There is a player at spring practice who stands literally heads and shoulders above many of his peers. He is 6-foot-6, 250-pound Soraya Ogebar, a tight end prospect who may very well end up playing somewhere else, but any future changes don’t matter as much as the ones before it.

Ogebar is from Lagos, Nigeria, and he came to the U.S. in 2007. The goal was to play basketball for WVU, which then was the champion of what Ogebar remembered as the “MIT.”

He tried out as a walk-on for Bob Huggins’ first team but didn’t make it, discovering in a cruel way that the American game is as much about conditioning as it is about skill.

The following fall, and after a lengthy period of preparation, Ogebar made WVU’s football team as a walk-on.

There’s much more opportunity here,” he said. “You just have to try to figure out what you want to do and you can do it.”

This wasn’t a revelation for Ogebar. His father imports and distributes cosmetics and beverages in Nigeria and that helped him place his two daughters at American University, in Washington, D.C. One is in graduate school, the other is still an undergraduate.

The same chances weren’t guaranteed back home.

“It’s little things that are big,” Ogebar said. “Here, you can have a 17-year-old kid and there’s a way for him to work and make money. Back home, there’s not that many opportunities to do that.

“Here, with the schools and the people working with you, you can really get an education. There are loans and scholarships. Back home, there’s really not a way to do that.”