It's not uncommon to see athletes, especially football players, sporting dreadlocks nowadays.
It's no exception for twins Shaquill and Shaquem Griffin, who both play for the Seahawks. However, while they were at Central Florida, they claim their former coach, George O'Leary, had a huge problem with their long-locked hairstyles.
While appearing on "SI Now", the twins said O'Leary made them cut several inches off their hair, threatening that if they didn't they wouldn't be allowed to play.
“To this day I’m still not sure (why we had to cut it),” Shaquill said. “When it comes to cutting our hair, with him I feel it’s personal.
"I can tell you a little story about it: going into camp that same year we cut it, he said, ‘I just don’t want to see the hair outside the helmet.’ And we had a lot of players whose hair was a lot longer than ours. So I was like, 'Ok, it just won’t show.'
“So me and my brother folded our dreads in half and put rubber bands around it so it was really short and it didn’t show. So we were like, we did what he said, we should be good. He came back and said, ‘I don’t want you to fold your hair, I want you to cut it.’
“That’s the part where it was like, ok, maybe this is a little personal, because you just said you didn’t want it to show out of the helmet and we did exactly what you said. At this point, he told me if you don’t cut it you won’t play, and the same for your brother.”
Shaquem wasn't starting on the team, so cutting his hair technically wasn't necessary, but he didn't want his brother to have to go through the ordeal alone. The pair went back to their dorm room, had their mother on FaceTime, and started the process of cutting several inches off their locks.
“We were crying the whole way through, had my mom on the phone on FaceTime while she watched us cut it. She’s crying, we’re crying, but that was a sacrifice we had to make. But I feel like the hardest part was him resigning a week after.”
After beginning 2015 season with an 0-8 record and briefly taking on the role of interim athletic director of the university, O'Leary resigned as UCF's head coach.
The Griffins said now they wear their hair in large buns off the field, with Shaquem explaining he felt uncomfortable leaving his hair down after O'Leary forced them to cut it.
“For us, I feel like it was really degrading,” Shaquem said. “He pushed us in certain ways that can be unexplainable. It’s hard to explain what the reason was behind it, but it was very degrading. It made us stronger and it brought us more together.
“It brought us to a point where it was like, we’re going to fight, we’re not going to quit on each other, we can’t allow him to win, even if he thinks that he was going to be close to winning, we can’t let him feel like he was going to break us because you can’t break both of us when we’re together.”