Former Cowboy Corner Turns Injury to Opportunity with Hard Work and Determination

Devon Hedgepeth looked like he was bound for stardom on the football field, but injury forced him to blaze another path that has led to the top Business School in the nation.

STILLWATER -- We don't mind being the second outlet to announce this, but former Derby, Kan. standout athlete and student and Oklahoma State cornerback and honors graduate in Industrial Engineering Devin Hedgepeth is going back to school this fall. Hedgepeth is heading to Stanford Business School, one of the best in the World and tops in the United States. The Wichita Eagle and Kansas.com had the story first as we cooperated with Hedgepeth wanting the story in his hometown paper first. He looks good in the cardinal colors, but promises to keep orange in his wardrobe along with some of that Derby High School green because he is a product of all of his stops. 

Hedgepeth came in as a promising cornerback for the Cowboys in 2010. The All-State player that was a two-way star for Derby played in every game of his freshman season and finished with 26 tackles and a forced fumble. The talk was Hedgepeth was going to be a four-year starter, a potential All-American, and likely play at the next level in the NFL. 

His sophomore season started off sensational as he picked off a pass in the opener against Louisiana-Lafayette and then two weeks later picked off a pass in the all-nighter at Tulsa. You remember the game that was delayed by storms and kicked off at 12:13 a.m. The next week at Texas A&M, Hedgepeth registered one tackle before limping off the field. Examination discovered he had torn his left Achilles. The season ending injury was rough, but Hedgepeth is nothing, if not determined. 

He was back in the spring, but suffered a setback with another tear. He worked his way back and in the opener in 2012 against Savannah State and he made a pair of tackles and looked like he was ready to go. He saw some action the next week at Arizona, but in the home game against Louisiana-Lafayette he was on the near sideline to the Oklahoma State bench covering a receiver and went down. His Achilles was torn for the third time, this time really ruptured and his football career was over. 

"There is so much that goes into it when you are injured in college," Hedgepeth told me. Most people think the only adversity you face is physical. You come in from high school with the dream of playing on the big stage and you sacrifice almost every minute of every day to achieve that. Then it is taken from you and you have to plan how you are going to recover but also how you are going to move on. Mentally, it is a big hurdle."

Football was over, but life was still in it's infancy as Hedgepeth became the poster boy example for head coach Mike Gundy in his post practice discussions with his players on how and why they needed to get their work done in the classroom. Hedgepeth was not a stranger as he continued to come to the football offices and to see his teammates and show them where he was making a difference now.

"I was hyper-focused because I was trying to get my Engineering degree, which wasn't typical of somebody in the football program," explained Hedgepeth. I was always dedicated to my education just like my football.

"I did keep going to football because my teammates were pulling me in, the coaches were pulling me in, and the medical staff was pulling me in," Hedgepeth said of a time when a lot of injured players would have drifted away from the sport. "It speaks to the character of the organization and of Coach Gundy. I do have a lot of respect for the organization and the staff because they did keep pulling me in. Every member of your team has a role, whether it is on the field or off the field. My role (because of injuries) became off the field and I chose to mentor and help younger players like Miketavius Jones, Kevin Peterson, and Ashton Lampkin. That's why I got into mentorship. I love leadership and talking about it."

Hedgepeth finished his Engineering degree, was inducted into the Alpha Pi Mu honor society, reserved for the top 20 percent of OSU's Industrial Engineering juniors, and accepted a position with ExxonMobil that led him to Houston. 

After five and a half years working for ExxonMobil working up to territory sales manager, Hedgepeth is leaving to go back to school. Not just any school, Stanford School of Business, the top-rated business school in America and one where only six percent of the applicants are accepted. 

"My dad always taught me to strive to be the best that I could be at whatever I was doing whether it was mowing the yard, sports, or academics," Hedgepeth said. "I started looking around at programs that I wanted to study and Stanford was the one. It just happened to be the top Business school in the country with a six percent acceptance rate. Lo and behold I was accepted."

Hedgepeth left his job in Houston in June and has done some traveling. He will spend some time in Tulsa this month with his old teammate and one of his best friends in former Oklahoma State safety and captain Deion Imade. Then in August it is off the Stanford where he has already done some Zoom conferences with some of his fellow new Stanford School of Business students. 

"I'm going to be in school with gold medal winners, people that have started up and sold businesses for hundreds of millions of dollars, there's a world-class musician, and another is a woman from China that I googled and she is in the Forbes 30 under 30 in China," the accomplishments of my classmates just amaze me.

Hedgepeth is pretty amazing himself and is destined to be a leader in the future in this country. He is young, dynamic, and comes around and steps forward in a country that is now listening to young African-American men like it has never listened to them before.

"I am a huge believer of the idea of being resilient," Hedgepeth responded. "The way that I describe resilient is not overcoming an obstacle that is right in front of you, but resilience to me is learning how to leverage that obstacle to make myself better. So if I come up against an obstacle, I look at it not to see how I can overcome it, but at how I can use that challenge to make myself better."

Hedgepeth says he sees not so much adversity or challenge, but he looks at them as opportunities. He's heading right into the opportunity of a lifetime at Stanford.