2015 Pac-12 Football Media Days: Oregon State running back changes name to honor mother

BURBANK, Calif. – Make it two years in a row now that Pac-12 Football Media Days have featured a student-athlete who recently changed his name.

Utah’s Nate Fakahafua-turned-Orchard and Washington’s Hau’oli Kikaha (formerly Hau’oli Jamora) held it down at the 2014 shindig, and now Oregon State running back Storm Barrs-Woods is carrying on the trend in 2015.

(While we're on the subject, former Cal basketball point guard Jorge Gutierrez momentarily had “Gutierrez-Cárdenas” put on the back of his Canton Charge jersey this year to honor a late relative before getting the call-up to the Milwaukee Bucks, though he didn’t legally change his last name.)

The player formerly known as Storm Woods announced to Beaver Nation earlier in July that he was changing his last name to Barrs-Woods to honor his mother.

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“I grew up in a single-parent household. Just seeing her work hard, she instilled in me to work hard and be strong. I get a lot of that from my mom,” Barrs-Woods told The Oregonian in a prior interview.

To say his mother has been supportive of his football career would be an understatement. Despite hailing from Texas, Barrs-Woods says that either his mother or grandmother have been at every one of his football games, home and away. They've had good reason to show up, too – Barrs-Woods enters the 2015 campaign seventh on Oregon State's all-time time list with 2,183 career rushing yards and fourth in school history for most receptions by a running back (111).

Though he hasn’t legally changed his name yet, Barrs-Woods does have plans to make Barrs-Woods official. His mother was emotional when she found out the news.

“She cried,” Barrs-Woods said, mentioning that it made him realize how much the name-change meant to her.