Zion Tupuola-Fetui’s competitiveness was understandably misconstrued.
Back then — before Washington redshirt sophomore outside linebacker racked up seven sacks and three forced fumbles in his first three career starts — he was a 6-foot-2, 250-pound mammoth with a high-top haircut. He was a prep football standout at Pearl City High School on Oahu.
And in the spring, he was an outside hitter on the volleyball team.
But regardless of the sport, or season, Tupuola-Fetui needed to win — and teammates didn’t always take kindly to his uncompromising competitiveness.
“Even if he couldn’t do things right away, he was very competitive about it and I don’t want to say hard on himself, but very driven,” Pearl City volleyball coach Sean Chang told The Times on Monday. “He was always competing, always wanting to get better. And at first, it intimidated a bunch of the guys on the team, because they took it as him being aggressive toward them. We actually had team meetings about this, where I would say, ‘It’s not that he’s being aggressive toward you. He’s trying to win. He’s trying to compete.’
“Once we got that set, it built a competitive culture where now guys were throwing stuff back at him. They were saying, ‘You expect this of us, and now we expect this of you.’ It built a good competitive culture on our team, so that really helped out.”
The three-star football recruit — who chose the Huskies over scholarship offers from Oregon, Cal, Oregon State, Vanderbilt, Hawaii and Nevada — helped out in other ways as well. Chang said that, “because he’s so big, especially on defense he could cover a lot of ground and space, even playing in the back row. Once he developed that ball control, he was able to pass.”
A hitter at heart
And, be it volleyball or football, Tupuola-Fetui could always hit.
“Right away his timing in the air, his approach and all that, it came surprisingly quickly. Just due to his size, he had a big presence at the net,” Chang said. “A lot of times people just think, ‘Oh, he’s big. He can pick stuff up.’ But he was making (subtle) adjustments. He was shifting a step or two here and there. Just his whole grasp on really anything athletic, he picked things up so quickly. It was incredible.”
Behind the dual-sport standout, Pearl City won its first OIA Division II boys volleyball championship in program history in 2018 — with Tupuola-Fetui contributing 10 kills in a title sweep over Kalani. He enrolled at the University of Washington little more than a month later.
And, if you’ve been watching, you already know what happened next.
“Unreal. Unreal,” UW head coach Jimmy Lake repeated Saturday night, after Tupuola-Fetui posted six tackles, three sacks, a forced fumble and a fumble recovery in the comeback win over Utah. “You can’t pin me down and say I thought he was going to have seven sacks and three forced fumbles in three games. Then he gets the fumble recovery, the huge gain when Kyler Gordon forced the fumble. The guy is just a playmaker.”
He always has been. Only now, the ascendant redshirt sophomore is listed at 6-3 and 280 pounds; the high-top has been replaced with shocks of dyed golden hair. His volleyball career didn’t follow Tupuola-Fetui to the mainland.
But he’s still an outside hitter — as evidenced by the 13 tackles, seven sacks and three forced fumbles in his first three career starts. Tupuola-Fetui has been named the Pac-12’s premier defensive lineman three weeks running, and he was honored as the Chuck Bednarik Award’s National Player of the Week and Athlon Sports National Defensive Player of the Week following the Utah win as well.
And, he admits, the individual awards are gratifying.
Stats and wins
But now, same as always, Tupuola-Fetui needs to win.
“I’m just glad that my success is also translating into team success,” he said on Saturday night. “I was telling (defensive coordinator Pete Kwiatkowski) earlier this week, ‘All these awards are great. But if they gave me an award on a week when we lost I definitely wouldn’t want to accept it.’ So I’m just thankful that we as a team are balling. Every single one on this team is contributing.”
But few have contributed more than Tupuola-Fetui — who leads the country with 2.33 sacks per game and ranks second with one forced fumble per contest. And compare that with the 2019 season, when the redshirt freshman managed just nine tackles in 12 games behind Joe Tryon and Ryan Bowman.
Still, his success was not as unexpected as the statistics might suggest.
“If you saw those last couple games (last season), the bowl game and the Apple Cup, he was coming on and we all saw it,” Lake said. “Definitely during the offseason starting in January, his physique changed. He put on a lot more weight. He was starting to understand all the techniques that coach Kwiatkowski has been teaching him, and he really went to work on his game and improved himself. You can see it all playing out right now.
“Now, this level of production? I believe we’re all a little bit like, ‘Wow. This is a lot of stats he’s putting up there, a lot of game-changing plays.’”
Strong and fluid
But, despite the modest sample size, Tupuola-Fetui’s sizzling statistics are far from a fluke. At 280 pounds, he possesses the leverage to bull-rush an overmatched tackle, and the quickness to unseat a quarterback from off the edge.
“He’s very, very powerful,” Lake said. “If you watch those clips, he’ll go engage that tackle and he can run that tackle back into the quarterback. So if all of a sudden they’re worried about his power and then he slips you, he goes on the edge, that’s where it gets really tricky for those offensive linemen. He really has a knack now for reaching out and going for that quarterback’s arm and getting the ball out, which are obviously game-changing plays.
“I’m very excited that he just continues to take his game to the next level and I’m excited to watch him come to work tomorrow in practice. I wish you guys could see it, because it’s just a beautiful thing to watch when a player is just constantly trying to improve himself and take the next step in his game. Who knows where he’s going to take his game? The sky’s the limit.”
Constantly trying to improve himself? A rare combination of power, speed and explosiveness?
Where have we heard all of this before?
“To be honest I don’t know much about football,” Chang admitted. “But I know that laterally, he could move ridiculously quick. His foot coordination was ridiculous. He would jump too close to the net, but somehow he would save himself and not cross (the bottom line) or not touch the net with his balance. All that mixed with his explosiveness, his ability to move, to jump, to move laterally, it was very impressive.”
It’s safe to assume, then, that Chang was not surprised by Tupuola-Fetui’s continued success.
But until a phone call this week, the varsity volleyball coach was not aware of it, either.
“I heard he was starting and playing games and stuff,” Chang said, when informed of his former pupil’s Pac-12 theatrics. “But I didn’t hear that he was doing this well!”
Vorel writes for the The Seattle Times
