By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE — The Canadian province of Nova Scotia is known for its lobsters, fishing industry and quaint seaside towns, among other things. It’s not known as a hotbed for Division I football talent, but that hasn’t deterred one of its exports.
Logan Taylor, a 6-foot-6, 295-pound sophomore, starts at left offensive tackle for Virginia, which opens ACC play Friday night at the JMA Wireless Dome in Syracuse, N.Y. Taylor was born in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, a town of about 2,300 residents.
“Everyone kind of knows each other,” said Taylor, who lived in Nova Scotia until 2019, when he transferred to Episcopal High, a prestigious boarding school in Alexandria.
His coach at Episcopal was Mark Moroz, a fellow Canadian who’d been a standout offensive lineman at Wake Forest. Moroz marveled at the ease with which Taylor adjusted to his new surroundings.
“I was shocked, because when I left Canada to go to Wake Forest I had significant culture shock, and he handled that transition with such maturity,” Moroz, who now works in North Carolina, said this week. “To leave his hometown in Nova Scotia, which is a pretty small town, and then go to Episcopal and [fit into] the culture there, he handled it maturely. If he struggled, he didn’t let anyone know.”
On the football field, Taylor was “one of the most athletic kids I’ve ever coached and extremely coachable,” Moroz said. “I would show him something, and he would immediately get it. So that was the most impressive thing. Sometimes you get one or the other. You get coachable kids who don’t have athletic tools, or the opposite.”
Episcopal does not allow its students to graduate midyear, and Taylor wanted to enroll at UVA early. So he returned home to Nova Scotia after the 2019-20 academic year. Taylor committed to the Cavaliers in July 2020, then spent the fall at Park View Education Centre in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. The COVID-19 pandemic wiped out his senior football season, but Taylor arrived at UVA as scheduled in January 2021.
Taylor was a well-regarded recruit, but the Cavaliers had a veteran offensive line last year, and he played in only two games as a true freshman. Then came a period of massive turnover. Bronco Mendenhall stepped down as head coach, and Virginia lost its top six offensive linemen, including tackles Bobby Haskins and Ryan Swoboda, who transferred to Southern California and Central Florida, respectively.
“I obviously wanted what was best for them, so I’m happy that they went off and did what was best for them,” Taylor said. “But when they left, I realized that I had a huge role to fill in and I’m doing my best to try to do that.”
Offseason setbacks slowed Taylor’s progress. In December, he had surgery to repair a torn labrum in his hip, and that limited his participation in the Cavaliers’ first spring practice under Tony Elliott, Mendenhall’s successor as head coach. Then, on the eve of training camp this season, Taylor came down with an illness and “lost a bunch of weight,” he said.
“We wanted him to come in close to 300 pounds,” Elliott said, “and he came in closer to 280. So now he’s starting to build himself back up.”
That Taylor attained such stature was not surprising. His mother stands 5-foot-11, his father is 6-foot-9, and they played basketball. Taylor grew up playing soccer. “Football was not big,” he said.
A family friend, however, started a football program and encouraged Taylor to try the sport. He progressed in the sport and was playing for Sir John A. Macdonald High in Halifax when his family heard about Episcopal from a man whose son was a student at boarding school.
“He was like, ‘It’s a very good academic school and a good sport school, so you should look into it,’ ” Taylor said.
For a budding football standout who was also serious about his schoolwork, the move made sense. “His family made the sacrifice to send him down to the States so he could learn and develop more as a football player,” said Garett Tujague, UVA’s offensive line coach.
His parents were sad to see him go, Taylor said, “but they knew what was best for me. They just wanted what was best for me, which was nice.”
His teammates at Episcopal include Elijah Gaines, who’s now a reserve cornerback and special teams standout at Virginia. (UVA tailback Perris Jones also graduated from Episcopal, but he and Taylor did not overlap there.)
After the pandemic hit in March 2020, Tujague and Taylor communicated primarily online.
“Every time we could we were getting on Zoom with Mom and Dad,” said Tujague, who’s in his seventh season at Virginia. “I think that was a huge part of them trusting me with their son. But when you’re from Nova Scotia and you have an opportunity to go and get a degree from the University of Virginia, that’s pretty powerful. And then also the chance to play in the ACC, that was a huge draw for him as well.”