Want to face Gerrit Cole — between innings? Inside the controversial new tech that could change at-bats forever
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Alden Gonzalez, ESPN Staff Writer
The Los Angeles Angels trailed by a run halfway through their May 28 game against the New York Yankees, and Willie Calhoun figured he’d plan ahead. Calhoun, a journeyman outfielder, thought he might be used as a late-game pinch hitter. So he made his way to Angel Stadium’s indoor batting cage and turned on Trajekt Arc, the cutting-edge machine that has quickly become a go-to throughout the industry for its ability to replicate major league pitchers.
Calhoun cued up all of the Yankees’ high-leverage relievers, most of whom he’d never faced, tracking as many pitches as he could over the course of a couple of innings. When he was summoned to face Luke Weaver in the bottom of the eighth, he felt ready. Calhoun took back-to-back changeups for balls, then saw a 91-mph cutter on the inner half and lofted a base hit to right field, a leadoff single that ignited a two-run inning and ultimately gave the Angels a come-from-behind victory.
“I was able to see how it was looking before I got into the box,” Calhoun said. “That machine is nice.”
Trajekt — essentially a pitching robot that can play the video of any pitcher’s windup, then spit out all of his pitches from the appropriate arm angle based on the reams of data available — is now used by 19 major league teams, plus three others in Japan, despite not existing in any form until 2021. This year, the league office has allowed Trajekt to be used in-game, a polarizing decision that has in some ways splintered the industry based on personal interest.
Some hitters, frustrated by an era in which pitchers throw harder and nastier than ever, have celebrated what they consider a rare advancement.
“This is the first piece of technology we’ve had that truly benefits us,” one position player said. “Before this we had nothing.”
Plenty of pitchers disagree, pointing to recent rule changes implemented to create a more hitter-friendly environment, and consider Trajekt an unfair advantage — particularly in-game.
“You wanna have it, fine,” a veteran pitcher said. “But three hours before game time, those machines need to be shut off.”
Trajekt previously required an Internet connection to operate, a violation of Major League Baseball’s sign-stealing policy. Modifying the device so that it could operate offline prompted the league to allow it for in-game use, according to an MLB official. Team executives were notified this past offseason.
“We already allow other pitching machines that replicate pitch characteristics,” Morgan Sword, MLB’s executive vice president of baseball operations, wrote in a statement to ESPN, alluding to another, less-involved pitch-replication device called iPitch.
“Once [Trajekt] moved the system offline during games, there was no longer a reason to stand in the way.”
The effects appear to be minimal thus far. Leaguewide batting average sits at .242, the third-lowest mark since 1900, behind only 1968 (the year before the mound was lowered) and 1908 (at the heart of the dead-ball era). But the strikeout rate against relievers is below 23% — 22.9%, to be exact — for the first time in eight years, a subtle decline some have at least partly attributed to the in-game use of Trajekt.
It’s why one of those relievers, Yankees lefty Caleb Ferguson, is adamantly against it.
“It’s impossible for a pitcher to mimic the at-bat,” he said. “We don’t even really get the chance at all to try to have that upper hand where you can come in and face a guy and read the result, see what’s gonna happen if I face whoever. But they could be hitting my fastball for the next three hours? That’s not fair.”
Hitters say they find it helpful, but they’ll also argue it’s not that simple. The machine — four feet deep, six feet wide and, all told, roughly 1,500 pounds — is too bulky to travel with, making it only an option for teams when they’re at home. Hitters largely don’t swing off it in-game, worried that it might make their hands sore by frequently getting jammed against high velocities. Some have said it’s also hard to pick up the baseball’s spin. And because the image it projects is basically a hologram, it’s much more difficult for hitters to time themselves off a pitcher’s arm slot than it would be in real life.
The Trajekt Arc sits on a track, allowing it to move left to right to spit out pitches.
Then there’s the situation at Arizona’s Chase Field, where the indoor batting cage is not big enough for the Trajekts to be stationed any more than 54 feet away from home plate, rendering the machine useless as a timing mechanism and leaving the Arizona Diamondbacks‘ Trajekt Arc to mostly collect dust.
“Ninety-nine [mph] feels like 120 for us,” D-backs outfielder Pavin Smith said near the end of May. “I don’t love it, to be honest. I liked it more in spring training. It was further back, so it felt more realistic. Now every guy looks like he’s twice as good.”
Trajekt, costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000 a month and requiring a three-year commitment, is typically set up 56 to 57 feet away to account for pitchers’ average extension. Standard game balls can be used, but players have taken to a softer version of Rawlings’ baseball, the L10 Pro. Unlike iPitch, a stationary two- to three-wheel machine, Trajekt sits on a gantry, allowing it to spit baseballs anywhere from four to seven feet off the ground, and can move left to right along a track.
Teams can input Hawkeye data, which MLB uses to collect in-game metrics, and they can implement information from Rapsodo and Trackman devices, which also catalog metrics, from players’ training sessions. Videos of pitchers’ windups come from the cameras that are stationed behind home plate at every major league ballpark, with teams capable of uploading the videos that correspond to each pitch to project the precise arm slot. Teams only have access to their own data. The more the machine is used, the more accurate it becomes at replicating pitches.
What it’s like to face New York Yankees ace Gerrit Cole (well, at least a holographic version of him).
Often, though, hitters are seeing what they believe is the best version of each pitch.
“It really varies,” Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Jason Heyward said. “Some look similar, some don’t. You’re seeing them throw the ball, but I still think it’s completely different in the game because there’s room for error. Pitchers mean to throw a ball here, and they throw it here. They mean to throw it here, and they throw it here, all that kind of stuff. So I think that’s where it’s not very realistic. It’s like video game pinpoint every time. But still — just getting a visual, an idea, of what someone has and how that may come out is cool. It’s helpful, for sure.”
Ten years ago, a teenager named Joshua Pope came up with the concept behind Trajekt while debating his high school friends about how many pitches it would take to get a hit off Marcus Stroman, then the ace of his hometown Toronto Blue Jays. Pope, now 28, wondered why there wasn’t a physical manifestation of all the publicly available pitching data. He attended the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, in part to learn from the mechanical engineering professor, Dr. John McPhee, who developed a hockey slapshot robot. Pope then received a grant of $60,000 Canadian dollars, raised additional financing, built a mock-up and launched the company Trajekt Sports in 2019, becoming its CEO.
During a tutorial at the 2019 winter meetings, Chicago Cubs director of innovation Bobby Basham became intrigued by the ball-inserter technology that allows for gyro spin, a revolutionary advancement that separated Trajekt from any pitching machine that came before it. Basham ultimately became Pope’s first customer, bringing it to the Cubs in the spring of 2021. By 2022, seven teams had it. A year later, it had grown to 12. Now it has spread to nearly two-thirds of the industry.
Pope’s company — co-founded by one-time classmate and current chief technology officer Rowan Ferrabee — now has 15 full-time employees and produces 20 machines a year. Forty of them are in use within MLB, with some teams having as many as six — one on the major league side and one at every minor league affiliate. Some are considering renting additional ones to use out of their academies in the Dominican Republic.
Pope said approximately half the machines are used at regular-season ballparks and the other half are used in the minors. He has heard of Triple-A catchers who use it to get a feel for the stuff thrown by the major league pitchers they’ll catch after getting promoted; pitchers who look at the shape of their own pitches to get a better feel for how they’re seen from the batter’s box; and, notably, teams shuttling prospects through reps against major league pitchers at their spring training complexes to get a baseline for performance.
“Obviously the most exciting ones are when a big-name player is facing a starting pitcher that day and in the first inning they hit a home run because they predicted a slider coming and they leveraged that off Trajekt and got a result,” Pope said. “We have countless anecdotes like that. But I think the more nuanced one, of evaluation and preparing for the game even prior to making it to the big leagues, is also something that we find really exciting, because it gives more opportunity to more people to have a chance at extreme, high-level practice, which is hard to get.
“Players can only throw full speed so often, and their reps are limited in training. And therefore it’s very tough to develop to that next level.”
A spring training ACL tear prevented Rhys Hoskins from playing for the Philadelphia Phillies in 2023. But when the Phillies made a playoff run late into that season, Hoskins held on to faint hopes that he might contribute. His month of October was spent at the team’s spring training facility in Clearwater, Florida, hitting off the Trajekt machine in hopes of getting as acclimated to major league pitching as possible if summoned at a moment’s notice. He began by holding a clicker instead of a bat, pressing a button to indicate swing decisions to help him distinguish balls from strikes, then progressed to full-on hitting, seeing up to 200 pitches a day.
“I felt pretty ready in terms of being in the box from a hitting standpoint in order to join those guys if that’s what the organization decided, mostly because you’re just able to replicate some of the speed of the game,” said Hoskins, now a member of the Milwaukee Brewers. “It’s hard to do that with a BP arm or even a normal machine.”
Hoskins, who ultimately wasn’t activated for last year’s World Series run, now regularly uses Trajekt to track pitches between at-bats when he serves as the designated hitter for home games. He has implored the Brewers’ pitchers to use it themselves to “remind them how nasty they are.” Angels pitching coach Barry Enright recently did that with his starters, bringing them all in to watch their pitches from behind home plate as something of a confidence boost to encourage strike-throwing.
Within the next two years, Pope’s goal is for every major league team to deploy at least one Trajekt Arc. He thinks more pitchers will realize its benefits, but it’s still very much a hitters’ tool. High-speed cameras are used to dissect their mechanics, weighted bats have helped to increase their bat speed, Blast Motion (a sensor placed on the knob of bats) became popular for its instant swing metrics. But a hitter’s best chance of keeping up with contemporary velocity and break, coaches say, is training the eyes by seeing those pitches as often as possible.
Virtual-reality hitting machines developed out of that concept, helping to spawn physical pitch-replicators like iPitch. Trajekt has taken it to another level — adding the visual of an opposing pitcher and the freedom of movement that has made it feel more lifelike.
“Some really high-tech machines, tools, toys, don’t really exist on the hitting side,” Hoskins said. “For this to kind of be the first big thing obviously means there’s more coming. There’s always ideas coming; it’s just, ‘How do you execute them?’ But this is a great start.”
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Pete Thamel, Senior College Sports Insider
UConn football coach Jim Mora has agreed to a new contract that includes two additional years that will take him through the 2028 season, the school announced Saturday.
The deal includes a raise to an average of $2.5 million annually over the course of the deal. He made $1.81 million in base salary in 2024, and the new deal will increase that base to $2.1 million in 2025.
Mora’s deal comes after he revived UConn football in his first three years at the school. He took over a program that went 1-11 in the year before his arrival and has led it to two bowl games in three years.
That includes an 8-4 regular season in 2024, which earned UConn a spot in the Wasabi Fenway Bowl against North Carolina on Saturday.
“Three years ago, I tasked Jim Mora with the challenge of leading our football team back to success and through his experience, energy and leadership he has done just that,” UConn athletic director David Benedict said in a statement. “He has taken our program to post season bowl games twice and just guided our team to one of the best seasons in UConn football history, building a momentum to keep this program moving forward. I look forward to his leadership of our football team in the years ahead.”
If Mora leads UConn to a win over North Carolina, it will mark the Huskies’ first nine-win season since 2007 and just the third nine-win season in school history. UConn went to the Myrtle Beach Bowl in Mora’s first year in 2022, the school’s first bowl game since Bob Diaco led the Huskies to the St. Petersburg Bowl in 2015.
Mora is a veteran coach who had two stints in the NFL with the Atlanta Falcons and Seattle Seahawks. He is in his ninth season as a college head coach, as he took the UCLA job in 2012 and had a successful stint there that included a pair of 10-win seasons. UCLA hasn’t won 10 games in a season since Mora left.
He mentioned at the Fenway Bowl news conference Friday that UConn went undefeated against Group of 5 teams this season, with its losses against Maryland, Duke, Wake Forest and Syracuse.
The 8-0 record against teams outside the power leagues, Mora noted, made UConn one of three Group of 5 teams to go undefeated against Group of 5 competition. He said that was a sign of UConn’s growth as a program.
“For this program, we want to start not just competing with but beating Power 4 teams,” Mora said, “and making the statement that we are becoming very relevant again on the football field.”
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Adam Rittenberg, ESPN Senior Writer
Georgia quarterback Carson Beck, who underwent surgery earlier this week to repair the ulnar collateral ligament in his right, throwing elbow, declared for the 2025 NFL draft Saturday.
In a social media post, Beck thanked his Georgia teammates and coaches, calling his time with the program “an incredible journey” and writing that he will be around to support the Bulldogs during their College Football Playoff run, which begins Wednesday against No. 7 seed Notre Dame in a quarterfinal matchup at the Allstate Sugar Bowl in New Orleans.
Beck injured his elbow on the final play of the first half against Texas in the SEC championship game Dec. 7. Renowned orthopedic surgeon Dr. Neal ElAttrache performed Beck’s surgery Monday in Los Angeles. Beck is expected to make a full recovery, according to the school, and he will resume throwing in the spring.
The 6-foot-4, 220-pound quarterback is in his fifth year at Georgia, but he had another year of eligibility because of the COVID year in 2020 and appeared in only three games in 2021.
Beck, a native of Jacksonville, Florida, went 24-3 as Georgia’s starter the past two seasons. He entered the fall as one of the top NFL prospects at quarterback. ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. listed Beck and Colorado‘s Shedeur Sanders as the top quarterbacks for the 2025 draft entering the season. Kiper’s latest Big Board lists Beck as the No. 4 draft-eligible quarterback prospect, behind Sanders, Miami‘s Cam Ward and Alabama‘s Jalen Milroe.
Beck did not match his 2023 numbers this fall but still finished with 3,485 passing yards, 28 touchdowns and 12 interceptions, 11 of which he threw during a five-game midseason stretch. He had 7,426 passing yards and 52 touchdowns over the past two seasons for Georgia, and he was a two-time finalist for the Manning Award and was a second-team All-SEC selection in 2023.
Redshirt sophomore Gunner Stockton replaced Beck in the SEC title game, which Georgia won 22-19 in overtime, and will start against Notre Dame.
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Kyle Bonagura, ESPN Staff Writer
PROVO, Utah — For BYU defensive coordinator Jay Hill, the offseason carried a lingering sense of frustration.
After nine years as the head coach at FCS Weber State, Hill joined longtime friend Kalani Sitake’s staff at BYU ahead of the Cougars’ much-anticipated move to the Big 12. The season started promisingly, but after a 5-2 start, the Cougars lost their last five games to miss a bowl game and finished one game out of last place in the conference.
“We all felt like we were a better team last year than maybe the record showed,” Hill said.
With nine months between games, it can feel like there is too much time to stew over what went wrong, but as the offseason progressed Hill was encouraged. He saw players who were a little more disciplined, a little tougher, a little better with responsibilities.
Hill was working as many as 90 hours a week, and as training camp came to a close at the end of August, he believed the Cougars were prepared to take a significant step forward. And if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be for lack of effort on his part.
At 49 years old, Hill doesn’t lack energy. A former cornerback at Utah, he runs regularly, lifts weights with players, plays pickup basketball and — outside of a Mountain Dew habit — has kept a generally healthy diet. Last season, he experienced some unusual lightheadedness while running, but after getting checked in the spring, he was told there was nothing to worry about.
“They were doing a bunch of heart tests just to make sure that the blood was pumping and everything was going well,” Hill said. “And I did all those tests, and everything came back better than normal. I felt like I was in great shape for someone my age.”
All of that is a backdrop for what made Thursday, Aug. 29, so shocking.
The night before, he complained to his wife, Sarah, that he was experiencing heartburn. When he described a localized pain in his chest, she was skeptical, but he figured it was something that would subside with a night’s sleep.
It did not. After practice, he lifted weights with players. That didn’t help. Then he sat in a sauna. That made it worse. He went through with plans to get a haircut on his way home, and that’s when he finally let himself believe something might be seriously wrong.
“I just started sweating so bad that the poor girl that was cutting my hair grabbed a towel, and she was wiping me off,” Hill said. “I felt so embarrassed. And then she took the cape off me and my pants were just drenched.
“I was having a heart attack, and I didn’t know it. Right in the barber chair, I’m having a heart attack.”
BYU did turn things around this season, winning its first nine games and earning a spot in the Valero Alamo Bowl against Colorado (7:30 p.m. ET Saturday, ABC). And it did so with one of its most important assistants in the coaches’ box, monitored by his wife.
SARAH HILL WAS home when her husband called to tell her he was in bad shape and on his way from the barbershop. She told him to stay put, and she would come get him, but he insisted he could make the short drive.
They stayed on the line as Sarah tracked his progress with the Find My app.
“I kept trying to convince him to just pull over and I would come get him — and then he wasn’t able to talk,” Sarah said. “I said, ‘OK, if you can’t talk then I’m getting in the car and I’ll find you right now. I can see where you’re at. I’ll come to you.'”
At about this point, Jay turned into their neighborhood and made it safely to their house. He got out of his truck, made his way to their back porch and lay down.
“I knew at that point it was a heart attack,” Sarah said. “I knew that I had a short amount of time, but I also was very calm and very at peace that it wasn’t going to be what takes his life.”
Sarah acted swiftly and firmly, telling him he needed to get back in the truck and she was taking him to the hospital, about a 7-minute drive. At first, Jay insisted he just needed to catch his breath, to which Sarah responded, “Get in the truck or I’m calling 911.”
At the hospital, things were a blur. With Sarah by his side, he was immediately whisked to a room for testing.
“[The physician’s assistant] pulled the paper out of the computer, and she just turned around and it wasn’t 10 seconds, 15 seconds before the doctor was in there saying, ‘You’re having a heart attack, we got to go [to surgery],'” Jay said.
Jay felt helplessness.
“I think I was still pretty calm. And in that moment, what do you do?” Jay said. “You just kind of go along with what they’re telling you. I remember something vividly going through my head, ‘No way. Not me. You’re too young. I thought I was in shape. This can’t be happening to me.'”
During the successful surgery, which Sarah estimates took about an hour, the doctors found that his right coronary artery was 100% blocked. They inserted a stent to open the artery and scheduled another procedure for two days later — the morning of BYU’s season opener against FCS Southern Illinois — to insert another stent into a different, partially blocked artery.
When Jay woke up, he felt much better, and the idea of sticking around until Saturday’s procedure was not appealing.
“They wanted to watch him the whole time,” Sarah said. “He’s like, ‘Nope, I got to get practice tomorrow. My son has a cross country meet. Can you release me to do this stuff and then I can come back and I’ll do the surgery next week?’ In his mind, he’s just like, ‘It’s the first week of the season, I need to get going.'”
SITAKE AND HILL have known each other since the late 1990s. They played against each other — Hill for Utah; Sitake for BYU — but a friendship was born when Kyle Whittingham made Hill and Sitake two of his first hires when he took over for Urban Meyer at Utah at the end of the 2004 season.
Their paths diverged after Hill took the job at Weber State following the 2013 season, but while he turned the Wildcats into a Big Sky and FCS power — winning four conference titles and reaching the playoffs six times — their relationship stayed intact.
“It wasn’t like there was this huge lapse, we’ve always been communicating,” Sitake said. “We’ve never gone a long period of time without talking and we’ve always been in each other’s lives.”
So when Sitake was looking for a new defensive coordinator and Hill was getting the urge to get back to the Power 5 level at the end of the 2022 season, the timing worked for them to reunite in Provo, where they picked up where they left off nearly a decade ago.
It is not unusual for Hill to call Sitake late at night, so when his phone buzzed that Thursday, he answered, “What’s up, bro?”
Sarah was on the other end, and delivered the news from the hospital. Sitake was shocked but quickly offered to help in any way he could. Shortly after they got off the phone, texts from Jay started arriving. Then he called. Fresh out of life-saving surgery, he was concerned about how BYU would call the defensive plays in two days.
“Bro, you don’t need to call me. Just rest,” Sitake said. “We can talk about this later.”
Go Cougs! pic.twitter.com/Hn9hoR8IUr
— Jay Hill (@CoachJayHill) August 31, 2024
When BYU met as a team the next afternoon, Jay remained at the hospital. Sitake told the players what had happened, then Jay joined the meeting via FaceTime.
“We were all pretty shocked because Coach Hill is a super active, healthy guy,” safety Tanner Wall said. “But he made it very clear from that moment that he didn’t want us to be distracted or worry about him, but to worry about going and winning our game.”
At the hospital, Jay was negotiating. He was told he would feel even better the next day after he underwent his second angioplasty procedure, after which it was recommended he should go home and rest.
But what if he went to the game and sat in the coaches’ box and watched?
“What the doctor said was, ‘I would not recommend it. Ultimately, you get to make the decision, but I wouldn’t recommend it,'” Jay said. “And I just told him, I’m going to watch the game one way or the other. So whether I’m at the stadium or at the house, I’m going to watch the game. So I might as well be at the stadium where I feel like I at least have a little bit of control.”
After his second surgery in less than 48 hours, Jay made his way to LaVell Edwards Stadium about an hour before kickoff. As he was escorted down to the field, he wasn’t feeling well, and it was there when he was embraced by his players that the mental stress of it all caught up with him.
“I don’t ever get emotional, but I got so emotional going on the field,” he said. “This is where I want to be — down on the field — and I can’t.”
Jay usually calls plays from the field, but he was relegated to the coaches’ box, where Sarah joined him. During the game, Sitake and linebackers coach Justin Enna shared playcalling duties on defense. Jay wore a headset and had the play sheet in front of him, but he mostly sat back and let his colleagues take the reins.
He was under strict doctors’ orders not to get too excited during the game, but his natural instincts made that a tough assignment. When signs of emotion started to show, there was Sarah — with a subtle squeeze of his leg or a knowing glance — to reel him back in.
It helped that BYU won comfortably 41-13 and that the defense made the game enjoyable for Jay.
“It was fun for me to sit in the box and just watch all the hard work from fall camp,” Jay said. “The players executed, they rallied behind what had just happened with the heart attack — for me it was a pretty surreal moment just to sit up there and kind of just see it from afar.”
HILL DECIDED HIS brush with death wouldn’t require any sort of lengthy absence from the team.
The coaching staff had Sunday off, but he was back in the office at 8 a.m. Monday, ready to work a full day ahead of that Friday’s game at SMU.
But he also realized there needed to be some concessions. During practice, he sat on a balcony overlooking the field and coached with a headset. He cut Mountain Dew and was more careful about his diet. Sarah joined him for regular walks that replaced his usual runs and weightlifting.
Hill was advised that most patients in his situation were supposed to take it easy for four to six weeks, and that a full recovery was six months out.
“In his mind as a coach, what does that mean, taking it easy?” Sarah said. “If they work 90 hours a week sometimes, does that mean now you’re just working 60?”
Jay’s path to recovery ran parallel with an encouraging start to the season for BYU. A brilliant defensive performance led the Cougars to an 18-15 win against SMU — it would be the Mustangs’ only loss in the regular season — and they made quick work of Wyoming to move to 3-0.
After the win in Laramie, Sitake walked into a celebratory locker room. It was a scene he usually would have been thrilled to see.
“There’s this big monster pit of dancing going on and there is Jay Hill in the middle of it,” Sitake said. “So, I go and pull him out and am like, ‘What are you doing? You’re not supposed to be doing that.’
“He just lives life, man. But we have had to watch him a little bit, because he’s always worried about others and focused on helping them get the energy they need.”
On one occasion, multiple staff members noticed that Hill’s complexion wasn’t right, so cornerbacks coach Jernaro Gilford called Sarah. Hill went home early.
“He gets into it and loses himself in the work and the service and what he’s trying to accomplish,” Sitake said. “And that’s what makes him special. But it’s also why we have to kind of watch out for him. It’s OK. We can be our brother’s keeper for a little bit.”
Sarah was there for Jay at every step. For the first several games of the season, she remained with him in the coaches’ box during games. They would measure his blood pressure before the game and monitor it as needed.
The fourth game of the season was at home against No. 13 Kansas State. On the field before the game, Jay felt his heart start to race. That was his cue to head up to the box, where he measured his blood pressure with alarming results. It was on par with the reading on the day of his heart attack.
“It was like 200 over 130 or something like that, stupid high,” Jay said. “And that scared me a little bit. That was a moment where I’m like, ‘If we don’t figure out how to monitor this, I don’t know if I can coach.”
(At this level, it is recommended to consult a doctor immediately, according to the American Heart Association.)
Sarah did her best to keep him calm, and the numbers improved a bit as the game began. But after the Cougars scored 31 straight points during a chaotic run between the second and third quarters, he was back in the danger zone.
“Then after the game, we win, and I think that’s when it kind of starts to drop and chill out a lot,” Jay said.
It wasn’t the first time Sarah and Jay, who have four children — Ashtyn, Alayna, Allie and Jacob — went through a medical scare together. This time, Sarah’s role as his de facto caretaker represented a role reversal in their relationship.
In 2016, she was diagnosed with Stage 4 Hodgkin lymphoma. It required a year and a half of intense treatment that included radiation, a bone marrow transplant and several rounds of chemotherapy. Going through that, she said, allowed her to maintain a sense of calm when helping her husband through his time of need.
“I was in the hospital for a month, and getting that perspective switch of me coming in, watching him in a hospital bed and him sitting in the hospital bed was actually a really beautiful experience,” Sarah said. “We were able to experience the other person’s side, and you just grow in love and compassion for each other, having experienced the opposite.
“So, we have joked that it’s a competition of who cannot die the best.”
Sarah’s original diagnosis, like Jay’s, came during fall camp. Throughout the season, he would accompany her to chemotherapy treatments every other Wednesday and do his best to be there for her while managing the demands of being a head coach.
Jay said they both felt the support of an entire college football program.
“I saw a very special thing in both instances where the team kind of rallied behind us,” he said. “The team rallied for sure behind her and her cancer situation. I’ll bet you 90 percent of the players shaved their heads that year. It was a pretty special moment of just how players can offer support and show someone that they loved her.”
AS HILL’S RECOVERY progressed through the season, BYU kept winning.
After beginning the year picked to finish 13th in the 16-team Big 12, the Cougars won their first nine games to rise to No. 6 in the College Football Playoff rankings. But just as the prospect of receiving a first-round bye started to seem possible, BYU lost back-to-back close games to Kansas and Arizona State in November.
The Cougars finished in a four-way tie with Colorado, Iowa State and ASU, with tiebreakers sending ISU and ASU through to the Big 12 title game.
After missing on a chance to play for the conference title, BYU and Colorado — which did not play during the regular season — were selected to play in the Alamo Bowl.
“It’s been great having him here, but it’s been really cool to see him recover and help us have the type of year we’ve had,” Sitake said. “We anticipated that we were going to have something special this year — even from the beginning — and he’s a big part of that.”
After BYU ranked near the bottom of the country in almost every major defensive category in 2022, this year it was among the best. The Cougars finished the season ranked No. 1 in the Big 12 in scoring defense (20.1 points per game), total defense (317 yards per game) and forced turnovers (27). Hill was nominated for the Broyles Award, given to the top assistant in college football.
“I think if you look at our defense over the past two seasons, you can definitely see the impact that he’s made,” senior defensive end Tyler Batty said. “His impact is unmistakable for sure.”
It resonates far beyond the X’s and O’s.
“This dude had a heart attack, and the same day he was operated on, he is at our game in the booth,” Batty said. “It just goes to show that he is a great example of grit and resilience. Guys like him and Kalani are guys you want to run through a wall for.”
By the last quarter of the season, Hill felt like he was back to normal. He returned to the practice field midway through the season and ramped up the intensity of his workouts near the end. Routine check-ins with his doctor have continued, and the signs have been positive.
For Hill, though, the major takeaway from the past few months hasn’t come from his recovery.
“I think we’re a little better in all areas as a team and it’s made a huge impact on just the success overall,” he said. “And then to see that pay off in wins has been pretty special.”
Spoken like a true coach.
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