After giving the NFL and NASCAR’s pit row a try, Asa Watson finds his calling

Asa Watson knew very little about boxing when he walked into Fontana Klub, a gym in Frankfurt, Germany for a training shift.

Watson had just received his personal training license and was given the opportunity to help with a few classes.

Gym owner Christian Neureuther was working that day, and when he saw Watson, he immediately recognized the 6-foot-3 former NFL tight end as one of the missionaries working at a local church. Neureuther had questions about his faith and eventually approached Watson.

“It was wild how it happened but just kind of stumbled upon it,” Watson said. “...I walked in, (the owner) said, ‘I actually saw you a couple of hours ago, and I wanted to meet you, but I was too afraid to approach you. And now, you’re walking into my gym. Did somebody send you?’ And I said, ‘no, God must have sent me here’ because I don’t have any reason to come to a boxing gym. I don’t know anything about the sport either.”

Watson was raised in a Christian household and has let faith lead him to where to go in life. However, becoming an international missionary wasn’t always a part of the plan for the 33-year-old.

Playing the tuba and tight end

Watson was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1990 and moved to Rock Hill in 1996.

Asa wasn’t the biggest fan of football growing up, finding it rather boring. He instead fell in love with music after picking up the tuba in the seventh grade at Sullivan Middle School.

“I fell in love with the instrument,” Asa said. “It wasn’t the most convenient thing to carry home every day because it’s huge, but my parents made room in the car. I took it home with me and practiced every day and got really good at it. I was an All-Region tuba player, got to play in the regional band. I just really loved music, loved music, loved playing in the band.”

Asa also ran track and played soccer growing up, but it wasn’t until watching his older brother Benjamin play at Northwestern High School and in college at Duke and Georgia, that Asa saw the excitement in football.

The following year, he joined football, choosing to play tight end to follow his brother.

“I was excited that he was playing the game,” his brother said. “Excited that he was getting playing time, that he was getting better. It’s always weird when you come back from college (or the NFL), and you see how much he’s grown and how much hard work he’s put in, how his body developed. I was just always super proud of him.”

Asa balanced band and football along with saxophone playercenter Brett Saunders, performing with the marching band at during halftime.

However, after his sophomore year at Rock Hill High School, Asa decided to fully commit to football, believing that the sport would take him further than the tuba.

By the time Asa made this decision, Benjamin had already been drafted in the first round of the 2004 NFL Draft and was on the New England Patriots when they won the Super Bowl in 2005.Benjamin played 16 seasons with four different teams in the NFL before retiring in 2020.

A 10-year age gap kept the two from being competitive, but Asa still put a lot of pressure on himself to succeed as Benjamin had. The building of South Pointe High School in 2005 help Asa resist succumbing to that pressure.

“We were initially zoned to go to Northwestern,” Asa said. “Once they built South Pointe, they redrew the lines, and that’s how we ended up at Rock Hill High. In one aspect, I wanted to go to Northwestern. Going in another way, maybe it saved me from even more pressure. Maybe it helped me to separate from his legacy and kind of start my own thing. I don’t know if anyone would’ve cared either way, but it was kind of cool going to the rival high school and paving our own path.”

Asa’s dedication to football paid off.

The tight end had 16 receptions for 423 yards and two touchdowns in his senior season to go along with a Shrine Bowl nomination. He committed to play his college football career at North Carolina State.

The church had always been a part of Asa’s life.

The family’s move to Rock Hill was for his father, Kenneth, to establish the Rock Hill Bible Fellow Church on Amelia Avenue.

Asa remembers growing up and his friends in middle school telling him that he was automatically saved because of his father, but that never resonated with him. Asa desired his own relationship and understanding.

“I think in high school, I started to ask the question, ‘OK, if this is real, then it matters,’” Asa said. “It matters how I live my life. I want it to matter how I treat people and how I live as a high schooler, but if it’s not real, then honestly, it doesn’t matter. There’s not really anything in between. It was at that moment when I decided to follow Christ. Not only my words or my understanding of what my parents put in me, but when I really started to discover the Christian faith for myself is when I think I’ve experienced the most change.”

The ups and downs of college

Asa’s stats weren’t eye-popping in his first two years of college; he caught only two passes for 28 yards and blocked a punt that was returned for a touchdown — but he played in 22 of the Wolfpack’s 25 games during that span.

Asa was excited for taking a larger role with the team heading into his junior season, but something was wrong.

“I just started having these palpitations at workouts,” Asa said. “It’s winter workouts. You wake up in the morning. You don’t have anything to eat, and then you just have to get dressed and go run for two hours, do drills and then work out. That’s when I started having heart palpitations. That persisted for a while until I told one of the trainers, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with my heart, but every once in a while, it just starts racing.”

The trainers sent Asa to a doctor, who diagnosed the tight end with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a congenital heart defect in which rapid heart rates are caused by extra electrical pathways in the heart.

Asa took a medical redshirt for the 2011 season and had two surgeries, one that summer and another in the spring of 2012.

During this time away, Asa took a three-week mission trip to Los Angeles. Working with troubled youth gave him time to contemplate what grace means to him and how to walk through life in the face of adversity.

“True grace is something that we accept joyfully and thankfully,” Asa said. “We live in obedience to Christ because of what he’s done for us. We don’t live in obedience because we want him to do something for us or we want to get something from him. Once I understood that, I came back off that trip with a whole different mindset on football. I felt like I was a better player because I was just throwing my body around and giving my all out of thankfulness.”

The 2012 season was Asa’s best in terms of production.

He caught 24 passes for 282 yards and a touchdown for North Carolina State, placing himself on the preseason watch list for the 2013 John Mackey Award.

However, midway through Asa’s junior season, Wolfpack head coach Tom O’Brien was fired and replaced by Dave Doeren for the following season.

Asa saw his production dip in his final collegiate season, catching only three passes on four targets for 41 yards.

“When new coaches come in, they have their priorities,” Asa said. “They want to develop the players that they see potential in, and a lot of times that means sometimes giving experience to the younger guys instead of the older ones who are on their way out. As much as I was looking forward to that year and hoping it was going to be my best year, it actually turned out to be one of the worst.”

Life in the NFL and NASCAR

Following the conclusion of his final season at N.C. State, Asa had one more piece of business to address before dedicating himself to preparing for a potential NFL future.

Asa and his now-wife Vanessa were high school sweethearts, meeting at a track meet as Asa was competing for Rock Hill and Vanessa for Fort Mill.

On Jan. 2, 2013, at a Winthrop-North Carolina Central men’s basketball game, Asa came to surprise Vanessa, who was a cheerleader for Winthrop.

“He was trying to get into the mascot outfit, but that didn’t happen,” Vanessa said. “So he just came down during one of the timeouts, and I was just like, ‘What is going on right now?’ Then, he just got down on one knee and proposed. Our engagement actually is on YouTube.”

The two got married in December, and the couple spent a three-day honeymoon in New Orleans after Asa was invited to the 2014 Sugar Bowl.

Following that, Asa went to Miami to train for the NFL Draft at Bommarito Performance Systems. He eventually signed with the Patriots as an undrafted free agent.

Asa had visited the Patriots’ facilities before during Benjamin’s time there, but getting to be there as a player was an entirely different experience.

“I was thankful for the opportunity,” Asa said. “I was ready to go in there and do well and show what I had and put my best foot forward. We went from OTAs and went to training camp, and it was a great experience just being in a locker room with a lot of great players. (Tom Brady, Julian Edelman, Jimmy Garoppolo, James White) and just learning everything from them. (Rob Gronkowski) was in the (tight end) room with me, so I learned a lot from him. That whole experience was great, just so surreal.”

Following New England’s first preseason game against Washington, Asa was cut from the team.

He was invited to the Dallas Cowboys’ training camp a few days later but didn’t make it past final cuts.

It was a challenging experience for Asa, as he began to understand that his career in the sport he loved may be over.

“I’ve been given this opportunity, but I blew it,” he said. “Then, you’re dealing with, ‘Do I keep training in hopes that somebody calls?’ My agent was communicating with me and telling me to keep staying in shape, you never know when somebody is going to need help, so I kept doing that. I waited the whole season and the whole time, you’re thinking, ‘Do I keep pursuing this? Or do I stop? Do I try one more time? Or do I move on?’”

Asa eventually decided to move on, deciding on NASCAR after remembering a position coach at North Carolina State telling him about teams recruiting former college athletes for pit crews.

Not knowing how else to introduce himself into that field, Asa just began calling teams.

He called Hendrick Motorsports.

No answer.

He called Penske.

No answer.

He called Roush Fenway Racing.

No answer, but Roush Fenway would call Asa back with an invite to try out to be a jackman for the development team.

Asa was excited for the opportunity but had not been a huge fan of NASCAR before.

“One of the things that threw me for a loop was that we were the development team, and I was pumped about being on the team,” he said. “I was like, we have to win every race. We have to perform well. And they were like, we’re going to get 40th. At best, we’ll get in the 30s. We’re never going to win a race. And that was just the reality. It had nothing to do with you as a pit crew. It’s just the teams with the most money and the best cars are in the best position to win.”

Asa grew to enjoy the NASCAR environment over time.

He built great friendships and connections with the members of the team, but he knew that the NASCAR gig wasn’t sustainable. The constant traveling and being away from his growing family was starting to take its toll.

He left the sport after one season, returning home to begin his missionary work.

Sharing their faith in Germany

Asa returned home and took a year-long ministry internship with Norfolk-based Urban Discovery Ministries as a campus recruiter. Following that, Asa worked with the Baptist Collegiate Ministry at Winthrop University, organizing community events with the students.

He had always felt that he had a calling to minister overseas; it was something that he and Vanessa had talked about since high school.

When the opportunity came up with International Mission Board (IMB) in January 2019, the Watsons saw it as an opportunity.

“He was like, ‘OK, I think it’s time to go,’” Vanessa said. “So we put in our application with IMB, and that was a pretty lengthy process. In October of 2019, we went through training, and in December, we left from here and landed in Frankfurt, Germany.”

Vanessa said the move was hard on her.

Not seeing the rest of their family for so long was going to be a challenge. However, they were sure this is the path they were meant to take.

Then COVID-19 arrived — about three months after the Watson family had moved to Frankfurt.

Germany implemented a strict lockdown that hampered what Asa and Vanessa were able to do as missionaries and newcomers to the country.

“That created huge challenges for us because we’re trying to learn culture and learn language and get to know people, and we’re in this country that we haven’t really seen yet,” Asa said. “We didn’t really get to travel at all to see the country or anything like that during COVID. As much as we were excited about jumping in there and things progressing, learning and serving, we were limited to be in our own four walls for the majority of the year.”

The Watsons did language learning and attended church online and they developed a deeper appreciation for the community.

After the COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, Asa and Vanessa served at a neighborhood church, making it a point of emphasis to establish themselves within the local ecosystem as they led sermons or participated in multilingual camps.

Vanessa said that the family had just began to fully adjust to life in Frankfurt when they had to move back to Rock Hill in August. On her return, Vanessa said that she was greeted with a feeling she did not expect.

“I feel like it’s definitely challenging to readjust to something that once was familiar but doesn’t really feel familiar,” Vanessa said. “Over (the time we were gone), people change, things change, the environment changes. You (somewhat) know the area, but it’s also kind of new again.”

Looking forward

Asa and Vanessa have readjusted to living in Rock Hill since their return, but are looking forward to another mission trip to Frankfurt in July.

Vanessa has been working at Mercantile in downtown Rock Hill, while Asa has been studying for his master’s in theological studies from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and running his own personal training business.

“Going back, we’re a family of six now,” Vanessa said. “I had two girls when we first left (Rock Hill) and then I had another two while we were in Frankfurt. Some of the stuff will be familiar when we get back, but I think we’re also preparing ourselves that things may be a little bit different now too. Very excited though.”

Benjamin was watching a livestream of the Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting earlier this month.

Asa was onstage and offering a prayer — and he started praying in German.

“I’m thinking, this is Asa, my little brother from Rock Hill, has been in NASCAR, tried the NFL, is married, just had his fourth kid, moved all the way around the world, and this is just us,” Benjamin said. “We’re from Norfolk, Virginia, originally. And now he’s standing onstage, praying in another language that I don’t understand that he learned, and he’s moved overseas.”

“I’m just incredibly proud of not just the athlete he became and all that type of stuff, but I’m also proud of his faith and his decision-making, and the fact that he knows what he wants and he does it,” said Benjamin, who won the NFL’s Bart Starr Award in 2018 as the player who “best exemplifies outstanding character and leadership in the home, on the field, and in the community. .

”I look at him, and I know he looks at me and is proud of me, but I’m incredibly proud of him,” Benjamin said.