The distance between Gardena, Calif., and Athens is 2,334 miles. For Boo Jackson, a few old friends and some new teammates made the gap much more manageable.
Ohio's redshirt-senior quarterback came to the Bobcats after two years at El Camino College with his teammate and fellow redshirt-senior, Hilton Dawson III.
When preparing to move to Ohio, Jackson heard that Patrick Tafua, a junior-college player at Golden West College in California, also planned to join the Bobcats.
We played against each other
Jackson joked. I threw a couple touchdown passes on him.
Jackson sent Tafua a message on Facebook, and the trio planned to fly to Ohio together.
Ever since we got here we've been close Jackson said of recently graduated Tafua and Dawson. All of us are family-oriented. We love our family. We want to be as close to our family as possible.
But going to school on the opposite side of the country made that unfeasible. The trio stuck together for the most part, which helped ease the transition to the Midwest.
Tafua and Jackson hit it off almost immediately because of their similar heritage.
Boo is half-Hawaiian
and me being Samoan and just having the Polynesian kind of mentality. All of the Polynesians
whether you're from Hawaii or Samoa or wherever
you're family
Tafua said. Family is the biggest thing
in that sense in that common respect we have for each other.
But Jackson and Tafua both said it didn't take long to make friends in Athens.
The people here are so friendly
Jackson said. They just came up to me and went
'Oh! You're the new quarterback.'
Jackson said he missed his family, but making new friends and getting close to his teammates helped him cope with his relatives not being able to watch him play every weekend.
We get four tickets a game
and I have to give them away
