Note: The following appears in the North Carolina football digital gameday guide, available HERE.
One of the true marks of a Clemson Tiger is their ability to sing our beloved alma mater word-for-word with passion and pride, no matter the circumstance. But of course, the truest mark of bleeding orange is not just memorizing the lyrics, but living them out as a Clemson Family with intentionality, resilience and joy.
And this year, P.A.W. Journey, the premier player relations department in the country that calls Clemson home, is carrying that banner with enthusiasm.
“That the Tiger’s roar may echo, O’er the mountain height” is what we are left with every time the Tigers join our voices together to commemorate competition, achievement and our beloved university. So, we have asked our Clemson football scholar-athletes to answer the question of what their “echo” is and will be as men, as leaders and as a team on their leadership and holistic development journeys.
At Clemson, our roar is loudest and most impactful when we take pride in being excellent in the classroom, on the field, in our families and in our communities. The essence of our echo is not how many people are roaring, it is the power that comes from our intensity of commitment and unity to the same mission from generation to generation.
This is what we encourage and empower our football scholar-athletes to pursue every day through mentorship, education and experiential learning. While winning in football can take them and Clemson very far, the mark they leave on this world has no bounds when they embrace the power of winning holistically in the way they live, lead and love.
Brayden Jacobs, a sophomore offensive lineman, perfectly articulated this year’s theme of “Echo” in his reflection about what he learned on P.A.W. Journey’s annual service-abroad trip to Sydney, Australia in May.
“You can serve people you don’t even see.”
Jacobs also attended the service trip to Sorrento, Italy last year, and after choosing to spend over half of his summer break serving others abroad for two years straight, he carries an invaluable lesson with him that will influence him and all those he touches, now and in the future, which is the aim of P.A.W. Journey.
After being selected as the Most Consistent Award winner for the Business Week trip to Miami as well as July 2026 P.A.T. Man-of-the-Month, Ari Watford has passionately displayed the “Echo” theme this year.
“Be yourself and develop something that works for you, no matter where you go or what you do,” was what he shared as his Business Week reflection, showing the confidence he built from finding his echo in boardrooms and before CEOs of organizations like the Orange Bowl Committee and the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau.
Watford also committed to understanding what it takes to live a legacy and make an impact no matter where you go by becoming a P.A.W. Journey ambassador during the spring semester, joining a prestigious group of leaders on the team who embrace leadership and holistic development on a high level for the betterment of the team as well as themselves.
The vision of P.A.W. Journey is to be the paragon for student-athlete development and player relations in the industry of athletics by producing first-class men and world-class leaders. Thus, the men of Clemson football are our echo, and this echo is already “o’er the mountain height,” as evidenced by 66 scholar-athletes participating in our Business Week and service-abroad trips, earning microinternships with 22 companies across the United States and Mexico, and amassing over 1,100 service hours as a team.
We even had 24 scholar-athletes participate in two of our three flagship initiatives this year, further demonstrating how contagious the spirit of leadership and holistic development can become for our scholar-athletes and the people they serve and lead.
Further, P.A.W. Journey’s echo has extended to the NFL, with Clemson being the first college football program to conduct a microinternship with its front office in 2022, paving the way for other teams to experience this microinternship every year since.
Beyond one microinternship with the NFL, football programs like Florida and Oklahoma, and others across the nation, have adopted their own versions of player relations departments inspired by P.A.W. Journey. When the men of Clemson football pursue a lifestyle of winning while at Clemson and once they become professionals, husbands, fathers and citizens, their legacy is inevitable.
The power of the Paw cannot be contained in our college town of Clemson, and this truth inspires P.A.W. Journey to embody a lifestyle of winning, day in and day out. We are Tigers through and through, and our roar echoes in the valley and on the mountaintop as the underdog or the frontrunner, and when no one is in the stands or everyone is watching.
It is our hope that being first-class and world-class as individuals and as a team will inspire others on our campus and in our community to join in on this echo that has and will continue to endure, because true champions always seek new victories.