Joseph grew up playing soccer, taking after his Haitian-immigrant father, who earned a soccer scholarship that brought him to what was then known as Anderson College, where he met Joseph’s mother, an Iva native. However, he gradually “got too big” to continue playing soccer, so he turned to a different kind of football, and it stuck, especially after he started training with his bodybuilder father, which really transformed his game and began to teach him the principle of success coming through hard work.
But despite living in an area with such deep college football roots, Joseph’s childhood focus was on the professional ranks. He cared much more about what Michael Vick and the Atlanta Falcons were doing on Sundays than the Saturday performance of the Tigers, or the Gamecocks, or really any college football team for that matter. In fact, before his later high school years, he only remembers coming to one Clemson game.
That all changed once the recruiting process started.
“By the time I was getting recruited, I definitely knew about college football, and I knew when I got the Clemson offer, it was a big deal. When they offered me, my school was going crazy…they couldn’t believe it.”
Joseph ultimately fell in love with Clemson because of its proximity to home, which meant that in addition to maintaining his Sunday routine, his family could, and has, come to every home game. He also, predictably, loved the family atmosphere that Clemson is so well known for.
“The family here…I could tell that the coaches were good people and would treat you right. They weren’t the kind of people who would do anything to get a win…they were going to do things the right way. Those things had an impact on me.”
