River Rouge High School’s football team was in the midst of a recent offseason weightlifting session in Michigan.
In between reps, players would peer over and look at Ruke Orhorhoro. Just like them, he was drenched in sweat and lifting as much as possible to achieve gains.
Except he wasn’t one of their teammates.
Orhorhoro (pronounced Oh-roh-roh-roh) graduated from River Rouge in 2018 and is now a 6-foot-4, 295-pound defensive tackle at Clemson. He often returns to work out with his alma mater.
No one told Orhorhoro to do it. There were no Clemson coaches around and it wasn’t a requirement from the Tigers’ strength and conditioning staff.
He just wanted to be there. He always wants to get better.
“They can see this is no joke,” River Rouge athletic director and head football coach Corey Parker said of his current players. “A national championship-rostered player, a guy that plays in the Final Four is pouring with sweat inside of the high school weight room. … It’s all about what (Orhorhoro) knows he has to do to be better to help Clemson take that next step, and that’s just impressive in itself.”
Both Parker and Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables agree: While Orhorhoro hasn’t scratched the surface on his potential, he’s well on his way because of his coachability and eagerness to learn.
It’s why he’s even playing football.
Making the case for football
Ruke Orhorhoro was a basketball player.
He grew up loving the sport and was a lanky point guard in middle school before filling out some and switching to center in high school. He was always a physical player and didn’t mind a little contact on the hardwood.
Orhorhoro could do it all — dunk, block shots, rebound. He averaged a double-double as a sophomore.
Parker was impressed with Orhorhoro as a basketball player, but he was more intrigued with the possibility of him playing football.
“He had great hip bend,” Parker said. “He can bend at the hips very good and he had very, very good flexibility to change direction, so that’s when I knew the potential was high. Most big guys are very stiff just by nature. He wasn’t.”
The River Rouge football coach didn’t come on too strong with his pitch. He fostered a relationship with Orhorhoro, first and foremost. It was easy since the then-sophomore had secretly wanted to play football. Orhorhoro also has a certain charisma to him that would make even the biggest introvert feel comfortable. He can have someone laughing simply by how he says something before flashing a dimpled, gap-toothed grin.
“We could crack jokes about different things,” Parker said. “He had a level of understanding about it, but we could also talk about weightlifting and getting stronger because he wanted to get stronger than he was.”
As a basketball player, Orhorhoro was 6 feet, 4 inches, 210 pounds and good enough to help the Panthers reach the Class B state semifinals on March 24, 2017 at Michigan State’s Breslin Center. The Panthers lost in a heartbreaker — Joshua Laman made his first 3-pointer of the season at the buzzer to lift Ludington over River Rouge 51-50 in overtime.
That was the last organized basketball game Orhorhoro would ever play.
Parker was handing out snacks to players as they got on the bus after the game when Orhorhoro gave him the good news: He’d start training for football that Monday.
“I took one day off after we lost just to see what it was like, but I hate taking days off, so I would just go in (the weight room) and lift by myself,” Orhorhoro said. “(Parker) caught me in there and we went through a whole workout and we talked about a workout plan. He just told me if I stay committed and keep coming in the gym, then things will turn out good for me.”
Orhorhoro was an easy sell for football. His parents were another story.
Education comes first
Oghenerukevwe “Ruke” Orhorhoro is from Urhobo, a small tribe located in south Nigeria. His family moved to Michigan when he was 9 years old. He’s the youngest of eight children, with all of his siblings completing or working to complete some form of post-secondary education.
One of his brothers, Danny, has a master’s degree from Wayne State University, while one of his older sisters, who Parker refers to as “Big Sis,” was a student at the University of Toledo while Ruke was at River Rouge.
Sports were a distant second to education and Orhorhoro’s parents needed Parker to know that. Once he agreed to make sure that Ruke, who had a 3.7 GPA in high school, would keep his academics first, the Orhorhoros agreed to let their baby boy join the football team.
Getting into football form
If Google didn’t exist, it would be hard to imagine a slim Orhorhoro. If you ask him, though, the Nigerian footballer still sees himself as he was in 2016.
“I’m pretty skinny myself,” he said, unfazed by the ensuing laughter. “I look good but we’re not going to get into all that.”
The reality check comes when Orhorhoro steps on the scale and the shock of “300” looking back at him sets in. The redshirt sophomore’s gains started when he was in high school and Parker laid out the plan on how to get Orhorhoro to bulk up for his first football season.
“With his dedication to the weight room and his dedication to his body, that let us know, ‘OK, he’s really serious about this,’ ” Parker said. “He’s really serious about not only being a good player individually, but being a great team, a great guy to fit the team that fit the scheme, so just a hard worker on the field.”
Parker handled the weightlifting and conditioning portion, while Orhorhoro handled the diet. Chocolate milk, peanut butter sandwiches and eating out of boredom were the winning combination.
By the end of his junior year and first football season, Orhorhoro said he weighed 260 pounds.
When it came time to figure out what position Orhorhoro played, the first option was wide receiver, but his hands weren’t that great (he assures he’s a better catcher now, though).
Tight end? Nope.
Linebacker? Not it, either.
Defensive tackle fit just right.
Through the position-searching process, Orhorhoro said he was just listening to whatever his coaches had him do, but he fell in love with pass rushing. He’d watch YouTube videos of Los Angeles Rams defensive tackle Aaron Donald and was enamored with the relentless way Donald could get to the quarterback. Orhorhoro has a knack for mimicking what he sees and channeled his inner Aaron Donald early on, and it paid off.
“He wanted to be a great pass rusher,” Parker said, “was one of the sack leaders in our state, helped take us to the state semifinals two years back to back and did a fantastic job of understanding what we were asking him to do as far as stopping the run on the way to the pass.”
His first season of football earned him scholarship offers from all over the country before he ultimately decided on Clemson on June 15, 2018. The choice was unanimous with his mother also approving of the institution because of its Christian feel.
“They have an understanding about faith there, and that was it,” Parker recalled Mrs. Orhorhoro saying.
Coming to Clemson
Orhorhoro played 84 snaps over nine games as a freshman, making nine tackles. He played a limited 33 snaps in four games as a sophomore in 2020 and sustained an injury in the season opener at Wake Forest, qualifying him for a medical redshirt.
In the first two games of this year, Orhorhoro has tallied nine tackles, 2½ for loss, and started the season opener. Venables has been pleased with what he’s seen so far from the redshirt sophomore defensive tackle.
Orhorhoro still plays basketball from time to time. He wants it known he’s the best basketball player on the Tigers’ team and casually says he’s 90% from 3-point range. Whether it be basketball or football, in River Rouge High School’s weight room or Clemson University’s football facilities, Orhorhoro has shown a dedication to learning his craft and hopes to be the best version of himself in his fifth-ever season of football.
“Eager to come and learn and improve every day, so he’s really straining,” Venables said, “and because of that strain and his consistency of showing up everyday with the right mindset, he’s been a microcosm of that incremental improvement. … He’s got a tremendous ceiling that he hasn’t reached yet.”