Elizabeth Merrill
THE PHOTO IS blurry and the faces are indiscernible, but this screengrab, Emilio Rodriguez says, captures the moment that Jackie Taylor’s life turned. It’s from a workout in the summer of 2021.
Rodriguez had just taken the volleyball coaching job at Gulliver Prep, a private school known for its academics, athletics and being a hub for children of famous people in Miami. Gulliver was not, however, famous for volleyball, winning just one game the previous year.
Taylor was a 15-year-old who had been playing volleyball for two years, mostly just “for fun,” and was coming off a nondescript season on Gulliver’s junior varsity team. At the time, there wasn’t a hint that she would become a middle blocker for a North Carolina team that is heading to the NCAA tournament this week.
“She was super, super raw,” Rodriguez says. “Like when Bambi first walks.”
She hit the court that day among a bunch of seasoned 15-to-17-year-olds in South Florida. Rodriguez hit record.
“She had no real acknowledgement of the space she needed, so she was all up in the net,” Rodriguez says. “She could barely swing.”
Her mom, Jackie Garcia Haley, sat in the stands and watched. She’s the one who nudged her into playing volleyball. Garcia Haley had been a soccer star at Gulliver and played at the University of Miami, and Taylor’s dad — well, he was an athlete, too, and played in the NFL. Jackie Taylor had competed on the track and field team and tried soccer at a younger age, but sports never stuck.
When the clinic wrapped up, Garcia Haley asked Rodriguez how her daughter did, and the coach showed her the photo: Taylor soaring into the air, 5-foot-11, with her entire head above the net and an acre of space between her feet and the floor.
Rodriguez saw the potential, and flashes of the man he — and millions of football fans — remembers but Jackie can’t. He saw Sean Taylor.
THE VIDEO IS grainy and dated, but the play captures the essence of the late Sean Taylor. Wearing No. 21 for Washington, Taylor sprints across the field toward the sideline, cuts underneath the Green Bay Packers’ Greg Jennings and leaps into the air to intercept a heave from Brett Favre. It’s 2007, and Taylor is 24 years old and at the peak of his athletic career. It’s his second interception of the day.
He was drafted by Washington with the fifth overall pick in 2004. As a safety at the University of Miami, he had touted himself as the hardest hitter in the draft, and in 2007 Sports Illustrated dubbed him one of the hardest-hitting players in the NFL. There’s video of Taylor from his rookie season pummeling the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Willie Parker as he’s trying to reel in a pass from Ben Roethlisberger, and a YouTube compilation of Taylor’s “BIGGEST HITS ever.” It was a different time in the NFL. Taylor once flattened a punter — in the Pro Bowl. In the video, he arrives out of nowhere, like a missile, and punishes the Bills’ Brian Moorman on the fake punt.
Sean Taylor played 57 games in the NFL. He intercepted 12 passes and forced eight fumbles, and fans, announcers and teammates spoke of him with reverence, even proclaiming that he was something more than mortal. On Nov. 11, 2007, he left the game against the Philadelphia Eagles early with a knee injury. Later, he went home to Miami to recuperate with his family.
Taylor had changed over the past two seasons. The young man who flouted the NFL’s dress-code rules, and once was ejected for spitting on an opponent during a playoff game, moved his locker away from the rowdy youngsters and to the middle of the veterans. When asked about it, he said he simply needed a change. But something else happened in 2006. Jackie was born, and it changed his perspective on life.
In one of his last conversations with Ryan Clark, a friend and former teammate, Taylor talked about his faith, his health and his baby.
“He talked about how light she made him,” Clark says, “about how he saw love differently now.”
On Nov. 26, 2007, Taylor was home in Miami asleep in his bedroom with Garcia Haley and 18-month-old Jackie. Taylor, who missed Washington’s game the day before, heard noises in the house and grabbed a machete he kept under the bed for protection. He confronted the intruders at his bedroom door. He was shot in the thigh while Garcia Haley and Jackie hid under the covers. Neither were harmed. The bullet severed Taylor’s femoral artery. He died the next day.
Five men were later convicted on charges connected to Taylor’s murder. Eric Rivera Jr., the alleged gunman who was 17 at the time, said they didn’t expect Taylor to be home.
“You only get one dad and hers is gone,” Jackie Garcia Haley said in a statement that was read at Rivera’s 2014 sentencing. “It breaks my heart to pieces to go through each day and each milestone without him.”
THE IMAGES WERE plastered all over the news — little Jackie Taylor, fidgeting in her mom’s lap during her father’s funeral. Taylor asleep with her pacifier as a congregation mourned.
Their lives intersected for 565 days. She remembers none of them.
But she has good memories of growing up in a loving household and a childhood that was “really normal.” Taylor was surrounded by a big family — her maternal grandfather lives two doors down from their home — and stuck close to her mother.
“I think with the nature of everything that happened with us,” Taylor says, “we had no choice but to lean on each other. She raised me to be super close to her and to always be open to telling her anything.
“And we did a lot together, like sports and dance. She was always just around and with me at all times.”
In 2010, Garcia Haley married Shay Haley, a musician who most notably played along Pharrell Williams in the funk rock band N.E.R.D. Garcia Haley told her it was OK to call him dad, so Taylor did. She grew up with four siblings whom she considered friends.
She said there wasn’t any dramatic or intentional moment in which her mom sat her down and told her the story about Sean Taylor. But she developed a deeper curiosity when she was 10 or 11. Shortly after that, she spoke at his induction to the University of Miami’s ring of honor. Over time, she learned more about him through his football friends and at events that honored him.
Still, the impact her father had on millions of people all those years later was somewhat jarring. When Taylor was 13 and at a football game, a fan asked for her autograph. She was just learning cursive at the time, so she simply signed it with her initials: J for Jackie, a name she shares with her mom, and T for Taylor, a name she shares with her dad.
After getting a few requests, she thought about practicing her autograph so she could get the hang of it.
She has seen clips of her dad playing football but hasn’t sat down to watch any old games.
“I think I’ve never been curious to go on the internet,” she says. “I don’t even think I’ve ever really heard his voice.”
She thought about that for a second and figured she’d probably heard it at some point during one of the ceremonies honoring him.
Taylor has been told they have the same mannerisms and that they look alike, walk alike and move alike. She heard it all the way back in fifth grade, when she played soccer. At times, it made her feel uncomfortable. What if she couldn’t live up to the expectations of being Sean Taylor’s daughter?
Instead of embracing sports, she focused on dancing. One day, when Jackie was in eighth grade, her mom brought her a pair of volleyball shoes to dance practice. Jackie agreed to give it a try. Jackie spent the next two seasons trying to learn the sport but struggled to show off her innate talents.
It wasn’t until that summer day in Rodriguez’s gym that the family could see glimpses of something bigger.
Rodriguez recalls something Garcia Haley told him later: “I felt like Sean was telling me that this is the place for her.”
THE MEMORY REMAINS a snapshot in Ira Childress’ brain. The Gulliver Prep volleyball players were goofing around after practice when someone asked Jackie Taylor about her jumping skills. The former Gulliver athletic director recalls the 14-year-old saying, “Watch this,” and then flying through the air to a basketball hoop and grabbing the rim.
“I thought, ‘There’s no girl in a 100-mile radius that I know, at this age, that can do that,”’ Childress says. “And that opened my eyes to like, ‘Oh, this young lady is gonna be special once she figures this out.”
Childress also remembers the time, during a Gulliver football game, when the halftime entertainment involved a group of people trying to catch punts from a JUGS machine. There were the boys, flailing and missing, while Taylor wowed the crowd by catching a high, spinning football.
So of course, Childress had to point his new volleyball coach toward Taylor. When Rodriguez heard she was Sean Taylor’s daughter, his curiosity piqued.
Taylor was a sophomore and had yet to learn the fundamentals or advanced terminology, but that was OK. She had fallen for volleyball and wanted to keep playing. “It’s like the only sport that’s really so team-oriented,” she says. “You need all six people in order to win the game. I just love the sport itself.” Rodriguez ran a successful club team called Miami Hype and had a pathway to success and a possible Division I volleyball scholarship.
He used that photo, the one that turned heads in the gym during that first summer clinic, to convince Jackie and her mom that she had the athleticism to move from outside hitter to middle blocker. Rodriguez told them there wasn’t enough time to develop all the skills — back-row defense, serving and serve receiving — that an outside hitter would need to impress Division I coaches. But if he put her at middle blocker, she could showcase her vertical leap, blocking and speed.
Taylor was hesitant — middle blockers are generally taller. But they couldn’t jump like she did.
He told Taylor that if they were going to do this, they’d need to have a “violent push” into ultra-competitive play at the club travel scene. Rodriguez would raise the net two to three inches every practice so she’d have to work harder to find success. Taylor would pile on extra workouts throughout her high school, then club seasons. When Taylor went on a family vacation, she’d take a trainer with her.
“She has been at the net, come off a block and landed on a kid and rolled her ankle,” Rodriguez says. “And before she can even complain about her ankle, I’m like, ‘Jackie, get up and walk it off.’ And she’ll get up. You can only do that with a certain type of kid because a lot of kids are not strong enough.
“Then she would pop right up and bite her lip and kind of walk around the gym, and then she was right back in.”
Gulliver won 11 games in Taylor’s initial season on varsity. She wore No. 1 — the same number her dad wore when he played football there decades earlier. She went through the expected bumps when club competition rolled around, but by the end of the season, it was clear that her game had evolved. Her quickness and explosiveness, Rodriguez says, allowed her to catch up quickly. After one intense year, Taylor belonged.
Her high school team won 26 games her junior year, and with the success came attention. People wanted to know the story of Sean Taylor’s daughter. She understood the natural curiosity but preferred to shift the attention to her teammates who had banded together for Gulliver’s turnaround.
Ryan Clark, who has gotten to know Jackie better over the past few years, said it’s tough to be the memory of someone who died in the middle of greatness.
“I think that’s difficult for a young lady who actually doesn’t know that person, hasn’t grown up with that person,” says Clark, who played with Sean Taylor in Washington. “And obviously this person was superhuman in certain ways … But as she grew into herself — you could see her at Gulliver Prep and start to understand what his legacy meant.
“So you got that height from him, you know? You got some of that athleticism from him. You got that smile from him. And I think once she started to come into her own it was easier to also embrace his legacy.”
THE NOTEBOOK IS more than a decade old and full of quotes that Sean Taylor jotted down. Jackie’s mom got it out of his old playbook folder and gave it to her when she started playing high school volleyball. It was one of the first tangible windows into her dad’s life, containing his thoughts, his handwriting.
It was around that time that she dedicated herself to volleyball.
Childress wanted it to last, so he flooded the zone with a group email to a sea of college-coaching inboxes.
Hello, Coach —
Every so often, a student-athlete bursts onto the scene with undeniable athleticism and potential greatness. At Gulliver Prep in Miami, FL, that student-athlete is none other than Jackie Taylor …
During Taylor’s junior year, her mom reached out to a mutual friend who connected her with former Olympic setter Lindsey Berg. Garcia Haley wanted Berg to evaluate and possibly mentor Taylor.
Berg flew to Miami to work with her individually for a week. Berg, who’s 5-foot-8, knew what it was like to be overlooked because of her size — the questions and criticism stalked her throughout her career. It motivated her to prove people wrong.
“I have seen it break people,” Berg says, “and Jackie is not one to be broken. She is just a fighter and knows her worth and is willing to work as well. She wants to prove everyone wrong, and she has.”
The first time she saw Taylor play, Berg said the gifts from her dad and mom were evident — she saw a fluid and athletic player who had caught up to the game in just one season. Berg asked what Taylor wanted in a college, but around that time, she was only garnering interest from the smaller schools.
Berg was enlisted to help her get noticed. The top players are recruited as early as the eighth grade, so Berg knew finding the right fit would be challenging.
North Carolina coach Mike Schall was just getting started, too. He was promoted from assistant to head coach at UNC in February of 2023, and he remembers getting a note from Taylor’s camp in the recruiting process. It said that Taylor hadn’t been playing for very long, but that she was going to be very good.
Schall sought her out when he went to his first club tournament as head coach, and he says he immediately felt as if she was somebody who could help the Tar Heels succeed. Her athleticism was obvious, but the thing that stuck with him was her interactions with her teammates and coaches.
“You could tell there was more depth to her than just being good,” he says. “There are plenty of good athletes playing volleyball. But we spend a lot of time evaluating what those interactions look like. Are they going to be a great teammate? Are they going to respond to mistakes in a positive way? Are they going to compete really hard when the game is on the line? Everything we saw in Jackie sort of checked the boxes for us.”
Taylor narrowed her choices to Tennessee and North Carolina. Her mom — whom she considers one of her best friends — encouraged her to go away to school, away from the University of Miami.
“[My mom] went to Miami, and she knew how much she depended on her parents,” Taylor says. “She was in the same state that she grew up in, the same city. She was like, ‘It’s so important to leave and to meet new people and be outside of your comfort zone.'”
In Jackie Taylor’s senior year at Gulliver, she led her team to its first state championship — just like her dad did in football in his senior year at Gulliver in 2000.
WEARING THE NO. 21 on her Carolina blue jersey, Jackie Taylor approaches from the middle for a quick set and hammers a kill.
She is no longer the lost, fast-tracked girl who quickly rotates out of a game. Schall says her role has been enhanced in the past year, and Taylor has become a reliable server. He thinks about her vast ceiling, because she’s only 60 matches into her college career and is still learning.
Her first college season was a whirlwind — the Tar Heels made it to the NCAA tournament for the first time in three years, and Taylor played in all 31 matches. She finished with 145 kills and 111 blocks, along with 11 aces and 40 digs.
UNC libero/defensive specialist Julia Bohlinger, who is Taylor’s roommate, says the 2024 season was like “drinking from a fire hose” for the freshmen. But Taylor made it easier. They both value their families. Taylor calls herself a homebody, and Bohlinger also considers herself somewhat “low-key” socially, sometimes preferring to stay in and watch a movie over going out. Bohlinger’s dad played in the NFL, too. Rob Bohlinger was a left tackle for the Carolina Panthers in 1998.
But it’s different. Julia Bohlinger is not recognized or associated with what her dad once did. Some matches, Taylor will see people in the stands wearing her dad’s No. 21 jersey. They’ll occasionally approach her for autographs, and she signs with more precision than her old “JT.”
“She handles it really well,” Bohlinger says. “She’s very kind and loving. If people come up to her, she’s not like, ‘Oh no, don’t talk to me.’ She’s very like, ‘Oh, hi, how are you?’ She’s just warm and welcoming. So I think it makes it easier for people to come and talk to her.
“I think she wants to carry some of the stuff of her dad, like his great qualities. She wants them to see that through her too.”
Taylor, who has grown to 6-foot-1, said she no longer feels the pressure to live up to his legacy. And it makes her feel good that people haven’t forgotten about him.
“There’s a deeper meaning in all this for her,” Schall says. “It’s like how she was raised by her mom, by her stepdad. But her father’s legacy is really important to her. So this attention for her is not something that she’s like, ‘Look at me, look at me.’ She wants to be able to say, ‘This is what I do.’
“And there’s a genuine humility about it. And our players adore her. I mean, they love the kid … I understand it could go sideways really quickly, but the way she is with the team, there is no animosity about the attention that she gets through her story.”
This season, the Tar Heels went 21-8 and earned their second straight trip to the NCAA tournament. They play their first-round game Thursday against UTEP. Taylor has tallied 152 blocks, fourth-most in the ACC. In a program that isn’t as much of a household name as Texas or Nebraska, Taylor garners a lot of attention because of her father. She knows a lot of people look at her and, much like Rodriguez did, see Sean Taylor.
But now they see Jackie Taylor, too.
“There’s a purpose behind carrying out his legacy,” she says. “But also finding my own name and finding my own path.”
ESPN producer Blake Foeman contributed to this story.
