Dennis Schwesinger gives the same advice to his son Carson before every game: Keep your eyes up and see what you’re going to hit.

Because it could be a piano.

The Schwesinger family used to count how many times he ended up hitting the floor or crashing into someone or something — which was once a piano — during middle school basketball games at Santa Clarita Christian School.

“It wasn’t because he was uncoordinated,” Garrick Moss, a family friend and former coach of Schwesinger’s said. “He just went so hard. And he went for every loose ball.”

Schwesinger is now crashing into opposing players on the field, but he’s doing as a UCLA linebacker with the same heart that he had as a student-athlete at Santa Clarita Christian School, a K-12 school with an enrollment of 560.

The redshirt junior went from walk-on to team captain at UCLA and leads the Big Ten Conference with 109 tackles in addition to 7.5 tackles for loss and three sacks. He’s a semifinalist for the Butkus Award, which is given to the nation’s top linebacker, as well as the Burlsworth Trophy, which is given to the top walk-on.

“I knew how good Carson was when we would sit there and watch the scout field,” Bruins senior linebacker Kain Medrano said. “He was doing what he’s doing right now to our offense three years ago. I’ve seen it, I’ve witnessed it for two years now.”

Big talent at a small school

Schwesinger’s rise has been underway for more than two years, though, and it started at a humble school in the Santa Clarita Valley that’s a ministry of Santa Clarita Baptist Church. He played every sport possible, which is not uncommon for students at small Christian schools.

By the time he was a freshman, he was piling up stats while playing both ways on the varsity football team. He was bigger and more athletic than most kids at the school and in the lower divisions in which the Cardinals played.

“He was one of those kids who you hope don’t leave,” Moss said. “But they were Schwesingers — they weren’t going to leave.”

The family was dedicated to Santa Clarita Christian School, but when the 11-man football program converted to 8-man, they had to make a decision when it came to their middle child’s athletic career.

“I remember talking to the Schwesingers,” Moss said. “What is Carson going to do? I mean, he has to go somewhere to play at a high level because he’s extremely gifted.”

Oaks Christian School was Schwesinger’s next destination. A family member worked there and two coaches who had previously been at Santa Clarita Christian School were also involved in the Lions’ football program.

The Westlake Village school is an athletic powerhouse in Southern California. The football program has produced UCLA standouts Zach Charbonnet and Bo Calvert as well as Oregon star Kayvon Thibodeaux.

Coming to Oaks Christian was similar to a walk-on experience for Schwesinger.

“I was showing up kind of from nowhere,” he said. “Nobody knows who you are or anything like that. And just having to put your head down, work and and see what’s going to happen.”

He finished his junior season as a safety with 80 tackles in 11 games and had six interceptions in five games his senior year before walking on at UCLA and earning a scholarship in late August 2022.

A competitive family

The time at Oaks Christian marked another change for Schwesinger: It was his first time not having his dad as a coach. He still talks with his dad about football to this day, but without him on the coaching staff at Oaks, Schwesinger was forced to come out of his shell.

He had always been a rambunctious kid growing up at home and yet, on the outside, he remained shy and professional, especially in his approach to football.

“My mom would tell you I was the antagonist,” Schwesinger said with a laugh. “One time she said if I was her first kid, she wouldn’t have had any more because I was so rough.”

He fought to keep up with his older brother and sister athletically and academically, which has led him to a capstone project as a bioengineering major that involves developing deep learning algorithms that can automatically process knee MRIs.

The project deals mostly with degenerative knee issues like osteoarthritis, but Schwesinger partly chose the topic because of the number of MRIs done for sports injuries in his family.

“I’m really impressed that Carson is able to excel in football and our rigorous bioengineering curriculum at the same time,” said Holden Wu, a professor of bioengineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and radiological sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine.

“He is engaged and has been mainly working on the problem definition, information organization and presentation aspects of the project. I look forward to more interactions with Carson as the capstone project progresses.”

Schwesinger chooses to keep his athletic and academic lives separate, hardly even wearing his UCLA football-branded clothing to class. Bioengineering is an escape from the college football lifestyle that dominates most of his time.

“The thing with engineering, too, is not a lot of students in engineering care about football,” he said. “So that’s a nice thing. It’s a nice almost break from what seems to be your whole life at times.”

The persona Schwesinger shows to the world is still shy, even with the spotlight that’s been thrust on him this season. As he slowly gets used to the attention, the rowdiness he had as a kid remains a part of him.

The energy grown from sibling battles is thrown behind whatever he’s working at — whether it’s in the film room or the classroom — and with the same character he had from the beginning.

“A lot of kids that go through SCCS, they have that humbleness,” Moss said. “They’re an encourager. They’re a hard worker athletically. We know Carson and he’s talented. We knew that would show up.”