Semoball

Circuitous journey ends up at Southeast for Ja'Chai Baker

Southeast Missouri State junior offensive lineman Ja'chai Baker adjusts his jersey during practice Thursday at the Rosengarten Athletic Complex.
Ben Matthews ~ Southeast Missourian

When Drew Forbes walked out of the Rosengarten Athletic Complex for the final time as a Southeast Missouri State football player, there were a lot of forlorn looks on the faces of the Redhawk coaching staff.

Forbes was tremendous during his four seasons with the program and that talent is precisely why the Cleveland Browns selected him in the sixth round of the 2019 NFL Draft.

However, the left tackle graduating wasn’t what concerned sixth-year coach Tom Matukewicz.

“My biggest concern is not losing Drew Forbes, it was losing Lucas Orchard,” Matukewicz said of the center. “Because he was a leader and told everybody what to do.

“Forbes had this dominating part of it but Lucas made it all work.”

Those two athletes, along with two other starters, all departed following the 2018 season and so how the revamped offensive line will gel and perform this season remains to be seen. However, there are several reasons for optimism including one very, very big reason.

“Wait until you see our left tackle play,” Matukewicz said of incoming recruit Ja’Chai Baker. “You’ll be like ‘Why is he here?’”

Baker is a 6-foot-6, 314-pound beast of a man who has the physical skills to be playing football at a higher level. In fact, he was playing football at a higher level before coming to Southeast.

Baker was a two-star recruit out of Council Bluffs, Iowa in high school and spent a redshirt season at Wyoming. He and two other Cowboy players were dismissed from the team in April 2017 and he subsequently transferred to Iowa Western Community College.

“He is a guy who could have played at higher schools,” Redhawk offensive line coach Ben Blake said. “It was just are you going to take a chance on him?”

Blake said that the Southeast coaches spent a lot of time with Baker, as well as with those that knew him and they came to the conclusion that he was worth investing in as a student-athlete and a person.

“Once you got to know his story,” Blake said, “where he is from, what he has been through, and how he has overcome those things, we did our diligent work.

“We asked the head coach. We asked the athletic director. We asked the academic counselor. You had a lot of people that were very close to him that signed off on him and said he had really turned around and understands what he needs to do to be successful.”

Joining that group of supporters was current Southeast coordinator of student-athlete development Betsy Wilcox, who worked with athletes at Iowa Western before coming to Cape Girardeau.

In addition to the situation at Wyoming, Baker also was adamant that he knew better of where he should play than his coaches.

“He had a non-traditional route,” Matukewicz said of Baker’s athletic journey. “He was 6-6 and 340 and said he was ‘only a d-lineman.’ No one could tell him any different even though my wife could have told him ‘You’re not a d-lineman.’”

After transferring to Iowa Western, he played four games in 2017 on the defensive line before redshirting. He finally accepted his coaches advice to move to the offensive side of the ball in 2018 and the move paid off.

He played in seven games last fall, his first-ever as an offensive lineman, and was good enough to earn Second Team All-ICCAC honors.

“That guy looks like he belongs at Mizzou,” Matukewicz said.

He looked that way in the spring after enrolling at Southeast in January.

He came to Cape Girardeau a bit overweight (he has dropped 20 pounds since last season) and inexperienced at the position, but his physical skills, size, and strength were simply too much to keep him off the field.

“Physically,” Blake said, “he is very talented and very gifted. As far as the position, he is very raw and is going off of natural ability right now.”

Going through 14 practices in the spring helped Baker continue to grow as an offensive football player and Blake said every day would do that for him moving forward.

“He’s going to be better week 11 than he was week one,” Blake said. “He has a skill set that you don’t create on your own. You’ve been gifted that.”

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