'The biggest game at the park'

When Trey Lathan thinks rivalries, his mind is immediately transported back a decade or so, to his days of little league football in Miami.

“Suniland Sun Devils versus the South Kendall Seahawks,” he said, with a huge smile instantly lighting up his face. “I was 12. That was a pretty big game, you know. Probably the biggest game at the park at the time.”

Fast-forward 10 years, and Lathan sits on the brink of competing in his second Border War game between bitter college football rivals Kansas and Missouri.

SEC vs. Big 12. Former conference foes squaring off on campus and in KU’s stadium for the first time since 2005. Fans on both sides with history that dates back to family members who knew family members who knew people who were involved in the initial Kansas-Missouri conflicts all the way back in the Civil War days.

So, yeah, Lathan understands that this game — 7 p.m. Friday night at David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium on FOX — is infinitely bigger than that little league clash of his childhood.

But you couldn’t have convinced him of that at the time. No chance.

“We played them back-to-back for 2 years in the league we were in,” Lathan recalled in an interview with R1S1 Sports earlier this week. “It was a lot of emotions both times. You know, you’ve got family members, you’ve got people in the stands saying, ‘We need this.’ They had a whole lot of other stuff going, but, at the time, it felt like the biggest stage on Earth.”

Lathan, who then wore the No. 4 that he still wears today and was known by his given name of Travious, played both wide receiver and linebacker for the Sundevils. In fact, in the Miami Xtreme Youth Football League’s 2015 “Super Bowl,” Lathan hauled in a 50-yard touchdown reception to help lead his team to victory.

That capped a third consecutive title and three straight undefeated seasons.

“It was pretty intense,” he said, still smiling. “Guys were talking and it got down to the last minute. They took a safety and gave us the ball back with like 30 seconds left and we went down and scored a touchdown to win the game. We won both of them.”

Asked if he still carries any pregame traditions or hype routines with him today that he utilized to win big with the Sundevils, Lathan pointed to just one.

“Other than just talking to my mom, that’s pretty much it,” he said.

Now that he’s set to take on the Tigers for the second consecutive season — KU lost at Mizzou 42-31 last season, when Lathan led all defenders with 13 tackles — the veteran KU linebacker has a better feel for what this rivalry is and why it means so much to so many.

“Definitely the fans,” he said. “We just prepared for another opportunity to play another team, but it was the fans that really showed me what it’s all about and really got into it.”

And while you might be laughing at the idea that a 12-year-old Miami little league team’s rivalry provided Lathan with enough context to measure against Kansas-Missouri, you should remember that he was a part of the famed Backyard Brawl between Pitt and West Virginia in 2022, 2023 and 2024.

“That’s intense, too,” he said. “We started off with that Sweet Caroline song every day at practice. I hated that song. But that right there was a real rivalry. It was something like this, with two teams that just didn’t like each other. There was some real pain and passion behind that one.”

Lathan’s Mountaineers won one of those three matchups, winning 17-6 in 2023 and losing by a combined 11 points in the other two meetings.

So, what would he tell people in Pittsburgh and Morgantown about the KU-Mizzou Border War rivalry?

“It’s something else,” he said. The story’s not the same (as Pitt-West Virginia), but it’s definitely something similar.”