In His Own Words: Swinney's Journey from Pelham to Clemson-Part 1
Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney has never been ashamed of his upbringing, coming from Pelham, Alabama.
At the national championship media day, I sat in a pool of reporters as Swinney was asked about how his growing up in Pelham and attending the University of Alabama influenced who he is today.
For the last few months I have tried to find the right context to share this story. However, the story that he shared was so powerful that any words other than his own would simply not do it justice.
“It's just amazing, it really is. It's just – I'm so proud of where I come from. I never say I'm from Birmingham. I was born in Birmingham. I was born at South Highlands Hospital and grew up in West End. I literally lived right behind West End High School until I was four, four and a half, and then my mom and dad, I guess this little bitty town in the middle of nowhere at the time, Pelham, no interstate or anything, long way to Pelham from Birmingham, I guess some houses were popping up and cheap and that kind of stuff, so it was kind of a – we moved out to Pelham. But my grandmother lived right off 20th street in Ensley her whole life, so I grew up going to Birmingham all the time, up in Ensley, cutting my grandmother's yard and hanging out up there.
“Technically I was born in Birmingham, but I was raised in Pelham. I will always consider that home. Even though Pelham has changed, there's I-65 going through it now, and we've got some – we even have an amphitheater now in Pelham, it's still home, and I've still got a lot of friends there.
“That's what shaped me. That's all I can say. I mean, I think that we're all shaped from and by our experiences of life, and for me, growing up in Pelham and going to Valley and River Chase and Pelham High School and being around all my coaches and Billy Tohill and Jim Backus and Paul Kellogg and Coach Crook and Jim Phillips and all that crew and all the great teachers that I had, those people are the ones who really shaped me and helped fuel a belief in me.
“I was always the shortstop, always the point guard. I was the captain. But I had a belief in all those things because of the teachers and the coaches that put me in leadership roles early on, and I just had this drive, and I know that came from my experiences with my family and all the people who helped shape me.
“So it was a special journey, and for me, I ended up at Alabama, I had some opportunities. I remember my basketball coach called me in his office. He's still mad at me to this day because Coach Kellogg, he thought I was a really good basketball player, and I think I was pretty good, too, but he wanted me to play college basketball. He felt like – he had some people that were interested, and he was like, are you going to do this or am I just wasting my time, and I'm like – I said, coach, you're wasting your time. I'm going to Alabama.
“Once I realized that I could go to Alabama, I didn't know that I could go to school. I thought I was going to have to go a JUCO route and either play baseball or play basketball or go to a smaller school and play football. I thought that was going to be the route I was going to have to go until one of my counselors told me that I would qualify for what was called a Pell Grant. I didn't know what a Pell Grant was, and I didn't know how to do student loans. I had no clue. I had no collegiate background in my family of how to do that type of stuff.
“So once I found that out, I'm like, man, I'm going to Alabama. That was my dream as a kid and so that's what I did. So I moved to Alabama in the summer of '88, moved into a little apartment, and got any student loans, got my Pell Grants, and ended up being there until spring of '01. I went there when I was 18, I left when I was 31. So Tuscaloosa was also a huge part of shaping me, the experiences I had as a student-athlete, the challenges, again, the drive, going into the walk-on program with Rich Wingo and Terry Jones and surviving that to get a chance to be a part of the team and chase my dream and the relationships that I developed.
“And then just the success, you know, little goals, make the team, make a travel squad, make a road travel squad, get in a game, get in the rotation, make some plays, get started on special teams. It was just all – make all-conference academic, and all those type of things. All those goals that I had from the structure of my time as a student-athlete and the people who poured into me and the men that believed in me and gave me an opportunity from Tommy Bowden and Bill Curry when I first got there, Terry Jones, Rich Wingo, to Woody McCorvey and Gene Stallings, Homer Smith, all these folks, and then just talked to Coach Stallings yesterday before I flew out here. I was going to work, you know, I finished up, I'm getting ready to take a job, and he's like, you need to get a masters. You start in July. You're going to be a GA for me."
