Name: Tamara Davis
Title: Coordinator of Defensive Operations
Hometown: Opelousas, La.
Claim to Fame: Resident Microbiologist
For Tamara Davis, LSU football is family.
That’s meant both literally and figuratively. She considers the people she works around as close as blood, but when she got her start, it was partially because her actual cousin, Devery Henderson, was a player on the team.
“I had no interest in football, at all,” she says. “Knew nothing about football at all, to be honest with you. I was a microbiology major. A totally different world.”
There aren’t many microbiologists walking around the halls of Tiger Stadium and the football ops building. Davis is one of them. She joined LSU as a student worker in 2001, working for Sharon Lewis in her first year on the job. Davis’ original intent was to go to dental school, but something about a sport she admittedly knew nothing about kept her attention.
In particular, the people.
“I had no plans to stay here,” she says. “I was an intern in grad school, and a job opened up. I ended up liking the job more than I thought I would. It was something different every day. My aunt owned a dentist’s office, and I thought, ‘Hm. Might be kind of boring.’”
Not much about her work these days is boring. She works with Dave Aranda and the defensive staff, and essentially all the players. If you’re ever talking with a football player and he gets a text, good chance it’s from Davis – a reminder of an upcoming meeting, a heads up about a change in practice time, or maybe just checking in.
Her favorite part of the job, of course, is “dealing with the players” – “They are hilarious,” she says – and recruiting, “because you meet different people from different walks of life.”
“The rewarding part is watching them come from the recruiting process, playing here, and then going to the NFL or moving on to their jobs,” she says. “That’s great to see the whole process unfold.”
Dental school is no longer in the picture, but Davis has plans to get back into graduate school soon. She knows she’ll at least have a nice place to study – the Cox Academic Center for Student Athletes is just a short walk away – and family to make sure she stays on top of her books.
“We’re a dysfunctional family,” she laughs, “but it works. It’s like a true family atmosphere. We’ve been around each other for so long, especially the women. It’s a unique place.”
Be the first to comment