Codey McElroy tries to stick with Bucs after stints in baseball, college basketball, coaching

TAMPA — The workout Codey McElroy asked for arrived in the first texts, but the real message Sean Cooper wanted his former player to see came last.

It was October 2020, and the Bucs had invited McElroy to another tryout after waiving the tight end the previous month. McElroy asked his Southeastern Oklahoma State strength and conditioning coach to help him prepare for the audition he hoped would restart his NFL career. Cooper texted the basics — static stretches, dynamic warmups for hip mobility, lifts if desired, skips, runs and jumps. At the bottom, he typed, “Go out there and pretend like you’re playing pickup basketball.”

McElroy understood.

Before becoming an NFL tight end — one entering a pivotal training camp after Rob Gronkowski’s retirement — he walked onto the Oklahoma State basketball team. He also spent two years in the Atlanta Braves’ minor league system, played college baseball at three schools, coached a year at Wichita State and failed with two NFL teams before latching on with the Bucs the last three seasons. Pickup basketball served as an underlying constant at each stop.

Basketball was always McElroy’s “safe space,” Cooper said. Baseball gave him the first glimpse of life as a professional athlete and the afterlife as a coach. But football — the sport he hadn’t played since middle school before joining Division II Southeastern Oklahoma State in 2017 — eventually stuck.

“You go from not playing (football) to playing in the NFL, I mean it’s just crazy,” McElroy’s father, Joe, said. “It’s kinda like going from junior high to sitting in front of everybody wanting to do brain surgery.”

Overcoming a late football start

Sometimes, Bo Atterberry couldn’t gauge whether players asking for tryouts were serious. But McElroy intrigued Southeastern Oklahoma State’s head coach when he entered the football offices two weeks before the 2017 season.

McElroy didn’t know routes, but he stood nearly 6-feet-6. During his audition, he sprinted a few yards, jutted out for a corner pass and “caught it like he’d been catching the ball for 20 years,” former wide receivers coach John Heavner said.

Atterberry recognized McElroy’s potential, but he wasn’t sure football knowledge and reps could mesh in time. When Atterberry asked if a helmet fit, McElroy replied with, “Coach, I don’t know how it’s supposed to fit,” McElroy’s father recalled.

“I couldn’t even learn a playbook, I was so far behind,” McElroy said.

The staff taught him a three-point stance and how to keep his hands tucked inside on blocks. Tight ends coach Alex Rainwater dissected formations into digestible wristband clues. McElroy didn’t start learning to read defenses until midway through the season, Rainwater said.

In the second game, McElroy caught his first touchdown reception by jumping over a defensive back. Since an opposing player attracted scouts to the game, “that’s kinda what got the eyes on me,” McElroy said. Four weeks later, he reeled in a career-long 42-yard completion by beating a safety and diving for an overthrown pass.

“That’s when you knew,” Cooper said.

For Southeastern Oklahoma State, McElroy became “a miracle” because of its uncertain tight end situation, Heavner said. For McElroy, everything needed for an NFL opportunity started to align. Scouts called his coaches. He participated in a pro day. He signed with an agent. Heavner didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about NFL prospects as a Division II coach, he said, but McElroy’s camp prepared themselves for the possibility.

When McElroy played poorly, or when stresses about the future became overbearing, he walked to the campus rec center and organized pickup basketball. He did the same at Texas — one of his three college baseball programs — and Oklahoma State, too. As a minor-leaguer, McElroy played pickup in Orlando around Atlanta’s 2015 spring training sessions.

Two months after that spring training ended, McElroy called his father and said he planned to retire from Class A Rome (Ga.). Joe was surprised his son wanted to stop after just two seasons.

But two years later, on a day McElroy borrowed a family car to register for Southeastern Oklahoma State classes, Joe’s phone buzzed again with his son’s number. The school had a football field. McElroy’s extinguished professional career now had a new spark.

Trying to stick (again)

The 2017 season marked McElroy’s first year playing football since seventh grade. He didn’t like it back then, Joe said. Baseball became McElroy’s favorite, so that’s what they focused on.

He attended Chattanooga (Oklahoma) High School because it offered both fall and spring baseball. Joe originally joined as Chattanooga’s softball coach but transitioned when the baseball position opened, and watching his dad coach ignited a similar passion in McElroy.

When he finished basketball at Oklahoma State, he stayed on as baseball’s graduate assistant for the fall before moving to Wichita State’s volunteer assistant position, where head coach Todd Butler let him coach the infield and first base.

The next year, Butler saw McElroy’s highlights on Twitter, leaping over Division II defensive backs. A few years after that, McElroy appeared on his TV with the Bucs.

“Next, he might be a goalie in hockey,” Butler joked.

McElroy caught his only regular-season NFL pass in December 2019 but has become a practice-squad mainstay. He earned targets at June’s minicamp, and McElroy said improvements in blocking and understanding the offense have led him “in the right direction.”

Bucs head coach Todd Bowles said McElroy represents a “big body” and a willing blocker but added the 29-year-old still needs to lower his positioning and sharpen his technique. McElroy hasn’t cemented his status as a rostered player, but he’s continued to leverage himself as the offseason reaches training camp.

“It would have been easy for him to just kinda sit back and maybe just go be a (baseball) lesson guy and go play in the men’s basketball league and destroy people until you’re 40 and then your knees go out,” former Wichita State pitching coach Mike Steele said. “Drop bombs on the softball field and crap like that.

“And (McElroy) was like, ‘No, I’m gonna go do something extremely, extremely difficult and improbable.’”