How moving from Philadelphia to Oregon matured Omar Speights, LSU football linebacker

BATON ROUGE — Omar Speights was 17 years old when he went on a plane by himself for the first time.

He was moving from Philadelphia to Corvallis, Oregon, where he would spend his senior year living with his brother and attend Crescent Valley High School. It was also the first time he'd be living away from his mother or leaving Pennsylvania.

Departing was the right decision, but it wasn't the easy one.

"I wasn't expecting to be moving him across the United States," Patricia Reichner, Speights' mother, said. "I wasn't expecting to be missing his 12th-grade year, missing graduation. You know, all of that. ... It was extremely hard for me, definitely. And I know it was hard for him as well."

It all worked out in the end. Five years later, Speights has joined LSU football for his final year of college after four productive seasons at Oregon State and one season at Crescent Valley.

This will be the third state Speights has lived in over the last five years. It was those unique experiences and exposures to different environments that helped shape and mature Speights into the person he is today.

"I kind of had to grow up fast," Speights said. "You just learn to be on your own and stuff like that and take responsibility because you really got nobody to lean on so it's all about you."

The move to Oregon

There's a reason why Speights left Philadelphia in the first place. Actually, there are a few.

Growing up in West Philly wasn't easy for him and his family. Shootings and violence were all too common, and it only became a tougher place for Speights to live as he became older and gained more local notoriety for his talent on the football field.

"Of course, all cities have their violence (but) it's so bad now with the killings and the shootings that we don't want to go outside, we don't do anything," Reichner said. "You don't have the camaraderie of the block parties. ... nobody trusts anybody.

"You're constantly watching over your back."

The violence hit Speights close to home. On Aug. 18, 2018, Speights' friend and high school football teammate Kristian Marche was shot and killed near his home the same week he was expected to begin his freshman season as a track and field athlete at Penn State, according to authorities at the time.

Reichner declined to speak any further about Marche's death. But soon after the incident, Speight's older brother — Jeromy Reichner — reached out to Patricia about potentially moving his younger sibling to the west coast for his senior year of high school.

"He was like, 'Look, we've got to get him out of Philly,' " Patricia said.

There were other reasons moving Speights cross country made sense, beyond his safety.

Speights had committed to Oregon State in June; and Jeromy, also a football player, had transferred from Los Angeles Valley College to Oregon State that summer, giving Speights a place to live in Corvallis before joining the Beavers.

Speights also wanted to graduate high school and enroll at Oregon State early, but none of the schools in the Philadelphia area had the academic flexibility to allow him to do that.

"I ended up asking my brother and he got in contact with one of the schools out there (in Oregon) and it was like 'yeah, we do that,' " Speights said.

Patricia knew, at least eventually, that letting her son move across the country was the right decision. But that didn't make the initial shock of the idea of letting him go any easier to swallow.

"I actually got mad at my older son for a minute because I was like, 'Why are you taking him from me?'" Patricia said. "... I was completely irrational. But in that moment, I was just going through so many different emotions."

Corvallis and Speights' maturation

Upon their arrival in Oregon, Speights and his brother were quickly met with the friendly embrace of the Corvallis community.

Patricia remembers neighbors offering to help the boys with groceries. Jeromy recalls the wives of Speights' high school football coach and high school athletic director being particularly helpful during their transition to Corvallis.

That friendly nature which permeated through Corvallis was an adjustment from what Speights and his brother had been used to in Philadelphia.

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"People out here are very openly friendly, they'll say hi to strangers. (But) back home, it's kind of like, don't do that," Jeromy said. "Or like, people who live out (in Oregon), they like to stare at things. And back home you can't do that. So it was like, it was very weird at first."

"... The biggest thing is even though my Mom is white, we never had white people help us. So when we got out to Oregon and there were white people asking us to help us, like me and Omar had talked about it, it was kind of abnormal. ... It was just one of those things where we come from a community where black people and white people don't necessarily have the best relationship."

But Speights absorbed the culture shock quickly with his congenial personality, as the lack of stress and distractions in Corvallis allowed him to focus on his academics and football, and unearth who he was.

"I just feel like in Philly, you get so caught up in just trying to survive in Philly," Patricia said. "... Him being able to get to Oregon allowed him to get to know himself ... his strengths, his weaknesses."

But the true turning point for Speights in his maturation process, in Jeromy's eyes, was at the beginning of his sophomore year when he had his daughter. It's when Jeromy said he stopped going to parties and began focusing on football even more.

"Watching him be a father to her just shows me just how much he's grown and how much he's matured," Patricia said.

That maturity quickly began to show on the football field.

After a successful freshman campaign, Speights recorded 63 tackles during the COVID-shortened 2020 season before racking up more than 80 tackles in each of the next two years while earning AP All-Pac-12 second-team honors in his final season with the Beavers.

Speights' journey now leads him to Baton Rouge, as the transition from Corvallis has been much easier for him in large part because of that first move from Philadelphia to Oregon five years ago.

That original decision — to relocate a 17-year-old Speights to the West Coast — didn't come without its emotional difficulties.

But now, Patricia and Jeromy have no regrets.

"I think that was the best decision," Jeromy said. "Not only because it pulled Omar out of harm's way. But also I feel like it forced him to be focused."

Koki Riley covers LSU sports for The Daily Advertiser. Email him at kriley@theadvertiser.com and follow him on Twitter at @KokiRiley

This article originally appeared on Lafayette Daily Advertiser: LSU football: Omar Speights move, Philadelpha to Oregon