By Movieguide® Staff
Clemson Tigers infielder Jay Dillard grew up half an hour from Memorial Stadium, prayed his way into a walk-on offer at his dream school and now spends his off-diamond hours reading the Gospel of John with his team chaplain. On the May 14 episode of The Walk Podcast, the Anderson, South Carolina, native walked host Joshua Swanson through the prayers, the long-shot offer and the verses he leans on between at-bats.
“My identity isn’t in the game, it’s in Him,” Dillard told The Walk Podcast. “Good or bad, when I go home at night, like He’s won the biggest battle.”
Dillard, who finished a sports communication degree at Clemson University in three years, comes by his orange-and-purple loyalty honestly. His great-grandfather, Bill Dillard, played football for the Tigers from 1932 to 1934 and sits in the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame. His grandfather ran track on the same campus.
Growing up in the shadow of Death Valley, Dillard told Swanson, meant tailgates every fall and Clemson games no matter the sport. He played football and basketball as a kid, then went all-in on baseball in eighth grade, and by his senior year at T.L. Hanna High School, the college coaches were calling.
The catch? Clemson hadn’t. Other offers sat on the table — College of Charleston, Coastal Carolina, the Citadel — and Dillard’s family kept telling him he couldn’t make those coaches wait forever.
“I remember laying in bed like, ‘Jesus, please. I never envisioned going somewhere else,’” Dillard said on the podcast.
Roughly two days later, in a summer tournament, he homered. Clemson called. Coach Monty Lee offered him a preferred walk-on spot, and Dillard committed not long after.
“That’s the Lord riding in on a horse,” he told Swanson. “It can’t be anything else.”
The foundation was poured long before that home run, Dillard said. His parents prayed at every meal, prayed for each other, and made faith feel like the most natural rhythm of a Sunday afternoon.
“They followed Jesus, like, absolutely,” Dillard said. “Everything revolved around Jesus, and they laid the foundation — which I couldn’t be any more grateful for.”
Once he got to Clemson, Sunday team training pulled him out of his old church rhythm, so he built new ones. He joined a campus Bible study, started reading John with the team chaplain, and lately he’s been memorizing Joshua 1:9 and Psalm 56.
The Walk Podcast, hosted by Joshua Swanson, exists to give Christian collegiate and professional athletes a platform to talk about Jesus rather than their stat lines. Movieguide® previously covered the show in June 2024, when members of Red Rocks Worship sat down with Swanson to discuss their identity, their touring schedule and the album they were about to record.
Dillard’s episode lands in good company on Movieguide®’s beat. The publication has chronicled the testimonies of Yankees slugger Aaron Judge — whose bio reads “Christian. Faith, Family, then Baseball” — Dodgers shortstop Tommy Edman, and Detroit Tigers outfielder Kerry Carpenter, all of whom keep saying, in their own words, that the scoreboard isn’t the point.
Near the end of the conversation, Swanson asked Dillard what he’d tell a viewer who might be, in his words, “curious about this Jesus guy.” The answer came without a beat.
“There’s a father, a friend, that loves you, that is so merciful and has so much grace, that wants to be in your life and will guide you through life,” Dillard said. “Even when you try to ball your fist up and do it yourself, he’s always there to say, like, ‘No, I’ve got you.’”
The episode runs just over 24 minutes and is the latest installment in The Walk Podcast’s College Baseball Series. For a Clemson kid who prayed for one specific phone call and got it, the takeaway is the one he keeps coming back to: the win was never his to begin with.
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