BYU football: How Uriah Leiataua earned prestigious business degree

PROVO — When BYU defensive end Uriah “Lopa” Leiataua was growing up in one of the most dangerous and gang-infested communities in Southern California, his goal wasn’t just to make it out of Compton.

It was to get “straight A’s outta Compton.”

Mission accomplished.

The honors student who had a 4.3 grade point average and was in the top three of his graduating class at Manuel Dominguez High also accomplished one of those before enrolling at BYU, serving two years in his parents’ homeland of Apia, Samoa, the same place where his father, Siu served years ago.

A three-star recruit for the Dons who famously decommitted from Stanford on signing day in 2014 and was flipped to BYU by then-coach Bronco Mendenhall, Leiataua has yet to live up to the hype that accompanied him out of Compton, mostly because of injuries. He’s got one season of eligibility remaining to rewrite that narrative.

“If I had to describe my college football career so far, it would be ‘what could have been?” he said. “The injuries have been hard to deal with.”

Off the field, however, he’s continued his immediate family’s academic success. Leiataua, whose three older sisters graduated from UC Berkeley, Cal State Long Beach and UC Riverside, respectively, graduated from BYU’s Marriott School of Business in April to become Siu and Vaosa Leiataua’s fourth first-generation college graduate.

“It took a lot of hard work and a lot of sacrifices,” Leiataua said. “I remember my first year at BYU, it was business school or bust for me. Those (prerequisite classes) were brutal, but I got accepted. And now I’ve made it.”

Leiataua says he would like to work for an organization such as the United States Olympic Committee, or another sports-related group, then give back to Compton in some way, make lives better for people who deal with sounds of police sirens and gunshots on almost a daily basis, including his parents.

“The place you grow up is the norm to you,” he said. “You never realize how different it is. I always tell people I wasn’t shellshocked when I came to Utah, but I was amazed at how different it was, and how much I was missing growing up.

“The four years I have been here at BYU, I have noticed how much kids have here, and how many resources are available to them, and I want to help (Compton) kids get some of that, too,” he continued. “I remember just thinking, ‘Dang, school buses are for real? School buses are a thing?’ I thought those were only in the movies. I didn’t know they actually picked kids up, took them to school.”

Leiataua, who was so smart in high school that his teammates would refer to him as “the dictionary,” and take all their difficult questions to him, credits his parents for “being really strict”…