“Without shoes,” Achilles Reyna looms over his teammates at 6 feet 6 ½ and 260 pounds. He has a wingspan of 7 feet 1 inch. He is athletic, and not just for his size, with flexibility and nimble footwork forged on the hardwoods but transferable to football.
Yet the Rainier Beach High School senior played football for the very first time only last year. His Vikings team advanced to the state 3A playoffs and finished ranked ninth in the state by MaxPreps. Then, playing basketball, his lifetime love, Reyna helped lead Rainier Beach to a repeat state 3A championship.
Six months later, Reyna accepted a football and NLI (Name, License, and Image) offer from Oregon, one of the top football programs in the country.
After only one season of organized football.
Which rarely happens and is even more of an anomaly, given the degree of difficulty of Reyna’s journey.
In their day, Reyna’s father, Jay, and his uncle, Brandon, were prime recruits and starters at Washington State. But the apple didn’t land very close to the tree – at least, not at first. Early on, Achilles Reyna tackled a kick returner who had signaled for a fair catch, marking him as untouchable to defenders.
“At the beginning, I was kind of nervous,” Reyna says of his budding football career. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
But he learned fast – enough to be named a second-team All-Metro Mountain Division defensive end as a junior. That part wasn’t much of a surprise to his head coach.
After Reyna’s first-ever practice with the football Vikings last year, Charles McFarland Jr. (“Coach Mack”) ran into the Rainier Beach gym. There, he found one of Reyna’s basketball coaches, Beach alum and former NBA star Jamal Crawford. Reyna was going to get a Division I scholarship and play in the NFL, McFarland told Crawford.
“In 17 years of coaching, I’ve been around a lot of different caliber players,” McFarland said, explaining his snap judgment of Reyna. “Yes, he is very raw, but he’s so aggressive, has so much natural ability, and is coachable. It’s like we’re molding him but giving him the freedom to still be an athlete.”
So far, so very good.
One of the country’s top recruiting experts, Brandon Huffman of Rivals/On3, saw Reyna and his squad christen the Southeast Athletic Complex at Rainier Beach last Saturday with a 55-0 shellacking of West Seattle. It was Huffman’s first live viewing of the out-of-nowhere prospect. He came away thinking of the hoops-star-turned-three-star Oregon football commit that, “there’s a very good chance that he ends up playing himself into a fourth star (out of five) when it’s all said and done.”
“A lot of kids in the Northwest think that they’re hoopers, and then they realize that there’s probably a ceiling, but by the time they turn to football, it’s too late,” Huffman explained. “For him, it’s interesting. He’s got these natural traits that nobody really has. Because he’s still new to the game, there aren’t a lot of bad habits. So while he still has a lot to learn and needs to be developed, you’re not having to un-train him in a lot of ways.”
After helping Rainier Beach to a repeat state 3A basketball title, Reyna, 18, continued to play exposure basketball in the spring and summer. He attended no football recruiting combines or university elite camps, which is almost unheard of. He had a one-season Hudl football reel to show college coaches, along with an elite basketball resume that includes a three-star rating by ESPN.
It was enough.
“It’s definitely crazy,” Reyna says. “If you told me a year and a half ago that I’d be going to Oregon for football, I’d literally think you were crazy and be like, ‘dude, I’ve never played football in my life. What are you talking about?’ And I’d be like, ‘I’m a basketball player, l love basketball.’ Things have changed so much, but I’m not mad about it at all.”
It’s difficult to imagine anyone in South Seattle being mad about any of the unique developments.
Two games into the 2026 season, the Vikings are 2-0, outscoring Bishop Blanchet, then West Seattle by a combined 96-19. They are ranked No. 4 in 3A by VarsityWA and 23rd in the state, regardless of classification, by MaxPreps. Senior quarterback Esquire Williams is second in the state with 659 total yards and sophomore sensation Damari’ae Barrington is first in the state with 30 points and fifth with 320 rushing yards.
Reyna and the rest of the Three Basketball Amigos, Wes Armstrong and Micah Ili-Meneese, give the Vikings an enviable infusion of senior size and athleticism. The 6-7, 240-pound Armstrong, the starting center from the basketball champs, had seven tackles for loss, 2 ½ sacks, and three receptions for 24 yards against West Seattle. Ili-Meneese, 6-4 and 195 pounds, the outstanding player of the state 3A basketball tournament, had three receptions for 41 yards and a touchdown, to go with six tackles on defense.
Before sitting out nearly the entire fourth quarter, Reyna shed a parade of double teams to log nine tackles, four for losses, two sacks, and a caused fumble. He leads the team with nine quarterback hurries in two games.
The Vikings (2-0) play at Seattle Prep on 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 18, at West Seattle Stadium. The following Friday, Sept. 25, they play a game of reckoning against defending 3A state champion O’Dea, also 7 p.m. at West Seattle Stadium.
If Achilles Reyna takes the unlikely path to stardom for the Oregon Ducks, their head football coach will have Reyna’s first high-school basketball coach to thank. In fact, Dan Lanning can offer treats when the Vikings close the regular season on Halloween against arch-rival Eastside Catholic at the Southeast Athletic Complex.
After three frustrating seasons, Reyna decided he could no longer play for Eastside coach Brent Merritt. “I didn’t feel confident,” Reyna said. “He made me feel really small. I didn’t feel his coaching style worked for me.”
Since the second grade, Reyna had played select basketball with the highly regarded, Seattle-based Rotary Style program. His close friend and teammate for much of that time was Ili-Meneese and other Viking stars-to-be. Rainier Beach was the most logical destination for a transfer, but it meant he’d have to sit out the first 40% of his junior season.
To keep himself occupied and in condition for the winter basketball season, Reyna decided to try football in the fall. It changed his life.
“He probably would have never played football had he not switched schools,” Jay Reyna says.
That’s because, in spite of his college football background, Jay Reyna and his wife Theresa did not want their sons to play football. The three Reyna boys are a combination of 6-5 Jay Reyna, who is Dutch and Mexican, and 5-3 ½ Theresa Reyna, who is Vietnamese – a mix the family calls “Dutchicanese.” They also inherited the Reyna athletic genes.
Concerned about the possibility of injuries, the Reynas tried steering their boys to soccer, swimming, among other sports – and even golf. “I wanted them to be 6-foot-5, 255-pound golfers,” their father said. “I thought that’d be a good career advantage for them.”
Basketball became the best answer, especially for Achilles, who’d been hyperactive since he was young. That also worked for his parents, but then the move to Rainier Beach opened the door to one of their biggest nightmares: another football player in the family.
“Oh my God, I was so worried,” Theresa Reyna said. “I could not stop worrying.”
At Achilles’ first game, Theresa Reyna addressed the other Rainier Beach mothers in the stands. Please ask your boys to protect my son, she pleaded. She was a newcomer, so they asked her to identify her son, supposing, she surmises, that he was some small Asian kid. When they learned it was the kid towering over all of theirs, the mothers said he was the one who should be protecting their sons.
Achilles Reyna received his first football offer during the basketball season, in January from Idaho. An offer came from Utah on February 18 and that one, according to Huffman, the recruiting expert, likely opened the floodgates. “Utah has done a fantastic job of finding those under-the-radar defensive linemen and turning them into NFL draft picks,” Huffman explained. In other words, the Utes’ offer made Reyna a legitimate prospect in the eyes of others.
Reyna ended up with football offers from Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Las Vegas, Boise State, Fresno State, Washington State, San Diego, Oregon State, San Jose State, Louisiana State, Texas A&M, Cal, and Washington. Oregon’s offer came on April 24; he accepted on June 8 with Utah, ironically, finishing a “close second.” Reyna also had five basketball offers – from Idaho, Fresno State, San Diego State, San Diego, and San Jose State.
Through self-assessment and opportunity, Reyna landed on a value proposition that makes sense for him and his future.
“I’ve been seeing myself more as a football player and I feel like I have a better chance of going to the NFL than I do the NBA,” Reyna said. “In the future, I’m going to have to end up picking one or the other any way. So I’d rather go to the best football school that I can and possibly not play basketball. Instead of going to a lower DI school so I can play both, but might not have the best chance of going pro in either of them.”
Achilles Reyna, who already has, wants to prove some people wrong. He wants to play both football and basketball at Oregon. And he wants to further defy the odds by playing real snaps as a freshman.
A lot of things will be stacked against Reyna on both counts. But he, after all, is the basketball star who, after a single year of football, nabbed a commitment to Oregon. It might be risky to bet against him.
Glenn Nelson is a former Seattle Times sportswriter and columnist, a founding executive at Rivals.com, a co-founder of Scout.com (now 247sports.com), and the founder of ESPN HoopGurlz and senior writer at ESPN.com. He also founded The Trail Posse (trailposse.com) to explore the intersection of race and the outdoors and covers Rainier Beach High School sports on his Substack, BeachBoyzBuzz.com.