Diligent worker: Griffin Armstrong’s journey to Louisiana Tech

Curtis Armstrong wept like he never had before.

As he sat amongst 47,000 fans on a humid night in Columbia, Missouri, to watch the Louisiana Tech Bulldogs take on the Missouri Tigers, he had his eyes set on one player. One jersey.

It was the first time his son, Griffin Armstrong, had ever dressed and played in a Bulldog uniform.

Curtis sat beside his wife Aimee and family friend Cliff Anders for the entire four-and-a-half-hour game on Sept. 1, well aware they weren’t going to see Griffin pop up on the jumbotron highlight reel.

After all, he’s the Bulldogs’ starting long snapper — not exactly the average college football fan’s favorite player.

But that wasn’t going to keep Curtis from wearing his emotions on his sleeve, and it sure hasn’t kept him and Aimee from attending close to every game since Griffin’s been a Bulldog — whether he’s dressed or not.

He’s quick to say what he’s like as he watches games.

“I cry,” Curtis said. “I haven’t taken a single picture during a game. This is a lifelong dream of his. And I know how lucky I am to see a kid work this hard and I just get to sit there and watch.”

As the game clock hit zeroes 25 minutes to midnight in Columbia, the Armstrong family found each other and couldn’t keep the tears back.

This was the moment Griffin Armstrong has been dreaming of since he was a kid. He was officially a college football player.

Cliff Anders remembers the embrace vividly and the pure emotion displayed by Curtis and Griffin — father and son celebrating with arms wrapped around one another.

“As soon as (Griffin) saw his father, it was the first embrace when you finally made it,” Anders said. “There’s no doubt anymore. There’s nothing that can derail this.”

And if you knew how far Griffin had come to don No. 49 for the Bulldogs, you wouldn’t blame them.

Childhood on the move

The year is 1989. Curtis Armstrong is three weeks removed from graduating high school and is ready to leave for the army.

Once he finished up his drill sergeant certification, he attended Jacksonville State University to get his commission and would eventually become an aviation officer flying helicopters.

He would meet Aimee and begin a 33-year career in the army, traveling across the world for new deployment assignments from Germany, Panama, and eventually Alaska.

And that’s when Griffin entered the picture.

The first thing Griffin remembers about growing up in Alaska is the cold.

He was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and spent his days fishing, hunting and enjoying the few options of entertainment in the chilliest state in the United States. But the sense of isolation wasn’t without visits from Mother Nature’s finest.

Just about every week in elementary school, Griffin remembers students crowding windows and staring with gaudy eyes when hulking moose and bears would come close and sometimes walk on school grounds. There was no wall or even a fence separating the school from the neighboring woods.

But being a military kid meant the time in Alaska was short-lived, as the Armstrong family headed to the complete opposite of the U.S. to the island of Oahu in Hawaii when Griffin was eight years old in 2010.

It’s where Griffin’s competitive nature started to form — and when he first realized his dad wouldn’t be around much given his line of work.

The Armstrongs lived in the city of Mililani — a 25-minute drive from Honolulu. Griffin started getting into baseball and football — essentially year- round sports given the climate of the region.

Griffin’s sisters Mikaela and Madeline enjoyed life in Hawaii more than him, but he was able to experience Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Polynesian and more cultures to give him his first taste of the world.

When Curtis was on the island, he was Griffin’s football and baseball coach. But with two sisters and his mom in his main circle, Griffin quickly learned the price of being the only boy in the house.

“ Those three and half years, my dad wasn’t around all that much,” Griffin said. “It was me, my mom and my sisters. I learned a lot about my sisters. I learned a lot about being the only boy in the family — I was going to be subjected to a lot of bullying.”

The torment included nail-painting sessions and Griffin acting as a mannequin for makeup pallets — acts of love from which he would need years to recover.

Looking back on the time in Hawaii and how little time he spent with his kids, Curtis said that was when the sacrifice of having a dad in the military first hit the family.

Curtis would be gone for three weeks and be back for four days and then deployed for six weeks, and the random time allotment continued. For about 270 days a year for three years, he was gone.

“The kids would say it was hard,” Curtis said. “It was easier in Alaska when (Griffin) was younger. But sacrifices were made by all. He hasn’t seen my mom since 2011 and I think he’s met his uncle twice in his life.”

“It was harder on him than I ever thought it was.”

After four years in Hawaii, Griffin — around 12 at the time — and his family packed up and headed to Valencia, Spain. This was where he truly found himself and the place he calls home to this day.

If you look up Griffin’s bio page on the Louisiana Tech athletics website, it says he was born in Valencia, Spain. It was more than a stop on his childhood world tour. It’s where he grew out of his shell and found connections that made the constant change a bit easier.

“I claim it because it’s where my heart is,” Griffin said.

But it didn’t start that way.

Griffin attended Caxton College in Buzol, a British school 30 minutes from where he lived. And he quickly realized he was different.

He didn’t speak a lick of Spanish and spent the first year in school without a social outlet to grow into.

And then he found rugby as he started sixth grade.

For about three and half years, he played rugby for Les Abelles Rugby club which is valenciano for “The Bees.”

“It was kind of funny because I didn’t want to go at all,” Griffin recalled. “I wanted to play soccer. And my dad’s like, ‘Griffin, you’re too big for soccer. These kids are all Spanish and all want to be Christiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi. You know what you’re gonna be? You’re probably gonna be like a Brian Urlacher just by the size of you.’ So, I was like well there goes that.”

The compromise soon became a passion. He enjoyed the first practices, and in a short time he was a key player in the Bees’ run in the Pantera Tournament championship.

For the first month of practice and games, his teammates thought his name was Christian. They had never heard of someone named Griffin and eventually needed correction.

Rugby is all about the team. Fifteen guys compete on the field for 45 minutes per half, filled with constant running, tackling, and fighting.

It’s where the first seeds of being satisfied with acting as a team player came to life.

“Growing up, I was always for being the best team player I can be,” Griffin said. “And I still am. I mean, I’m a long snapper.”

As his rugby game grew, he joined drama and choir groups and would spend his weekends with new friends.

“I felt excluded for a while,” Griffin said. “And rugby helped form me to be the person I am, where if I’m going to be close with you, I’m going to want to help you with every situation I can. If you show me a little bit of respect, I will show you quadruple that.”

But like all the stops before, it came time to say goodbye to his teammates and the city he had grown to love — just as he finished his sophomore year of high school. It was different from all the others that came before.

“It was the hardest thing I think I’ve ever done in my life,” Griffin said.

And thus, the family trekked on to Pyeongtaek, South Korea — more specifically, Osan Air Force Base.

He went from living on the Spanish coast with a school of 1,000 students to a military base dorm with less than 300 students and a graduating class of 38 kids.

“South Korea was a tough place to be,” Curtis said. “ The work is long hours and living in a place that’s mildly depressed due to the constant threat of potential escalation is tough.”

That’s where the football path began for Griffin, with his rugby experience serving as a strong appeal for Osan head coach Jerome Learman.

Osan lived in constant roster flux and went week to week unsure if they would have enough players needed to dress on game days. Coaches would beg kids in other sports to just show up to help with numbers, even grabbing a basketball player at the school to just stand on the sideline in uniform for a game.

Griffin’s junior year at Osan featured 13 players on the football roster when he arrived, forcing him and his friends to create pamphlets to draw interest in joining the team simply for numbers.

“I was going from being at a place where I felt like I was at home to being at a place where everything was new again,” Griffin said. “We made the best out of it as we could.”

Roster management aside, football became Griffin’s passion. So, the summer after his junior year at Osan he went to his dad with a goal: “I want to play college football.”

But as they’d soon find out, the odds were not on their side. It didn’t stop them from trying.

Monumental challenge

Cliff Anders wasn’t surprised when he got a call from Curtis Armstrong in the summer of 2020.

The two went to flight school together and spent time building a friendship through their similar personalities. The two kept in touch when they could once they went separate ways, but Anders knew at some point Griffin would be getting closer to the age where college football was in the cards. Anders heard of his successes in rugby and wondered if Griffin would make the transition to football as he got older.

Curtis had one connection in the college football world, and it was Anders, who was the long snapper for the Virginia Tech Hokies from 1995-- 2000.

So, he gave Anders a call.

"It wasn’t really a surprise, but I was glad he called me,” Anders said. “And when he said ‘Hey, Griffin wants to play.’ I was like, ‘Yes!’ I was really excited.”

Anders and Curtis kept a dialogue going for the weeks after the initial call, as Anders sent over training regimens and workout plans to get Griffin started.

“I said, ‘I’ll invest time if he meets the work,’” Anders recalled.

Curtis and Griffin started an offseason summer program that would later become an eight-week winter workout.

Griffin played five games his junior season ast Osan and had a total of seven snaps between punting and field goals his senior year, as Learman wasn’t a fan of punting the ball on 4th down. But despite the lack of tape, Griffin was rated as the No. 4 long snapper by Prokicker.com So, how exactly would Curtis and Anders get a kid playing 9-man football in South Korea in front of college coaches in the United States?

“(Anders) said, ‘I handle the phone calls if you handle the emails,’” Curtis recalled.

Curtis created an entire Gmail account just for recruiting correspondence. He’d get off work every day at 7 p.m. and send emails for two hours afterwards. He bought his own camera to film Griffin’s game and practice reps. Meanwhile, Anders took to just about every public staff directory of college programs in the U.S., most of the time getting voicemails and rarely any calls back.

“Somewhere between 400-500 schools is just I-A, I-AA to NAIA,” Anders said. “It was a monumental challenge.”

While the two were reaching out across the country, Griffin kept working — no matter the time or day. Literally.

“It was like noon, after breakfast and I went to my dad and was like, ‘Workout?’” “He was like ‘yep, sure.’ It’s a bench day so we went in, hit our workout, hit our conditioning,” Griffin recalled.

“And I just remember my mom coming back at like 2:30 and she was yelling, ‘Curtis Armstrong! Why did you let him lift on Christmas?’ And my dad’s like, ‘It’s a Tuesday. He needs to hit his lift.’ And I looked at my mom and said, ‘I love you, but I also love football. I want to get better. I want to do this.’”

At 17 years old, Griffin benched 280, squatted 480, and could deadlift 400- plus pounds. He’d wake up every day at 5 a.m. to lift and knock out 600 snaps a week on average.

“We’d go to dumpsters and we’d find a tire, put them in the back of my dad’s truck and then my dad would get a militarygrade rope, tie it on there and he’d be like, ‘OK, you’re gonna run with that,’” Griffin said. “And I did all I could just for a chance to get better.”

Given how hard Griffin was working, Anders knew it wasn’t impossible to get him a shot. But he needed to fly to the U.S. if he wanted a chance.

So, Curtis and Aimee sent him on a $2000 flight to New Orleans to meet up with Anders, hoping to get him in front of dozens of programs and convince them he was a viable prospect.

They trusted their son was going to impress. You don’t work that hard just to let up right as you knock on the door.

Anders took Griffin to the Nick Saban football camp, where close to 800 players came and showcased their skills for 60 schools. Griffin participated as an offensive lineman, not as a long snapper. But Anders would talk with his connections and made it known just how good he was as a specialist.

In the coming weeks and months, invites for official visits came rolling in for Griffin with programs like Clemson, Virginia Tech, and West Virginia to name a few.

And then COVID-19 entered the world.

And within two weeks of getting his flurry of official visit invites, the NCAA stopped all national recruiting. It would take Griffin six weeks to get back to South Korea due to lockdowns and international travel becoming harder to manage by the day.

He returned home to Osan, and it seemed like his opportunity was gone.

But Anders and Curtis kept pushing and asking around the country if any coaches had a spot for Griffin.

“I just kept telling my dad, ‘Why can’t it be me?’” Griffin said. “He was always like, ‘It’s OK. Just be patient. They’ll come.’”

And one day it did.

Former Louisiana Tech special teams coordinator Dennis Smith reached out on Twitter and told Griffin to come to Tech as a walk-on. Smith loved his work ethic and asked him to take a leap of faith and come to Ruston, Louisiana. Griffin jumped at the opportunity.

“I’ve seen people sell athletes who are not ready,” Anders said. “ You see them go to places and fizzle out and quit and they are not the level of player they were sold as. If there was ever anybody to extend myself for, it would be (Griffin) and his father and their family.”

For the first time in his life, Griffin headed to live in the continental U.S. and begin his journey at Louisiana Tech.

With his walk-on spot saved and his enrollment official, Griffin became the first player from Osan American High School to play a sport at a Division I program.

He enrolled in 2021 and did what he’s always done. He got busy.

Work paid off

The local papers were skeptical, but Curtis was insistent. He wanted to have a hometown news outlet cover the fact that Griffin made history in his enrollment at Tech. The only problem was the paper ‘couldn’t prove’ he actually was recruited to play for the Bulldogs since he wasn’t offered a scholarship.

Plus, how could a kid from Osan make it to Ruston and play D-I football?

“He was and still is a diligent worker,” Curtis said. “He just makes me so proud because of the decision he makes.”

But it encapsulates Griffin’s mentality when it comes to the sport. The spotlight is and never will be on the guy snapping the ball in the middle of a scrum.

It’s why he’s had no issue just going about his days working on and off the field.

“Living is to help people. That’s the way I’ve lived my life,” Griffin said. “That’s the way my parents raised me.”

Since he’s been at Tech, Griffin has balanced his football responsibilities with part-time work to make ends meet — including working as a server at Utility Brewing Company over the summer.

His days would look something like this during the summer: Work out at 7 a.m. and come back at 2 p.m. for another workout. That would finish around 4 and then by 4:30 he’d be taking orders at Utility Brewing from 4 to 10 p.m.

And it’s what grabbed the attention of Louisiana Tech football coach Sonny Cumbie when he first met Griffin — now a redshirt freshman.

The job of long snapping gets no pats on the back. It’s unheralded and mostly forgotten. But Cumbie could see he took the position seriously.

“The thing that really inspires me about Griffin is, undoubtedly, how he shows us with his passion; he wants to be a great deep snapper and to be a really good teammate,” Cumbie said. “I think this team’s really important to him.”

The big concepts of air-raid offense and a new defensive coordinator take the headlines for Tech, but Cumbie said it’s the nitty-gritty players doing the dirty work that make all the difference in a game.

As he continues his first season leading the Bulldogs, Cumbie said Griffin works at a high level and views his role as a big responsibility — one for which he’s worked too hard to give up.

But he gives the Bulldogs a bright spot in the locker room to boot.

“He brings a lot of joy to our team,” Cumbie said.

Based on his up close and personal interactions with Griffin when they worked together in 2020, Anders believed he could get to this point. But nothing shapes someone like coming from a military family, and Anders has no doubt it’s why Griffin has always worked harder than most.

Everyone talks about hard work, but only a few stay at it when no one’s looking. Thousands of calls, emails and dollars spent would have been for nothing if Griffin didn’t strain himself to this point.

And of all the details in Griffin’s journey to Tech, Anders wants to make sure people know that.

“None of it would have paid off if he didn’t do what he needed to do,” Anders said.