Donavan Tate was a two-sport All-American out of high school. Tate committed to play football and baseball at North Carolina, but when he was picked No. 3 overall by the San Diego Padres in the 2009 MLB Draft, he decided to go straight to the pros and make several million dollars.
Unfortunately, Tate’s MLB career never turned out as planned. He played less than 300 career games in the minors, never even making it to Double-A as he struggled with injuries and substance abuse.
Now, Tate is getting a second chance in a second sport. He has signed with Arizona football as a 26-year-old freshman, and could compete for the starting quarterback job:
Donovan Tate will enter Arizona as a true freshman. He will have five years to play four.
— stunna (@stunnaIo) May 4, 2017
In 2015, Tate told Baseball America he didn’t want to quit baseball at that time:
Tate has returned this spring from his latest injury, a torn Achilles tendon that sidelined him the entire 2014 season. It would have been easy at just about any point in Tate’s career for him for Tate to move on with his life, which in 2014 included a marriage and his first child, a daughter. He never gave much thought to the idea of quitting.
“There have been a few down points in my life where I didn’t necessarily know what I wanted to do as far as baseball,” Tate said, “but didn’t know what I wanted to do as a person and what I wanted to do in life. But whenever you go through the things that I’ve been through, you get to know yourself and you get to know the people around you.”
Also in 2015, he spoke to the San Diego Union-Tribune‘s Jeff Sanders about his problems with addiction, which reached a low point in 2012:
“Up until that point, I considered myself an alcoholic,” Tate said. “I loved to drink and I drank a lot. I would have drank all day, every day if I could. I drank. I smoked weed. But that offseason, for some reason I got involved with the wrong crowd. I had never touched anything besides alcohol or weed. I had never known what that stuff was like.
“I have a very addictive personality and it caught up with me—big time. It spiraled out of control.”
Tate will turn 27 years old in September, so this is definitely a unique situation and one worth following in the fall. Tate hasn’t played competitive football since high school in Georgia, but he was a four-star recruit back in the day.
