Tre’Quon Fegans used to watch ‘The U’ on repeat. Now he wants to lead Miami back to glory
Antwon Fegans’ sons really never had any choice but to play football. Fegans likes to joke it’s the reason he even had sons.
“Oh, I had them to play football,” he said and then stopped to laugh for a good for or five seconds. “I definitely had them to play football.”
His four youngest were signed up to play by the time they were 4, and Fegans has been coaching them since Antwon Fegans Jr., who’s now a second-year safety for the Arkansas State Red Wolves, first started. He did the same with Delvon Fegans a year later, Tre’Quon Fegans a year after that and finally Anquon Fegans after a few more years passed.
Football, Tre’Quon said, is his first real memory and the four brothers’ childhoods were consumed by it. They would play in the park and play in their yard. They would watch games on TV and scour the internet for old highlight videos. When Tre’Quon was about 5 or 6, they came across another revelation: “The U,” the “30 for 30” documentary from 2009 about the Miami Hurricanes of 1980s. The four brothers devoured it, and watched it over and over.
It helped fuel Tre’Quon Fegans’ love of Miami. Now he’s headed to the Hurricanes to try to bring them back to those glory days.
“The culture,” the 6-foot-2, 181-pound cornerback said. “Miami has a lot of Hall of Famers, a lot of good defensive talent in the Hall of Fame, so that was one of my reasons.”
Said his father: “It was like all the way live. It was like years before its time, so it gave you a 2021, 2025 vibe and the way they played, it was ruthless and we liked that.”
The Fegans football family
Antwon Fegans Sr. was never the player any of his sons have became, he admits. He was a decent enough wide receiver growing up in Alabama, but he never got a chance to play in college. He wanted to raise them to get to the heights he never quite reached.
With each one, it was evident early they had a chance to be great, Fegans said. Each was typically the best on his team from the early days he started playing and Tre’Quon was only 6 when his father started to think he had a chance to be really special.
“The way he played the game and his heart — he played the game at a high level,” he said. “He was advanced. He was more physical.”
His early hunches have largely borne out. Antwon Jr. is getting ready for a redshirt freshman season at Arkansas State. Delvon is about to start his junior college career at Northeast Mississippi Community College in Booneville. Tre’Quon orally committed to the Hurricanes last Friday and is the No. 81 overall prospect in the Class of 2022, according to the 247Sports.com composite rankings. Anquon already has five scholarship offers, including one from Miami, and hasn’t even started his freshman year.
When the three oldest were still in elementary school, Antwon Sr. had them start working with Trae Elston, who was playing for the Ole Miss Rebels at the time and is now a safety for the Calgary Stampeders in the Canadian Football League. Elston and Fegans knew each other from being in the football community in Oxford, Alabama, and Fegans figured Elston, who would play parts of three seasons in the NFL, would be a good tutor for his boys.
In one of those first sessions, Elston told them, “Y’all boys better learn how to run backward,” Antwon Sr. recalled.
Fegans saw they had the knack.
“I said, ‘You want to make a lot of money? Go play defense,’” he said. “They asked me what I mean by that and I told them, ‘On defense, the only thing you’ve got to do is do what you’re supposed to do. On offense, you’ve got to depend on other people to do,’ and they switched over to defense, every single one of them.”
Why Tre’Quon Fegans picked Miami
Tre’Quon made his move to the secondary when he got to Oxford for his freshman year. He was promising as a freshman and then a star as a sophomore, grabbing five interceptions and returning all five for touchdowns to lead the Yellow Jackets to a state championship. As a junior, Fegans was a first-team all-state selection by MaxPreps.com, then he transferred, alongside his younger brother, to Thompson in Alabaster, Alabama, for his senior season in June.
Around the same time as the transfer, Fegans also took his official visit to Miami and the family has been high on the Hurricanes ever since, with just about every member of the family occasionally tweeting out pictures from their trip to Coral Gables. Fegans even made his commitment announcement at Black Market Miami, a sports bar in the city.
Tre’Quon uses only one word when he’s asked to describe himself: “Playmaker.”
When he rattles off the list of his favorite Miami players ever, he runs through the usual suspects on defense: Ray Lewis, Ed Reed and, of course, Sean Taylor. All four brothers loved the legendary safety.
“They fell in love with him,” Antwon Sr. said. “They used to always watch him play and then when they saw him in that Miami jersey, they always kept rewinding and they always said, I wouldn’t mind playing there one day.”
The big hits and game-changing interceptions stood out to Tre’Quon, but he learned to appreciate the workmanlike parts of his game.
“I like how he played,” Fegans said, “how he’d come prepared for every game.”
This story was originally published August 6, 2021 at 4:01 PM.
