Stephen Paea and Sioeli Nau return home to take on the Utes

By Kevin Hampton
Gazette-Times reporter

For Oregon State football players Stephen Paea and Sioeli Nau, Thursday’s game at University of Utah is a homecoming of sorts.

Family and friends will be there to cheer them on, even though most of them will probably be rooting for the Utes.

“A lot of my friends will be there,” Paea said. “They’ve been calling me, sending me messages and stuff, if I can get tickets for them. So it should be fun.”

Paea has been targeting this game since he saw that it was on the schedule.

“The first thing I saw is, ‘Oh, we’re playing Utah,’ ” he said. “I was like, ‘Is it here or at Utah?’ I looked at it and it was at Utah and I was like, ‘Oh, man. It’s going to be a great game. I have four games to prepare for it.’ ”

Those four games have been played. Now it’s time for Paea and Nau to return to their old stomping grounds.

Paea grew up in Tonga and moved to Provo, Utah, during his high school years. He went to Timpview High and began playing football.

Paea played rugby in Tonga and it translated well to football. He had the size and athletic ability to attract college coaches. Both Utah and Brigham Young University noticed and Utah was one of his top choices.

“It was one of my favorite places to go, University of Utah. Just the way it is,” Paea said. “I visited five times and I even went and watched one of the games, too.”

The pull to stay in state was strong. Before he could make a decision, Paea had to get his academics in order.

He decided to go to Snow College in Ephraim, Utah, and became Nau’s teammate.

“They looked at me after high school, but they were out of scholarships,” Paea said. “I wasn’t eligible anyway, so what they did is they sent me to Snow College and then after I graduated from there I could go back there and I would have a scholarship already.”

Nau was born in Hawaii, grew up in Provo and wound up in nearby Spanish Fork, where he went to high school. He was a top defensive lineman at Spanish Fork High.

While Paea liked Utah, Nau was a BYU fan. It was his dream to play for the Cougars.

“I wasn’t a fan of Utah, actually,” Nau said. “I was a big fan of BYU and since they were rivals, I wasn’t a fan of Utah at all.”

After going on a two-year Mormon mission, Nau returned to Utah and enrolled at Snow College.

He played well, but did not get much interest from the Utes and BYU did not work out.

“I was still a die-hard BYU fan ever since I was little and then after junior college, I was at Snow College, I was hoping that I would get some kind of scholarship to go play at BYU, but at that time they didn’t have any scholarships available,” he said. “So I ended up here at Oregon State, which was probably best for me to be up here than back at home.”

Paea soon followed Nau to Corvallis.

After a season as a stalwart defensive lineman for Snow, Paea was grabbed by the Beavers. The big draw was playing in the Pacific-10 Conference. Utah belongs to the Mountain West Conference.

“What I didn’t like is the conference,” he said. “It’s not as strong a conference as the Pac-10.”

Paea has two brothers who are interested in coming to Oregon State.

“It’s a lot of pressure,” he said. “It’s going to be fun, though, because I get to play against a lot of players from high school and a lot of players I played with at Snow.”

Nau and Paea have friends on the Utes’ roster. They know Utah running back Matt Asiata and Nau knows defensive tackle Aaron Tonga.

“To me, this is like the big game of the year,” Nau said. “Just to go back home and see everyone, see all my family and friends that will be there to support and also to see my old teammate Matt out there on the field.”