Stanley Berryhill III got to open one present on his second-ever Christmas Eve, a tiny basketball hoop made for toddlers.
From midnight until 4 a.m., Berryhill — just 18 months old — shot baskets relentlessly.
“Would not stop, just shooting,” Berryhill’s father, Stan, said. “He’d cry when we took it away from him.”
In the 20 years since then, Berryhill turned himself first into an all-around athlete and then into a stellar football player. The redshirt junior wide receiver will lead the Arizona Wildcats into their Sept. 4 opener against BYU in Las Vegas following an offseason that included a coach’s firing, plans to transfer, a new hire — and a renewed dedication to the Wildcats.
First-year receivers coach Kevin Cummings calls Berryhill “a different cat,” and he means it as a compliment.
“He loves life and you always see him smiling. You barely ever see him not smiling,” Cummings said. “For him to come back after thinking about going to another school or going through what he went through, he loves Arizona. He loves and lives for Arizona football.”
An early focus
To help craft his son into a standout football player, Stan Berryhill followed what he called “the Russian Olympics model.”
“They would pick kids at a very young age and they were going to put them in the Olympics,” Stan said. “Their mom and dad already have them figured out, right? ‘You’re going to be a swimmer at birth. This is a swimmer and we’re going to train them their whole life to become a swimmer,’ and they become Olympians.
“My mindset was, ‘OK, I’m a football player, so my son is going to be a football player,’ before he was born. As soon as he could understand anything, we were training to play football. Everything is going to be natural for him and his instincts are going to be natural. That’s basically how I approached it.”
Young Stanley played for the Tucson Falcons, where he met current UA teammate Jamarye Joiner, and developed his talents at Fort Lowell Park. He also played baseball, volleyball and soccer, and was good at all three.
“But once we saw that he was a high competitor and hated to lose, we knew he was going to attack it differently,” Stan Berryhill said.
Stanley Berryhill spent part of his high school career at Mountain View.
Despite his relentless work ethic and drive to earn a scholarship offer to play Division I football, Berryhill was empty-handed as a standout wide receiver at Mountain View High School. His hometown Wildcats didn’t show the slightest interest in adding Berryhill, even though he attended their camps as a boy.
“They looked at him like he was just anybody else,” Stan Berryhill said.
To stand out, Stanley Berryhill moved out.
Life in LA
Berryhill relocated to Southern California before his senior year of high school, moving in with members of his extended family there. He enrolled at Orange Lutheran High School, a powerhouse program that plays in the same division as heavy-hitters such as Mater Dei Catholic and St. John Bosco.
Berryhill also began to receive attention from an Arizona college — just not the UA.
“ASU flew up, pulled him out of class and said, ‘Look here, we don’t have a scholarship, but we want you.’ This is the only team saying this to Stan at the time — only team,” Stan Berryhill said.
The attention was flattering, but Berryhill knew where he wanted to play. And it wasn’t in Tempe.
As his father said: “Any kid in this city who watches the U of A will always want to grow up and be a Wildcat. Kids outside of this city aren’t going to give you their all. He will give to the Wildcats more than he would the Sun Devils, because in his heart — I know my son — he wants to be a Wildcat.”
It took a few months for UA coach Rich Rodriguez to watch Berryhill’s Orange Lutheran highlights. Rodriguez liked what he saw, telling Stan Berryhill that his son had better hands than most of the receivers on scholarship.
Rodriguez offered Berryhill a walk-on spot, and the wide receiver took it.
“I believe in representing where you are from,” Stan Berryhill said. He told his son: “Start a legacy where you’re from. You become a son of Tucson by playing for the U of A. The city will always take care of you.”
Frustrations return
Stanley Berryhill redshirted the 2017 season, then found himself buried on the Wildcats’ depth chart. The frustrations returned.
“Stanley almost quit and told me, ‘Dad, I’m quitting to go play baseball at Pima College,’” Stan Berryhill said. “I didn’t talk to him for two weeks. I had to pull the daddy card and told him, ‘Bro, I’ve never steered you wrong. … Listen, just give it a year and if you don’t get a scholarship this year, then you have my blessing to leave.’”
Berryhill was put on scholarship before the 2018 season, Kevin Sumlin’s first at the UA, and it wasn’t long before he was contributing on offense and special teams.
Over three seasons, the 5-foot-11-inch, 190-pound Berryhill caught 56 passes for 733 yards and eight touchdowns. But the Wildcats struggled, losing 12 games in a row, and Sumlin was fired in December.
And Berryhill was on the move again. Or at least it seemed that way.
Fisch catches a Wildcat
Shortly after Sumlin and his staff were fired, Berryhill — the Wildcats’ leading receiver in 2020 — announced that he would be transferring. He committed to Ball State of the Mid-American Conference.
Stan Berryhill said his son decided to transfer because he was “highly frustrated” with his UA coaches, saying they created “negative situations for Stan that were uncalled for.”
Arizona hired Jedd Fisch to replace Sumlin, and the new coach made keeping Berryhill a priority. The two FaceTimed, and had a productive conversation about how Fisch was going to run both the offense and the program.
Arizona wide receiver Stanley Berryhill forces his way past Oregon State defensive back Isaiah Dunn during their 2019 game at Arizona Stadium.
“Fisch just told me the vision he has for me. … The vision is a lot of motions, a lot of moving around and not just sitting in one position all the time, but I can’t get into it too much,” Berryhill said. “After talking with Coach Fisch and (Cummings), the message that they delivered to me to get me to return to the U of A was a message that I liked a lot. So far, everything that they said, they’re staying true to it.”
Another part of Fisch’s pitch?
“We’re going to turn things around and make football fun again,” Fisch said, according to Berryhill.
Since then, Berryhill has developed a tight bond with Fisch.
“We’re very close. He’s almost like a bigger brother, because he’s a very young coach and we can talk to him about anything; family problems, football — sometimes we just go into his office and hang out with him,” Berryhill said. “You don’t see that in many coaches. He connects with us and resonates with all the players.”
A locally grown leader
Berryhill displayed his leadership during spring ball, recording 70 catches during the month-long period while emerging as one of the Wildcats’ go-to playmakers in Fisch’s new attack.
He was also Arizona’s offensive representative at Pac-12 media day, a sign of the respect he commands among his coaches and teammates.
“I always tease him about Pac-12 media day. Like, ‘You think you made it, but we still got work to do,’” Cummings said. “But he can handle it, and he’s a guy who likes to handle high expectations.”
Attending Pac-12 media day was a “big moment” for the Berryhill clan, Stan Berryhill said.
“When he went to media day, he wasn’t just representing the U of A; he was representing Tucson, Arizona,” Stan Berryhill said. “These memories will last him forever. There will be people in Tucson talking about Berryhill, and that’s important.”
The Tucson native has bigger dreams as he embarks on a fresh season.
“I knew I wanted to be a Wildcat; it’s just the circumstance I was in didn’t seem right at first,” he said. “But with Fisch and K.C. and the new coaching staff, it just seemed like the place to be.”
