It’s difficult to decipher Tren’Davian Dickson’s East Texas drawl over the phone.

For how loud his play on the field was, he was never one to raise his voice. But add his nine and seven-year-old kids to the mix, roughhousing with each other somewhere on the other end of the line, and not even a professional codebreaker could catch every word.

As Dickson reminisces on his record-breaking high school football career — and all the hype that faded into a ‘What if?’ after — he repeats that he has no regrets and therefore hasn’t thought about his college journey until this reporter called. Everything happens for a reason, he says. As if on cue, one of his children tugs on his shirt, wondering who Daddy’s talking to. That is, until Grandma gives them that look that means business.

“Daddy’s doing an interview,” said Gwen Wesley, Tren’Davian’s mother.

Your father used to do a lot of these before y’all were born.

Ten years ago, Tren’Davian Dickson was Texas high school football’s most electric receiver, signed to play for Texas college football’s most electric offense. He broke the TXHSFB record with 76 career touchdown receptions, which brought Oklahoma head coach Lincoln Riley and LSU’s Les Miles to the halls of Navasota High School. But Dickson fell in love with Baylor, namely because Art Briles’s offense had led the country in points per game for three years running.

Dickson graduated from Navasota a semester early so he could enroll at Baylor for spring football practice. There, everything the coaching staff had promised him began to fall into place: he was a perfect fit in the offense.

“I’m gonna be honest, I always thought he was going to be one of those players that may have a chance to go to the NFL,” said Lee Fedora, Dickson’s high school coach.

Except that Baylor was a sinking ship that Dickson had unknowingly boarded.

Dickson signed with Baylor just weeks before the program’s sexual assault scandal came into public view. The first ESPN report was published just six weeks after his commitment. At that point, former Baylor players Tevin Elliott and Sam Ukwuachu had been convicted of sexual assault, and later reporting detailed systemic failures by Art Briles and university leadership to investigate and respond to multiple allegations.

On May 26, 2016, Dickson returned to Navasota to celebrate his high school graduation with all his friends back home. But before he could toss his cap in the air, the news dropped. Briles was done and so were all the plans Dickson thought he had.

This story happened only 10 years ago, but the college football world Dickson entered is unrecognizable from what it is today. When The Athletic examined the college careers of the top 600 recruits from the Class of 2021, it found 60.3 percent had transferred at least once. This year, former five-star QB Malachi Nelson will play at his fourth school in four years. But for Dickson, part of the ancient Class of 2016, he’d have to sit out a year if he transferred from Baylor. It didn’t matter that he’d been convinced to enroll before he technically graduated high school, or that the coach who’d done the convincing was now disgraced.

Dickson’s high school graduation was supposed to be an opportunity for him to hear how proud Navasota was of him. His future had seemed so certain ever since he’d caught four touchdown passes in the state championship game. Now, it was the murkiest of anyone walking across Navasota’s graduation stage. 

 …

There had to be a moment from youth sports — a one-handed catch, or a touchdown run – that provided the first glimpse of what Tren’Davian Dickson would become: the national high school record holder with 39 receiving touchdowns in a single season.

But the clearest memory for his mother, Gwen, was Tren’Davian hiding in the car while his sister cheered for Navasota’s youth football programs. He only played football because Kevin Baker, a renowned youth coach in the area, had trekked to the parking lot, pulled Tren’Davian from the car, and placed him on the field.

“Football was never his thing,” Gwen said.

Instead, Dickson dribbled a basketball everywhere he went from the time he was six years old. He first dunked in seventh grade despite standing 5-foot-7-inches tall, and an AAU team from Houston began picking him up outside the school for travel tournaments.

So, of course, Navasota’s basketball coach, Patrick Goodman, put Dickson on varsity as a freshman.

“I’ve never coached one like that before, and I’ll probably never coach another one,” Goodman said. “I rank these athletes I’ve had throughout the years, and he’s No. 1.”

Just watch the video of Dickson dunking over a Madisonville player during his sophomore year (20-second mark), and you’ll agree.

In those days, Navasota and Madisonville played the de facto district championship every year. The tensions were high, and the Madisonville players were talking a little trash to Dickson. Bad idea.

Dickson deflected a pass on defense and sprinted toward the basket. A Madisonville player had raced back under the hoop and stood ramrod straight in the hopes of taking a charge. Dickson elevated, spread his legs, and jumped over the Madisonville player. Pandemonium ensued. Navasota students ran onto the court or out of the gym doors, hands on their heads. Goodman, as the head coach, got a technical foul for failing to calm down a hundred teenage boys who’d just witnessed a poster in real life.

“I’ll never forget that,” Goodman said. “I still watch it to this day, and I’ll watch it to the day I leave this earth.”

Goodman is now the basketball coach at New Waverly High School, but he still shows his teams that dunk at the beginning of every season. The message is not, “If you work hard enough, you can do this.” It’s more like Goodman is trying to convince himself all these years later that Tren’Davian Dickson really did that. 

But as Dickson’s football career fizzled out, the highlight has become bittersweet for Goodman.

“He always told me basketball was his first love,” Goodman said. “I just always wanted to ask him, ‘Well, why did you go with football?’ He had Rice, Boise State, and TCU (interested). Had we just pushed it more, he would’ve had others as well. He was a legit point guard.”

The semester that Dickson enrolled early at Baylor, in what should’ve been his senior basketball season, Navasota made the regional tournament. For the team’s first game against West Orange-Stark, Dickson sat on the bench with his teammates. But the next day, he sat farther up in the stands. Goodman hollered up at him, asking if he was gonna come back to the bench.

“Nah, Coach,” Dickson said. “It’s too hard.”

“The only reason why he didn’t choose basketball was because of Baylor,” Gwen said. “If he had stayed in school his senior year and played that last basketball season, he probably would’ve chosen basketball.”

But football’s pull was hard to resist in Navasota. When Fedora first took the head coach job in 2005, people asked him why he’d ever go to Nasty-sota? By 2012, Dickson’s freshman year, the Rattlers won a state championship. Navasota was a football town, with 6,000 people in the stands every Friday night. And the quarterback/wide receiver combination of Dickson and Shelton Eppler — whose 5,444 passing yards in the 2014 state championship season ranks second in state history — were the biggest stars.

The double-overtime title game against Argyle was a hilarious juxtaposition of styles. Argyle running back Nick Ralston carried the ball 54 times for 225 yards and three touchdowns. Meanwhile, Eppler threw the ball 54 times and set a then-state record with 71 touchdown passes on the season.

Dickson caught four touchdown passes for a national record 39 receiving touchdowns in a single season. The two touchdowns in overtime won the game, but the one-handed grab in between two defenders down the right sideline - after which he threw up the X in an ode to Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Dez Bryant - is an image burned into TXHSFB lore.

“There were sometimes they were triple-teaming him, and we’d still throw to him because he could flat out beat everybody,” Fedora said. “He was an unbelievable receiver.”

But it wasn’t just the physical gifts that convinced Fedora that Dickson had a chance at the NFL. It was how he ran every route full speed, even if he knew there was no chance the ball would come his way on that play. Or how he would tell the media after a game that he didn’t have a single catch that it was all about Navasota winning.

“I would meet with all my players individually after every game,” Fedora said. “There would be times where he’d have three, four touchdowns in a game. He’d say, ‘Coach, I need to get better on this play. I did very poorly on this play.’”

Now, at Navasota’s graduation, Dickson and Fedora were having a meeting far more consequential than a missed assignment on a play. Dickson had to make a decision about whether or not to transfer from Baylor in the wake of Briles’s firing. 

Fedora had always told his boys that God deals everyone a different hand of cards. No one controls the hand they’re dealt, but they do control how they play them. You keep your head up. You keep fighting.

Dickson always used to giggle when Fedora went on this spiel. It was kind of a funny concept: you and your friends sitting at a poker table while God stands across from you, slapping down cards. Come on, God, a two and a seven? But now he realized how important the lesson had been.

He felt his best card to play was transferring from Baylor.

Dickson had a choice between Oregon and the University of Houston. He chose the Cougars, which was a Group of Five program at the time, but also much closer to home and coming off a 13-1 record under head coach Tom Herman.

Dickson joined the program in August and participated in preseason practices, but he remained ineligible for the 2016 season due to the transfer. Part of the reason he’d picked Houston was that the staff had convinced him he’d be able to play immediately. And, to their credit, U of H did file a waiver with the NCAA seeking Dickson’s eligibility. But the school got its answer before the NCAA ever responded. Dickson left the team on September 21.

 At the time, no reason was given for Dickson’s leaving. And in the decade that’s passed, there still hasn’t been a concrete explanation. The most Dickson ever said about why he left Houston was in a 2018 news feature for KAGS, the NBC affiliate in Bryan. 

“A hefty fine (for the transfer waiver),” Dickson said. “I didn’t have the money for the fine, so I had to wait to get that money and be able to get my transcript to even start school again. Like I said, it was just a lot of stuff that went wrong. Some housing fees and stuff like that. It was just a bad deal.”

If Dickson had been born a few years later, his NIL package would've made money a non-issue.A financial explanation for his abrupt exit would track with what coaches from Navasota said about his character. 

“He was one of those who I’d call All-American kids,” Goodman said. “He exemplifies what you would want in a child, as far as his work ethic, behavior, and how he treated others.”

Time has healed Dickson’s wound, and 10 years later, he does not want to reopen it when asked why he left Houston, his second college in five months.

 “The best way I can say it is that there was a lot of miscommunication,” Dickson said. “But I don’t like to get into it. Like I say, everything happened how it’s supposed to happen.”

But this reporter still wanted to know. What did he mean by miscommunication? What did he mean by housing fees?

I reached out to the University of Houston to speak with someone who was in the athletic department during 2016. The department emailed me back this statement.

“No one currently on staff, nor in the athletics department at this time, can speak firsthand or accurately on Tren’Davian’s situation with that coaching staff in 2016, as that was handled privately between Tren’Davian and Coach Herman.”

I reached out to Tom Herman’s former employers, the University of Texas and Florida Atlantic University, to find a way to contact him. Texas had no information, while FAU directed me to his school email account. I fired off two requests to that address, but they weren’t returned. This is not to accuse Herman of turning down the request. He was fired by the University in November of 2024 — so how often would he really check that email? 

Further emails and social media DMs to former staffers went unanswered.

 I failed to track down the full story on why Dickson left Houston. But Dickson has moved on, and so should I. Besides, this story is not about how Dickson’s time in major college football ended, but about how the rest of his life is just beginning.

…

Two years after breaking the career record with 76 touchdown receptions, Dickson was out of football, taking classes at Blinn Junior College. In the wake of another transfer, most kids would’ve blasted out their highlight tapes on social media. Dickson instead withdrew, spooked by his time at Baylor and Houston. 

“He wasn’t used to being let down by people,” said Roy Dickson, Tren’Davian’s father. “Coming from Coach Fedora and the Navasota coaches, who always looked out for him and were brutally honest with him. After Baylor, he got let down a lot.”

Ahead of the 2018 football season, a player at Texas Southern, a FCS school, approached wide receivers coach Dallas Blacklock, saying his cousin was looking for a place to play.  

“Something is majorly wrong,” Blacklock remembers thinking. “There’s no way when you go and watch this kid’s tape that you’d say, ‘He’s going to end up at Texas Southern.”

But when he first met Dickson, Blacklock found out why.

“He was this skinny, frail kid,” Blacklock said  I’m like, ‘Is this the same kid that was dunking on everybody?’”

Not only had Dickson stopped playing football, he’d stopped doing much of anything. His football career had seemingly ended at the same time as he became a new father, and the weight of that responsibility was crushing him. 

Dickson’s mother was the ultimate reason he returned to the field. Before Dickson drove to Texas Southern’s campus in Houston, he told her he was doing this for her and not himself anymore. When he was playing football for himself, he couldn’t muster the strength to leave his room. Now that he was doing it for her and his children, he returned to his high school weight within two weeks of strength training.

“I wasn’t big on the NFL or NBA dream,” Gwen said. “My thing is education first. Nobody can take the education away from you. You break your leg, you still have an education. For me, that was what I was most proud of. That diploma was bigger than him setting the Texas High School record.” 

Texas Southern went 2-9 in 2018, but wide receiver Bobby Hartzog and Dickson were first and third in the Southwestern Athletic Conference in receiving. He earned SWAC Newcomer of the Week with 159 yards and two touchdowns against Texas State. Dickson was the type of athlete who was so smooth that it appeared he wasn’t even fast. His long strides ate up two-and-a-half yards a step, and once defenders realized how explosive he was, it was too late.

“You think he’s moving in slow motion, but he’s flying past you,” Blacklock said. “We finally got to the point where it was like, ‘Hey, man, just throw the ball as far as you can.’ It was like a Randy Moss effect. You’re not gonna overthrow him.”

But while Dickson showed flashes of what could’ve been while at Texas Southern, his frequent, unexplained absences also showed why it wasn’t meant to be. Dickson was not a diva or hothead. Actually, quite the opposite.

“If he was in the room, you didn’t know it,” Blacklock said. “He didn’t have the boisterous, cocky, egotistical attitude that you would think would match his play style. If I was as talented as him, I wouldn’t be quiet. Everyone is going to know it.”

That attitude was at once his greatest strength and his greatest hindrance. Dickson, now a father of two, was torn between his newfound love of football and his desire to be back with his kids. Then, in the offseason between 2018 and 2019, Texas Southern hired a new coach and moved Blacklock, his trusted confidant, to running backs coach. Faced with so much change, Dickson threw up his defense mechanism: sitting in his bedroom. It was his way of taking back control, even though he knows the more productive way to gain control would’ve been to control his attitude and work ethic.

If Dickson missed a practice, Blacklock would drive to his apartment and bang on the door for five minutes until he emerged. He hadn’t shown up to practice, hadn’t answered his phone, and couldn’t even tell you why. He didn’t have words to describe the invisible enemy he was battling. To someone who didn’t know Dickson, like a new head coach, it was disrespectful. To someone who did know Dickson, like Blacklock, it was sad. 

Spiritual talks with his father kept Tren’Davian going through the darkest days of his college experience. Every morning, Roy would text Tren’Davian a Bible paragraph to read. Soon, Blacklock asked to be included on the text thread, as did some of Tren’Davian’s teammates. The more people who heard about Tren’Davian’s testimony, the more people got added to Roy’s text chain, including this reporter.

Before every game at Texas Southern, Roy would text Tren’Davian the same verse - Romans 8:28. 

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

Dickson always thought his purpose was to be a professional athlete. But God dealt him a different set of cards, and the way he played them has brought more people to God through his father’s text chain.

Today, Dickson does electrical work in Navasota for Champion Homes. Somewhere in between the end of his football career and today, a lightbulb went off in his mind, too. Maybe it was the birth of his two children. Or, maybe, it was them growing up and looking at him like a superhero, without knowing anything about his high school football career. In these moments, he knows his football career — and how it ended — won’t define him.

 “I feel like my greatest days are ahead of me,” Dickson said. “Some people would think that the record is the greatest thing I’ve ever done in life. I feel like the best thing I’ve ever done is being a father. The things that I’ll accomplish going forward will be the greatest things I’ve ever done.”