Jabari Zuniga Turning Into a Bear for Gators
Friday, October 14, 2016 | Football, Scott Carter
The redshirt freshman has 11 tackles on season, five of them sacks.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Tammy Thompson-Winfrey thought long and hard about names for her baby boy. She did research to discover their meanings, settling on Jabari.
The name stuck almost immediately.
"The almighty brave and fearless one,'' Winfrey said of her only child.
A masculine name popularized by African-Americans since the early 1970s, Winfrey's Jabari has lived up to his forename, including his latest stop in life.
A redshirt freshman defensive end for the Gators, Jabari Zuniga never expected to be here just a few years ago. He was a tall, pudgy kid who since elementary school had shown unusual strength for his age.
Winfrey can remember calls from his teachers telling her that Jabari had knocked this kid down or bumped that kid too hard on the playground. Most of the time, Winfrey would pay the teacher a visit to explain.
"I call him the big bear,'' she said. "He's a bear. That's his nickname."
Winfrey broke out in laughter during a phone conversation this week about the time Jabari served as lead domino to nearly knock down a single-file line of his classmates. One day at school, the teacher told Jabari to go line up by a clock in the classroom and for the rest of the class to follow.
As soon as he reached the clock, Jabari put on the breaks. The kid behind him crashed into his back and fell backward. Down goes most of the class. Jabari stood tall like the Washington Monument.
"I was constantly going to the school and trying to explain to the teachers that he is just strong,'' Winfrey said. "He just had this strength when he was young."
The first time Gators assistant coach Randy Shannon met Zuniga, Shannon was an assistant coach at Arkansas and Zuniga a junior at Sprayberry High in Marietta, Ga. A basketball player since he was young, Zuniga had recently joined Sprayberry's football team.
Between a visit to the school in the spring and the end of Zuniga's senior year, Shannon was shocked.
"That May he was 5-11,'' Shannon said. "Senior year he sprouted up. It was like, 'whoa, wait a minute. Who is this guy?' Well, like anything else, some people didn't go back through the school because he was 5-11 at that time."
The Gators kept close tabs on Zuniga and signed him in 2015 in their first recruiting class under head coach Jim McElwain.
The 6-foot-3, 250 pound starting center for the basketball team suddenly was a college football player only two years after strapping on a helmet for the first time.
"When I first got out there, I didn't really like it,'' Zuniga said. "Then I hit somebody, and I just loved that feeling. I was eager to learn."
Zuniga's education in the sport really took flight when he got to UF. And it had little to do with X's and O's.
Zuniga needed to work off what defensive line coach Chris Rumph called "baby fat" and rebuild his body if he was going to be a factor on the defensive line in the Southeastern Conference.
Zuniga went to work in the weight room and on the practice field, running more than he believed he could.
"There were plenty of days when he was like, 'Mom, it's hard for me.' I can remember him getting up in the morning and saying, 'Mom, they have me running and I felt like I was going to die out there.' He just couldn't handle it,'' Winfrey said. "Running was never a big thing of his. That first year was really hard for him. But Jabari is really not a complainer like that."
Zuniga kept running, kept lifting and ate healthier. By the end of spring camp in April, and after nearly 10 months on campus, the Gators knew they had a potential edge rusher that could cause chaos.
McElwain saw it. Rumph saw it. Shannon saw it.
So did his teammates.
Zuniga dropped down to 230 pounds and turned that baby fat into muscle. He was listed at 6-3, 245 entering the season with plenty of room to grow.
"He's a high-motor guy,'' teammate Joey Ivie said recently. "He's got a lot of potential. And I think if he keeps taking the right steps, he's going to be a great player for us."
Zuniga added "that's really what took my game to the next level I guess, just getting into shape. When I came in I couldn't play because I wasn't in shape. I couldn't keep up. I knew what was going on. I think they knew what I could do because in the summer I was eating on O-linemen."
In Zuniga's college debut in the season opener against UMass, he recorded two sacks. He had two more sacks against North Texas and one at Vanderbilt to become the first UF freshman since Huey Richardson in 1987 to register five sacks in a season.
The No. 18-ranked Gators have at least six games remaining, including Saturday's homecoming against Missouri, for Zuniga to add to those totals.
"He's an explosive young man that has quickness, got good hands and is learning the game," Shannon said. "He's doing a tremendous job for us in the pass game and sacks and stuff, but his run game, if you watch him on tape, he's very, very disruptive because he's got very strong hands and very good punch."
Zuniga didn't know what to expect in his first game. His focus was to push toward the pocket and try to be disruptive. What about those two sacks?
"Really surprised me. I was shocked," he said. "I feel I did good but I have a lot more to touch up."
Zuniga has always been a quick study according to Winfrey, and he is athletic like his biological father, former Tulane University basketball player Carlos Zuniga. Carlos Zuniga ranks as one of the best high school players in New Orleans history and played professionally after college, including a brief stint with the Detroit Pistons during training camp in 1981.
While Zuniga and his father talk occasionally, Winfrey and her husband, Clayton Winfrey, raised Jabari outside of Atlanta. Clayton Winfrey's interest in football rubbed off on Jabari over the years and now the couple can be found most Saturdays cheering on No. 92.
The others in their section often give Winfrey strange looks.
"Get him Bear. Get him Bear. Get him Bear,'' she yells when UF's defense is on the field. "They don't know that's his nickname."
They only know him by Jabari. Bear is catching on, though.
