The past 18 months of Keegan Jones' life have been filled with adversity.
So as the former Cleveland High School standout prepares for his second football season at UCLA, it seems fair to ask: What difference could a little more of it really make?
During his time with the Blue Raiders, the top tier of major college football programs did not give anything more than a passing glance to Jones. With his 2017 senior season behind him, he planned to attend the U.S. Naval Academy and play for the Midshipmen, but not long after arriving on campus in Annapolis, Maryland, he realized the combination of Division I football and a military lifestyle wasn't for him.
So he asked for and was granted a release from the service academy, even receiving help from one of the Navy assistant coaches who sent video of Jones to a number of colleges.
What other coaches finally saw was an elusive running back who rushed for 1,000 yards and scored a total of 23 touchdowns as a senior. What they saw was one of the best athletes in the state of Tennessee, with Jones capping his high school sports career at the 2018 Spring Fling by winning the Division I Large Class 200-meter dash title with a time of 21.1 seconds - the fastest in the state that year - and placing third in the 100 (10.57 seconds) and the long jump (23 feet, 1/4 inches) to help the Blue Raiders to a runner-up team finish.
As he exited at Navy, offers came in from Baylor, Georgia Southern, Michigan and UCLA, with Jones ultimately choosing the Bruins due to coach Chip Kelly's success with track athletes who were also talented football players.
Scott Cummings, Cleveland's football coach at the time, told the Times Free Press when Jones signed in December 2018 that Tennessee coach Jeremy Pruitt was "livid" he hadn't heard about the 5-foot-9, 182-pounder sooner.
"He said they needed a guy with top-end speed to get vertical, and after watching him, he knew that's what Keegan brings. By then it was too late because Keegan had pretty much made up his mind that he was going to UCLA," Cummings said. "I've had fast guys in my career, but what Keegan has is something special. He has an athleticism, great vision and the ability to make a cut and get back to top speed that you just don't see."
His arrival on campus in Los Angeles was just the beginning, though. Jones didn't have a summer to get acclimated to campus or work on his craft with teammates, so in January 2019 he was thrown into the fire. It may have been more difficult from an athletic standpoint than from an academic one for Jones, who scored a 28 on the ACT.
"First it was a little stressful because I was used to my high school ways, just going with the flow and all that, but college is a whole lot different. It's fast-paced," Jones told the Times Free Press recently. "It's a bunch of responsibilities you've got to take care of with academics and sports."
Jones played only on the kickoff return team last season, and his only recorded stats came in the Bruins' crazy, 67-63 comeback victory over 19th-ranked Washington State on Sept. 21, a Pac-12 matchup in which UCLA trailed 49-17 midway through the third quarter. His personal highlight that game was a block of 6-foot-1, 258-pound Tristan Brock on Demetric Fields' 100-yard kickoff return that cut the Bruins' deficit to 21-17.
"I was excited because that was an overall team effort," Jones said. "We go into the locker room way down, and all Coach Kelly told us was to keep chopping, keep going, and we started clicking and it was on from there. The defense started stepping up, and the offense started matching their intensity.
"It was just crazy."
The Bruins finished 4-8, which meant no bonus practices for a bowl game and led Jones straight into offseason work as he listened to his UCLA coaches who implored him to continue to learn the system, the terminology and the signals that could help him get on the field with the offense as a sophomore.
The Bruins were getting ready for their fifth spring practice when the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States and led to a wide-ranging shutdown of sports.
UCLA students were just finishing their winter quarter, and they were sent home on March 19 after Los Angeles County issued a stay-at-home order. Jones figured they would be allowed to return, but that still hasn't happened. He's been at home in Cleveland, doing workouts sent by running backs coach DeShaun Foster to stay ready.
The NCAA announced last week that football and basketball players could resume voluntary on-campus workouts June 1, though, which mean Jones will resume the pursuit of his main personal goal for this season: proving he belongs.
"I just want to make it known that I can play at this level," he said. "I just want to make a statement that I can do this because I feel like last year was a season where there was a bunch of learning.
"I feel like it's my time. It's time to show them what I can do."
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenley3.