Seider put UF on hold for family
Belle Glade native and running backs coach says teen son is healthy.
GAINESVILLE — Glades Central High graduate Ja’Juan Seider is Florida’s new running backs coach, a job he turned down two years ago when Jim McElwain was assembling his fifirst staffff at UF.
Seider wanted to become a Gator — always has — but not then. He wasn’t concerned with his career or profession.
“My priority was being a dad,” Seider said. “Nothing else mattered at that time.”
Seider and his wife, Brandi, fifirst noticed a lump on the neck of their son, Jaden Seider, in the summer of 2014.
Tests results were inconclusive as the lump grew larger, but by December it was the size of a golf ball.
The following month, doctors did a biopsy and discovered that Jaden had cancer. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin nodular lymphoma.
“When you learn your son is diagnosed with cancer, I’ve never been around it,” Seider said. “You hear about it, but when you actually have somebody that’s close to you get affffffffffffected, it changes.”
Seider was entering his third year as the running backs coach at West Virginia, his alma mater. The condition of Jaden and his eventual diagnosis kept Seider from accepting McElwain’s offffffffffffer.
“He understood that,” Seider said of McElwain. “They didn’t stop trying. They waited a week and said, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, coach.’
“I’m telling you, it made it hard to say no the fifirst time, but I had two little girls I had to think about, too. So you can’t just uproot your family.”
After a six-month battle and