WHEN MATT MARRUJO watches Tetairoa McMillan play football, he can still see traces.

Marrujo, the boys’ volleyball coach and athletic director at Servite High School in Anaheim, California, recognizes the superb hand-eye coordination in his former star athlete’s prolific performances at Arizona. When the 6-foot-4, 219-pound wide receiver elevates for a catch, Marrujo notices how McMillan starts with a “step close,” the powerful last two steps a volleyball player takes while attacking a ball.

McMillan chuckled upon hearing that scouting observation.

“No doubt, I can definitely co-sign that one,” he told ESPN last year. “I think it’s a big reason why I’m efficient at what I do as far as jump balls, 50/50 balls, going up to get it. Volleyball plays a huge role in that, for sure.

“I tell everybody — and I probably shouldn’t say it — that volleyball is my favorite sport. I probably had the most fun playing it.”

Before he became Arizona’s all-time leader in receiving yards, an All-America playmaker and a projected first-round pick in the 2025 NFL draft, McMillan was a kid who said yes to any game he could play. He’d compete for fun, not for dominance, but was an exceptional athlete in every sport he attempted.

By eighth grade, it was obvious football would provide the golden ticket for McMillan’s future. But the three-sport athlete — he also played basketball — always jumped from season to season, earning nine varsity letters at Servite. Those who coached and played with him in high school still say he had the potential to become a rare talent in another sport.

“If he’d taken the time and said volleyball is his main passion,” Marrujo said, “he for sure would’ve been one of the top players in Southern California and the country. He’s just different.”

MIGUEL MONTEROLA WAS looking to buy a go-kart.

It was summer 2018. A cousin from Spain was staying with him in Southern California and needed something to drive. He’d found a nearby listing online and arranged a meetup to check it out. The seller? Shawny McMillan. Monterola, the owner and founder of Orange Coast Volleyball Club, introduced himself, and they quickly hit it off. Shawny told him about her 6-foot-3 son, a football and basketball player, and pulled up a video of him dunking at 12 years old.

“She’s like, ‘You want to meet him? I’ll go get him,'” Monterola recalled. “So he comes down, and this guy is huge, he’s ripped. I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? This is your kid?'”

Monterola went right to work convincing Tetairoa to check out an OCVC practice. Shawny had played volleyball in college at Hawai’i Pacific. Her brother, Paka Dutro, played at Santa Monica College and has been coaching volleyball in Southern California for more than 25 years. Monterola knew him well and gave him a call.

“He’s like, ‘Yeah, man, this kid is very athletic, but nobody has convinced him to play volleyball,'” Monterola said. “‘If you can, good for you.'”

Tetairoa had played some in middle school. He never felt pressured by his family to embrace volleyball, but the opportunity was intriguing.

“The next thing you know, probably a week later, I was practicing with the team,” McMillan said. “I was like, man, whatever, let’s play.”

Growing up, he initially believed his future was in Major League Baseball. He started playing shortstop and third base at 5 while growing up in Hawai’i and always played up for his age. “If you ask my family, they’d say baseball is my best sport,” McMillan said. But he gave that up around 12 and started getting more serious about football at 14.

That’s when he teamed up with the Orange County Buckeyes, an eighth-grade football team led by Noah Fifita, now Arizona’s starting quarterback, and featuring 19 future Division I players. The Buckeyes won a 14U national title in 2017 with McMillan playing wide receiver and safety. He found his crew there, with 10 of the teammates moving on to play together at Servite High School.

After football, McMillan would move right on to basketball, where he was a stretch guard and pass-first facilitator who’d fill up the stat sheet with rebounds, blocks and steals. He thrived in anything he tried. One of his former coaches swore he has even witnessed McMillan bowl a 240 game. “Everything is easy for him,” OC Buckeyes coach Les Fifita said. “Everything.”

OCVC already had the top 14U team in Southern California before McMillan showed up for a tryout. They still talk about how hard he hit the ball on his first try. Monterola turned to Shawny and chuckled as he told her, “I’ve seen enough.” Their starting middle blocker was 5-foot-4. McMillan had a ton to learn, but he could clearly help.

When he joined the team for its next tournament in Anaheim, the buzz in the building was palpable: Who is No. 83? As Monterola put it, McMillan had muscles that most of these kids had never seen before.

“Every club owner was like, ‘Are you kidding me? Where do you get this kid from?'” Monterola said. “He was so intimidating, so physical and athletic, and he would trash talk across the net. He had no idea what he was doing, but nobody wanted to go through this guy.”

Within a month of joining, McMillan helped OCVC win a 14U USA Volleyball boys’ junior national championship in July 2018. The team went on a dominant run, winning nine matches over four days in Phoenix. McMillan picked up the nickname “Flyin’ Hawai’ian” from coaches for his rare leaping ability.

“He’s one of the most likable guys I’ve ever met,” said UCLA setter Andrew Rowan, a former OCVC captain. “He was just there to ball, have a good time and try something new. We were stoked to have him. His attitude was, ‘Help me as much as you can.’ He was open to everything and super coachable. He just wanted to get better.”

McMILLAN WAS HOOKED from there, and he went on to play with OCVC for two years. He couldn’t practice with the team frequently due to his football obligations, but he didn’t miss matches. When he enrolled at Servite, he had no trouble earning a spot on the varsity boys’ volleyball team and starting right away as a freshman.

The game gets faster and blocking becomes more challenging at the high school level, but Marrujo, the Servite head coach and AD, watched McMillan get better. He transitioned to opposite hitter as a sophomore, playing six rotations instead of three, and learned to embrace his strengths. Marrujo insists he didn’t teach the kid much other than tweaks here and there.

“He was such a natural,” Marrujo said. “You just let him do his thing.” His footwork wasn’t always perfect, Dutro said, but he could always overcome it with athleticism and power.

“He just had a heavy, natural arm swing,” said Dutro, who joined Servite’s coaching staff in 2019. “It’s a heavy, heavy, heavy natural arm. You could hear a thump rather than a hit.”

And if you were in the wrong spot at the wrong time, you could feel it. His uncle remembers a moment in a match when McMillan hit a ball so hard that it bent an opposing blocker’s finger back. “I just saw this kid go, ‘F—!'” Dutro said. “You could tell he was not blocking him again.”

“You’d go back and watch film,” Marrujo said, “and see the opposing team and coaches kind of wide-eyed like, ‘What just happened?'”

🚨 School Record 🚨

Tetairoa McMillan ’22 ties Servite’s record for most kills in a match with 36. He now shares the record with Madison Hayden ’12 (Stanford). @ocvarsity @SteveFryer @latsondheimer @ocboysvball @OCSportsZone @C_Morrissette pic.twitter.com/nYq0Ftv4XU

— Servite Volleyball (@ServiteVB) May 30, 2021

Matt Martinez played with McMillan at Servite for two seasons before moving on to play at Stanford. He appreciated the freshman’s humble approach and deference to team leaders. Even while his reputation was rising as a football phenom, he brought zero ego to their team. He’d bum rides from older teammates and join them for trips to In-N-Out after matches.

“It was pretty comical to be on his side of the net,” Martinez said, “because sometimes it seemed like he was toying with the other team a little bit. It came so easy to him, and he was scoring at will at times. We’d play all the top teams within Orange County, and occasionally T-Mac would get this matchup where it’s clearly very unfair, and it’s just hilarious to watch.”

Ask McMillan how unfair he was on the volleyball court back then, though, and he’ll cut you off. He has too much respect for the guys he played with to go that far.

“No, no, no. You may think that, but I played at a pretty high level in volleyball in high school,” McMillan said. “It wasn’t no scrubs. A lot of the people I played with or played against are all playing Division I right now. I would definitely not say it was unfair. They can jump, they can play, and they can play volleyball probably way better than me. I was just on a team that allowed me to succeed.”

At Servite, he was allowed to juggle as many sports as he wanted. He’d go right from football to basketball in the winter and then immediately into volleyball season in the spring. He’d alternate between 7-on-7 football and club volleyball tournaments in the summer. And by the end of his freshman year, he already had nine scholarship offers.

When he had to drop one sport during the COVID 2020-21 school year, McMillan kept playing volleyball over basketball. He had always planned to graduate early as a senior, so he knew that junior volleyball season would be his final one at Servite. He helped lead the Friars on a postseason run to the California Interscholastic Federation-Southern Section semifinals against Huntington Beach. In the final match of his high school career, McMillan tied a Servite school record with 36 kills.

“That’s probably one reason why I was OK with hanging up my volleyball career — because I went out like that,” he said.

BUT WHAT IF McMillan had kept playing volleyball in college? Years later, his former coaches and teammates still have no doubt he could’ve competed at the highest level.

McMillan ultimately followed Fifita and two more Servite teammates to Arizona after his plans to attend his dream school fell apart. He committed to Oregon before his senior season and was mere weeks away from officially signing. Oregon football coach Mario Cristobal flew down to Anaheim for an in-home visit with the McMillans amid rumors Cristobal was weighing an offer from Miami. The next day, McMillan found out on TV that Cristobal was gone. Coaches weren’t returning his calls.

“I had asked Cristobal himself and asked the receivers coach what was going on,” McMillan said. “They said nothing’s happening. So I was like, man, I’m gonna take y’all word for it. But … it happened.”

He chose to stick with his brothers and join the Wildcats, and he never regretted it. Arizona does have two men’s volleyball club teams but does not compete at the Division I level. In fact, only six schools in the Power 4 — BYU, Ohio State, Penn State, Stanford, UCLA and USC — currently have Division I men’s volleyball programs.

For that reason, there’s very little history of dual-sport athletes playing football and volleyball in college. Former Arizona basketball player Chase Budinger famously made the transition from playing in the NBA to competing in Olympic beach volleyball. Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava, another top recruit from Southern California, also played volleyball in high school, but the football-basketball combo is far more common. According to Tracking Football, about 55% of wide receivers drafted into the NFL also played high school basketball.

Marrujo said McMillan did a joint football-volleyball visit to USC, including photo shoots in both uniforms, and remembers volleyball coaches at Ohio State and Stanford expressed similar interest in bringing him in as a two-way recruit. Rowan discussed the possibility with his future UCLA coaches during his recruitment.

“I remember I brought it up to T-Mac like, ‘Yo, if you wanted to make this happen, you can make it happen,'” he said.

Dutro thinks attempting the rare feat of a two-sport college career would’ve ultimately taken a physical and mental toll. Eventually, even the greats have to pick one.

“It would’ve been unheard of and absolutely insane,” Martinez said. “He was just that good at both sports. His athleticism was pretty astonishing.”

Had McMillan decided he wanted to focus on playing outside hitter and put in the practice time, Monterola believes he would be one of the best in the country. Martinez suspects he’d be in the U.S. Men’s National Team development program and someday vying for a spot on the team.

Rowan is chasing greatness at UCLA, earning first-team All-America honors and winning national championships in each of his first two college seasons. The 6-foot-6 setter has already won multiple gold medals with USA Volleyball. He would’ve loved to see McMillan keep going.

“T-Mac could come right now into Division I college volleyball, train for a month and I bet you he could start on a top 10-15 team,” Rowan said. “I’m not even joking.”

McMillan can’t risk injury during the NFL draft process and hasn’t picked up a volleyball in a while, but Dutro says his nephew still played coed games during his Arizona career.

“If he continued to play volleyball, he probably could’ve gone all the way,” Dutro said.

Almost seven years later, Tetairoa’s old go-kart is still sitting in Monterola’s garage. The club coach hopes his former star pupil will come pick it up someday, a souvenir from a chance encounter that turned into so much more.

“If T-Mac asks if he can have his go-kart back, I’ll say yes,” Monterola said. “Take your go-kart and raise your children and tell them that story.”