Lugging trays of lemonade and hot chocolate through the stands of Hughes Stadium required an occasional break.

And when Logan Stewart put down his tray to watch a minute or two of the action on the field at CSU’s former football stadium, he always zeroed in on starting safeties Trent Matthews and Kevin-Pierre Louis.

They were hard-hitting defenders who helped the Rams win eight games in 2013 and 10 games in 2014.

Stewart, then a student at Mountain View High School in Loveland, pictured himself in their place, proudly wearing the green and gold Colorado State University uniform.

“In the back of my mind, I always told myself I could see myself playing here,” Stewart said. “I don’t know when or how, but I could see myself playing here.”

The when is now. The how has been quite a journey.

Stewart, 21, spent one year apiece playing football at two different junior colleges and one season as a walk-on at CSU, redshirting while he practiced with the scout team. Now, the 6-foot-1, 214-pound junior is on a full scholarship and at the top of the depth chart at safety as the Rams prepare for the 2019 season.

“I think it’s unbelievable,” CSU coach Mike Bobo said Saturday. “… I was telling him, ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ and this was last fall. And he said, ‘Coach, I’ve always wanted to be at Colorado State.’ That’s the kind of guy you want. He’s on a mission.”

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Stewart has never been one to shy away from a challenge, his mother, Kari, said. When he sets his mind to something, he’s going to find a way to make it happen.

When he was told by an assistant football coach at Mountain View High School that he needed to be working out regularly in the weight room if he hoped to play college football, he got himself out of bed and was waiting on the doorstep at 4:45 a.m. each morning so that coach, Mike McMahon, could give him a ride to 5 a.m. workouts.

“We’d have conversations in the car and whatnot about what your goals are, what’s your purpose?” McMahon said. “So he kind of told me a bit about his background and how he ended up here in Loveland (he was adopted from Florida when he was just a month old), what his goals were and what he wanted to do.

“Really, all I did was give him an opportunity to make that happen.”

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When he failed to earn any scholarship offers for football coming out of high school, he turned down scholarship offers in track — he was Colorado’s Class 4A state champion in the long jump as a senior in 2016 — to find a different path.

“I had a track offer here (at CSU), but my grades weren’t the greatest, and it would be tough for me to get in right away,” Logan said. “Therefore, I found that the junior-college route would probably be my best bet, and if I performed well there, then the opportunity would present itself. So I packed my bags up and took the junior-college route.”

One season at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona, where he was in on seven tackles in nine games for a 3-9 team, wasn’t going to get him the attention he needed. So Logan set out to find another junior-college program where he could make his mark.

“He contacted the coach at Iowa Central, and Logan asked him, ‘Do you have any scholarships?’ ” his mother said. “The coach said, ‘I’ve got two that I’m going to give out this summer.’ And Logan said, ‘OK, I’m coming to get one of them.’ ”

He did and wound up being one of the team’s top tacklers with 66, including 32 solo stops, for a team that went 1-10.

There were still no offers from four-year schools. Logan, though, wasn’t ready to give up on his dream. He came back home to Loveland and worked out with Corey Sample, a former college football and Colorado Ice player, as if he were going to play the following season. Along the way, he caught the attention of a CSU athletic department staffer, who paved the way for an invitation to join the Rams last fall as a preferred walk-on.

Logan and his parents, who have eight other children — three biological and five adopted — scraped together enough money to cover his tuition and fees, and he made it work. He slept on couches at teammates’ homes and loaded up on snacks from the athletic department’s fueling station to eat as meals when the football team wasn’t providing them.

“My mindset every day going into practice was to get better at one thing — master the mundane, as Coach Helow (George, who coaches CSU’s safeties) would say — then build on that each and every day, just giving it my all,” Logan said.

He never did get into a game. But he made a big impression in practices, particularly on special teams, Bobo said. By the time spring practices started, Logan was a player coaches were keeping an eye on. And when they ended, he was listed on the depth chart as one of two starting safeties.

The scholarship, which includes a stipend for living expenses, soon followed.

No more sleeping on couches, he said. No need to take out that student loan he was planning to use to pay for his final two years of college.

That kid who was hawking hot chocolate at Hughes Stadium five years ago is a bona fide member of the CSU football team.

“We are so excited for him,” his mother said. “… Really, it was his determination. He just kept striving for his goal.”

Kelly Lyell covers CSU and other local sports and sports-related news for the Coloradoan. Follow him at twitter.com/KellyLyell and facebook.com/KellyLyell.news and help support the work he and his fellow journalists do in our community by purchasing a subscription at coloradoan.com/subscribe.