno. They call it a ‘no’ for a reason, because nobody makes it out. I wanted to change kids’ mindsets. If we all come here, we’ll do something special.

You also have one of the more interesting majors on this team, too. Tell me about criminology-forensic behavioral science. Take me through that.

My mother. She’ s a forensic psychologist at Corcoran Prison. When she was working on her doctorate and she was doing internships at another prison, she was telling me all the experiences that she was having while working there and it got me really interested.

A lot of the defensive linemen were trying to cut weight and their body fat percentages this offseason. You’re down to 275 from 310 or so. So, being from Fresno, what was the one food, the one go-to meal here in town, that you had to do without in cutting all that weight?

I’ll tell you, the one food that was hard to turn down. There were two things, In-N-Out and Chipotle. Those are two of my favorite things.

What difference do you think that will make for the D-line this season? Looking at it, you, Malik Forrester, Patrick Belony, Kevin Atkins all are in much better condition.

After the San Jose State game, we all made a pact that it was going to be different. We can’t go 1-11. Not again. That year was hard. It was hard every week. It’s not like we were getting blown out in all those games, we would be close and in the last couple of minute the game would slip through our hands, so we were asking ourselves, ‘What can we do every single day to make sure that doesn’t happen, because it starts now.’ That’s what we did. Malik, he would show either before his weight lifting or after it and he would do extra cardio and all that. I would jump rope. I would do something else. We all would do something extra to help benefit the team, because that’s the main purpose, benefit the team, win a championship and win a bowl game because we want to change the atmosphere, bring it back. We want that raw dog, bulldog mojo. That’s what we want. That attitude. That d-line attitude and I feel like we’ve got it.

If you could change the outcome of one game in your career, could be Pop Warner, high school, here at Fresno State, which would it be?

That’s hard, because I have a lot of them. I’ll give you three. The first one is obviously the Tulsa game last year. We were up 31-0 with 10 minutes to go in the second quarter and we let the game slip by. One thing people don’t understand is it’s hard to keep a lead. That other team, they get motivated, they think, ‘We’re not going to go out like this.’ So, it’s hard to keep that same energy all four quarters. Also, in high school, my junior year, it was Clovis North and Bakersfield in the Valley Championship and we got blown out. That was going to be my first time winning a championship, but we lost. Then, my senior year, against Edison, that’s when they had A.J. Greeley, Tyler Horton, everybody, it was a battle of the teams in Clovis and Fresno and we came up short 20-21. That game was tough.

This story was originally published August 29, 2017 at 1:09 PM with the headline "After six years, Fresno State’s Jasad Haynes finally heard it: ‘You’re on scholarship’."