There’s been plenty of change around defensive tackle Montrell Henderson since he came to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in the summer of 2022.
Once a young player whose value was in his potential, Henderson is now one of the most experienced players in the program — and just one of three scholarship athletes on the current roster who started their collegiate career at UTC and now are preparing for their fourth season with the Mocs (quarterback Luke Schomburg and edge rusher Jestin Gilmore are the others).
At the same time, Henderson has undergone his own transformation, and instead of being that young player who weighed as much as 340 pounds as a freshman, the 6-foot-2 redshirt junior is now listed by the Mocs at a comparatively svelte 292 pounds.
“I told him when he got here, ‘You’ve got to lose a pound a day, boss,'” UTC head coach Rusty Wright said during spring practices earlier this year. “I was really more concerned about his overall health than I was with him playing football at that time more than anything.
“To that man’s credit, he has worked really, really hard to change his body and change his lifestyle, and I think that’s going to pay off for him. There’s something to people that do things like that, and you want to be around people like that.”