Luca Evans (OC Register)  —  LOS ANGELES — As winter fell and the sun vanished, the Church of Latter-day Saints sent a teenage football player to the top of the world to spread the word of Jesus Christ.

Earth spins on an axis at an awkward 23.5-degree angle, and so it is that the northernmost part of Norway becomes one of the furthest regions of humankind from the sun in the winter. In the town of Tromso, daylight disappears in mid-November and hides until the spring, thrusting a populace of more than 70,000 into complete shadow and below-zero temperatures.

In Norwegian, they call this time morketiden. In English: the dark time.

It is not for the faint of heart. Seasonal depression, despite mental health remaining fairly stable, is a frequent topic of studies into northern Norway. And on the Church’s three-year youth mission to Oslo, Norway, mission president Kirt Montague found he could only put a certain type of young man or woman on the two-hour flight out north of the Arctic Circle.

After an hourlong conversation with Walker Lyons, a 6-4, 235-pound USC tight end commit who had put football on hold to serve, Montague tabbed him for Tromso.

“I knew he was a tough kid,” Montague reflected. “Again, this is not a place that you can just, you can send anybody.”

“I felt,” Montague continued a few words later, “like I could trust him.”

So Lyons spent months last year living in an apartment in Tromso, strumming a ukulele and teaching English classes. He later went all the way south to Stavanger, where he dabbled in coaching American football and honed his Norwegian as the sky turned bright again. When he finally joined USC as a true freshman this summer after a year away from football, there was a different glint to his eyes, head coach Lincoln Riley said Thursday. No choice but to grow, in the dark time.

After exactly three months of getting up to speed with college football, Lyons caught three passes in USC’s 48-0 rout of Utah State.

“I’m like, ‘You kiddin’ me?’” Montague said, his voice swelling over a phone call Wednesday. “He was a missionary a few months ago.”

“Now he’s out here knockin’ heads with D1 college players.”

It was a unique story, Riley reflected during fall camp: to sign a kid and then not see him for a year and a half, their only communication with Lyons the occasional FaceTime call across a 10-hour time difference. But Lyons had been up front with Riley and tight ends coach Zach Hanson throughout USC’s recruitment, the freshman said. His faith was a massive part of his parents’ lives, and a massive part of his, and so his family made a 700-mile drive from Folsom in February 2023 – according to the Deseret News – to drop off Lyons at the Provo Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah.

Lyons, still a young man barely wrapping up high school, had been given plenty. He wanted to give. And so he put down his life, for the better part of a year.

“Stepping away from football and school and that were, kinda things that I wanted for a little bit,” Lyons said Tuesday, “and kind of just looked outward in a way. Looked to help other people.”

When he was called by the Church, folks started sending Montague a slew of newspaper articles – a highly touted four-star recruit out of Folsom was tagging along. And the mission president was excited. Nervous, too. Was he cocky? Was he full of himself?

But the first time Montague met Lyons, after the 14-or-so-hour-flight from Utah to Norway’s capital of Oslo, he found more humility than he expected. Lyons transferred into Folsom midway through his freshman year of high school, and was deemed ineligible under the CIF’s transfer rules, so he spent much of his first season happily shagging balls as a younger 6-foot-3, 230-pound water boy. He played a few games during the pandemic-shortened spring his sophomore year, played his immediately subsequent junior season in the fall, and then had much of his senior year wiped out with a broken leg.

He was an introvert, Folsom coach Paul Doherty said, who rarely spoke in full sentences. But Lyons was resilient, Montague sensed. And self-assured enough to put a year’s worth of NIL opportunity on hold.

“You’re not just walkin’ away from football, you’re walkin’ away from a lot,” Montague said. “And that, honestly … I knew enough to know that that was no small sacrifice.”

The pressure for Lyons to return and start his life at USC, Montague said, was nearly constant, from all directions. Why would you leave? Why aren’t you here? Get your butt home. But the kid put it aside for months, starting in Tromso. His days were full enough, waking at 6:30 a.m. sharp and in bed by 10:30 p.m., walking the streets and knocking on doors and holding classes and activities and game nights in the hours between.

There were about 70 young missionaries around Norway, Montague said, rotating in cycles across a three-year mission from 2021 to 2024. The Church divided the country into zones with roughly 25 missionaries each, and each zone is divided into a handful of “districts.”

Shortly into his mission, by the time he had arrived in Stavanger, Lyons became a district leader. Then a zone leader. A quiet kid embraced the Norwegian language with fearless aplomb, and led tour groups with gusto, and Montague is convinced there’s a large part of Lyons that simply didn’t want to leave.

“My physical was already, I felt it was pretty strong,” Lyons said. “But the other parts of myself, I felt like they were able to grow and catch up to that physical part.”

Eventually, though, the clock began ticking on reporting back to USC, and Lyons and Montague made the collective decision to send him back in June. There was a plan set in place for him by strength trainer Bennie Wylie and USC’s staff, Lyons said Tuesday, as soon as he returned. And he had less than three months to train before USC’s season kicked off, his only true conditioning coming within sanctioned 30-minute workout blocks during his missionary schedule in Norway, honing a routine sent to him by trainers.

It’s still a work in progress, Riley affirmed Thursday. But as the head coach has increasingly incorporated tight ends further as blockers and pass-catchers in USC’s offense, Lyons flashed potential in spot action in a blowout of Utah State.

“There’s a lot about him out there,” Riley said, “that doesn’t feel like a freshman.”

Both off the field, too, after Lyons became a mission leader in the Norwegian darkness. He was a changed kid upon his return, Doherty reflected, suddenly beaming with confidence.

“He’s got enormous potential to have impact for good in this world,” Montague said. “And he’s got that mindset.”

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