LOS ANGELES — Prior to Austin Overn’s senior year at Foothill High School (Santa Ana, Calif.), his mother Crystal had spent the previous five years bribing her son not to play football, mainly out of the fear of injury.
So she recognizes that her current opinion — that Austin, a walk-on receiver who doubles as USC’s starting center fielder, should continue to play football — is contradictory to her former stance on the matter.
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“(I’m) heavily encouraging him to do it,” Crystal said. “It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. You’ve got Lincoln Riley and a potential Pac-12 championship team and Caleb Williams. He’s draft eligible for baseball next year so in 15 months this could be his only time he can play football (again).”
Then she joked: “Totally backwards.”
Over the past year, there’s been a lot of talk at USC about football players playing baseball. Receiver Mario Williams has expressed a desire to play baseball. Defensive lineman Anthony Lucas has claimed he’ll play baseball next season. And then there’s five-star tight end signee Duce Robinson who — depending on what happens with the MLB Draft — might also play baseball for the Trojans.
But Overn is the only one juggling both at the moment, and he’s doing a damn good job of it. On Thursday, Overn collected four hits and two RBIs in the Trojans’ 12-2 triumph over San Diego State. Entering Friday, he’s hitting a team-best .347 for a surprising USC squad that sits at 9-3 in Pac-12 play (18-10-1 overall) and is on pace for its first winning season since 2015.
“Unbelievable,” Lincoln Riley said. “Our whole team has been kind of energized by it. They all keep up with him, and a lot of our guys have watched him play. It’s impressive, man, a guy who’s good enough to play college football at this level who can go out there as a young cat and really light it up in collegiate baseball.”
In an age of increased specialization across youth sports, Overn is a rarity. He played four sports in high school. He played baseball all four years; that was the constant. He played basketball through his junior year.
He joined the football team as a senior at Foothill because, he said, “All my friends played lacrosse or football. There’s a group chat of like 12 of us and I’m like the only kid that doesn’t play, so I knew I just had to play.”
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Speed is Overn’s greatest athletic asset. When he attended Foothill football games prior to joining the team, he was confident he could blow by opposing defensive backs if he ever played. But the only times he really put his skills on official record were at baseball combines, and he wasn’t sure how those testing numbers translated.
That was one piece of motivation for him to join the track team his senior year. “I just wanted to see where I (stood) with all these kids,” he said. “I’m trying to see where I’d play out against all these track stars. It was more of a thing mentally to know where I’m at.”
He usually trained for the 100-meter dash before baseball practice. His best time is 10.49. He also posted a wind-aided 10.45 and finished third in the CIF Division I meet.
Came in 2nd place today but still ran a 10.49. I also competed in the long jump for my first time and came in 1st place with a 23’1. Still have room for improvement. @USCCoachGill @LincolnRiley @S_HarrisUSC @SteveFryer @FoothillBasebal pic.twitter.com/r7vAGn8qhy
— Austin Overn (@AustinOvern) April 2, 2022
“He’s never once just played one sport,” Crystal said. “He’s always played two, three. … He was blessed to be good at a lot of things and I think he enjoys it. He loves the sport he’s playing at that moment.”
Football, Crystal admits, came as a bit of surprise. She had zero expectations for her son on the gridiron. Maybe score a few touchdowns, not get hurt and have some fun at the pizzeria on Friday nights after games.
So what did Overn do? He caught 68 passes for 1,407 yards and 20 touchdowns in his lone season of football. He also rushed for four scores and threw a touchdown pass. Against Yorba Linda High School, Overn posted 10 catches for 287 yards and three touchdowns.
“We scored with a minute and a half to go, kicked it down to the 10 and said, ‘OK, we’ve got this game easy,’” said Yorba Linda coach Jeff Bailey. “First play, they threw it over our two sophomore DBs and he made a great play and they scored in eight seconds. … It’s one of the best performances we’ve seen in a long time.”
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The Orange County Register named Overn first-team All-Orange County. His season was impressive enough that UCLA pulled him out of a baseball workout to offer him a football scholarship, Crystal said.
At the time, Overn was already committed to USC and former Trojans baseball coach Jason Gill. Because UCLA seemed willing to let him play both sports, Overn asked Gill if he could look into possibly playing both sports for the Trojans. But Lincoln Riley was in only his second day on the job, so Gill wanted to give his new colleague time to get settled before approaching him about it.
It turned into a weeks-long process that ended when Overn received a call from USC football’s former director of player personnel, Spencer Harris. Overn remembers looking at his phone as it vibrated and silencing it because he didn’t recognize the number and was trying to sleep. So he went back to bed.
“When I woke up, it was a voicemail like, ‘Hey, Austin, this is Spencer Harris with USC football. We’re going to give you a walk-on spot,’” Overn said. “I was looking at it right when I woke up like, ‘What the hell is happening right now?’”
After playing just one season of football in high school, he was now being offered a spot on USC’s roster.
“We knew he had not played much and the film was still really good,” Riley said. “ It was like, ‘All right, we know he’s really fast. We know he’s a dynamic athlete, and if he could do that on that limited exposure to football then he can be a really good player.’”
USC officially announced Andy Stankiewicz as its new baseball coach last July. He spent the previous 11 seasons at Grand Canyon, which he guided to the NCAA Tournament in 2021 and 2022. With the Trojans, Stankiewicz inherited an incoming recruiting class that featured Overn, who signed his national letter of intent with the baseball program in February.
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But the first time the new coach saw Overn wasn’t on the baseball field.
“I watched him run some routes on the practice field, right over here from Dedeaux (Field),” Stankiewicz said. “As a staff, we saw he ran well and we could see his speed. You don’t know how well that’s going to translate. A lot of fast people try to play baseball and it hasn’t worked out very well.”
Overn has had to juggle both sports since last fall. He said the workload is not as overwhelming as it was the spring of his senior year, when he was playing baseball and running track. The biggest challenge has been finding time for school and a social life.
Overn was ineligible to play in a game with the football program last season because of a technicality in his national letter of intent. He spent most of his time on the scout-team offense, practicing against the first-team defense.
He never expected to play college football, so Overn “wanted to experience it and see where I’m at because obviously all the football receivers are way bigger than me, stronger.”
“What he showed here this (past fall), he could help this football team,” Riley said. “There’s no question about it.”
Although he plays two sports, Overn still has to deal with NCAA practice hours limits, so he had to split some time between both programs in the fall. USC’s baseball staff didn’t really get to work with him in full until January.
Overn’s goal coming into the season was to start in center field. With USC’s roster makeup, that wasn’t much of an issue.
“We didn’t have much depth in the outfield,” Stankiewicz said. “We knew if he could catch a baseball, he was going to have a great chance to play center field a lot. He showed us that right away.”
Assistant coach Travis Jewett has worked extensively with Overn to refine his swing and approach at the plate. Jewett’s teaching is a significant reason why Overn is hitting as well as he is. He has already tied the program record for triples in a season with 10. At the beginning of the season, Overn was batting at the bottom of the order. Stankiewicz realizes they have to force-feed him from the leadoff spot now.
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“Hey, man, let’s go. Take it,” Stankiewicz said. “We feel like it’s time.”
“I have filmed every at-bat all the way through his entire life, and I see the difference every time he’s up there,” Crystal said. “His two-strike approach is completely different. He has a confidence in him I’ve never seen before. He’s just excelling because these coaches believe in him and they believe in this team. All these kids do.”
Overn is in the unique position of being on the ground floor with two first-year coaching staffs tasked with rebuilding once-proud programs. Riley took over a team that won four games in 2021 and turned it into an 11-win squad in 2022, nearly taking the Trojans to the College Football Playoff.
Stankiewicz took over a program that has won 12 national championships but has only had two winning seasons in the past 15 years. USC was picked to finish 10th in the Pac-12 this season but enters the weekend in the top three of the league standings.
“Something that stood out to me in both football and baseball is everyone likes being there,” Overn said. “It’s the team, the chemistry. There’s always just jokes, laughter. … Football, locker room, everyone is just laughing, having fun. Same thing on the field. Baseball’s the exact same thing.”
Overn is doing so well on the diamond that there’s a legitimate question as to whether he’ll play football much longer.
Riley, who coached Kyler Murray during his two-sport journey, has his own hunch.
“We’ve definitely taken notice (of how well he’s done) so I don’t think we’ll be seeing him do a whole lot of football in the future probably,” Riley said before expanding on the situation.
“We’ve had some conversations with his family. We’ll have some more as their season wraps up. He has some decisions to make, and they’re good decisions, right? When you’re killing it in one. We’ll look at it and see what he wants to do.”
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For years, Overn has had people telling him he has to pick one sport. Even though his future is clearly in baseball, he’s gone this long without picking one sport at the expense of others.
He can play in the Cape Cod League this summer, which means more exposure but no football. Overn has already organized his class schedule in a way that would allow him to play football next season, so he’s keeping his options open.
“I still have no idea,” he said. “There’s so many angles to it. I don’t know yet. It’s going to be a decision I have to make soon, though.”
(Photos courtesy of USC Athletics)
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