Nearly 10 years have passed but Jay Seawell, Alabama’s head golf coach, can still remember the exact moment he first heard of Trey Mullinax. He was hosting his annual golf camp, and his cell phone rang. It was his father, who was also a golf instructor, calling from the fifth fairway, excited about the sweet-swinging 15-year-old with the Blonde “Bama Bangs” striping it in front of him.

“I remember, my dad said, ‘If you want to see a kid hit it long and straight, you’d better get to No. 5 ASAP!’ I still remember that,” Seawell said.

The 6-foot-4 Birmingham native is a foot taller these days, but the recipe is still the same - long and straight. It’s one that has the 24-year-old heading to the PGA TOUR for his first start as a rookie next week at the season-opening Safeway Open.

For Seawell, it’s an example of what happens when “off-the-charts talent” has a desire to learn.

Because 10 years ago, the talent in front of him at camp was tantalizing, a blank canvas of athleticism refined from years of playing basketball, football and baseball, yet unrefined. Mullinax had dabbled in golf as a youth with his dad but hadn’t seriously taken up the game until he was 14. As smooth as the swing was, the scores didn’t yet match.

So Seawell pulled him to the side privately after his round that day at camp, and implored him to get out and play more golf. He had a gift, and he just needed to play more. That was the only formula he needed to be great.

So he did. Alabama, though, didn’t begin to take notice until he qualified for the 2008 U.S. Junior Amateur, which just so happened to be in Birmingham, Alabama at Shoal Creek Country Club. Seawell noticed and decided to follow him during stroke-play qualifying. He didn’t qualify but Seawell was sold by his progress.

“I hate to use the word project, but we thought he had some late development in him,” Seawell said. “In a 4.5 scholarship world, you have to find somebody like that. We saw there were many things in there that were very talented but were very raw and not put together yet.”

PGA TOUR winner Michael Thompson played for Seawell at Alabama and still remembers the first time he saw Mullinax play. It wasn’t where it needed to be, but it was easy to see where his coach’s head was.

“He's really got the complete package. He's probably as close as you can come to Dustin Johnson in terms of raw power, just raw talent,” Thompson said. “And he’s very good at just staying patient on the golf course. He doesn't really let anything rattle him too much. Every now and then we're all subject to letting our emotions get the better of us, but he's a complete player.”

As crazy as it sounds to compare the talent of a PGA TOUR rookie with just one Web.com Tour win to a 12-time PGA TOUR winner, Seawell gets where Thompson’s coming from. Seawell has coached Justin Thomas. He’s had Bud Cauley. He’s had Thompson.

“Well, I think while he was here, there were guys that had better careers while they were here, but from a talent point of view, he’s off the charts. I think from a talent point and a potential point of view, he’s as good as there has ever been here,” Seawell said. “I think the reason he’s gotten better is he’s continued to grow into that potential, and that takes a lot of dedication and a lot of mental fortitude to do that. Sometimes potential is a bad thing. But the great thing about golf is it’s a growing game, and I think down the road, we’re all going to all look back and say, ‘God, where’d this guy come from?’ But we all knew from the very beginning that if he did, he’d be exactly where that moment will be.”

For Mullinax, his professional career has almost mirrored his college career. In his first season on the Web.com Tour, he finished 60th on the money list, but his two best finishes of the season came later in the year. At times, he felt like he was putting too much pressure on himself to prove he belonged like those early days in college.

“Pressure is tough because you put it on yourself,” Mullinax said. “You try not to look at leaderboards, but you can see them. You try not to hear the roars but you can hear them.”

For his second year on Tour, his coach continually reminded him that he played better when he smiles, and the score is made inside 100 yards. It paid off. Mullinax won the Rex Hospital Open after coming from five shots back on the back nine on Sunday and locked up his PGA TOUR card with a eighth-place finish on the Regular Season money list.

“It’s a dream come true,” Mullinax said. “We’ve all dreamed about playing on the PGA TOUR, and playing in the Masters. My goal was to get to the PGA TOUR and now my goals have changed. My goal is to win on the PGA TOUR. I’ve seen Smylie (Kaufman), Justin (Thomas), Jordan (Spieth), Rickie (Fowler), Emiliano (Grillo), all them do it. I feel like my game is good enough to win out there, and I feel like I can go out there and win and compete. I look forward to going out there and doing the best I can.”

Seawell got to see the evolution firsthand a year ago in Mullinax’s first PGA TOUR start at The RSM Classic. The man, whose friends occasionally joking call ‘The Big Ern’ because they say his bangs look like Ernie Els’ in 1995, finished T25 with his coach on the bag.

“Trey’s done more for me than I could have ever done for him,” Seawell said. “We just get along so well. We know how to talk to each other. We do have a bond. Our personalities match. Our vision. His respect for me is off the charts, and so we just get along well. For me personally, it was amazing. It was something I needed after the national championship to kind of get back in the dirt.”

THE CROSSROADS

Like any project, there were growing pains. Despite making the lineup in every event his freshman year, Mullinax struggled mightily in the NCAA Championships at Karsten Creek with rounds of 84-80-84.

“We knew when he went to NCAAs that he was going to be overmatched, and he couldn’t have broken 80 if Tiger Woods was caddying for him that week,” Seawell said. “It was just mentally over him. It was just a big environment that he wasn’t ready for.”

If every career has a tipping point, Mullinax’s sophomore year was it. Although he’d made the lineup for each of the fall events, Alabama headed to its toughest test of the season in March that year, Southern Highlands, for the Southern Highlands Collegiate Masters. He wasn’t ready, and he got eaten up, shooting rounds of 83-80-87. He didn’t make a start the rest of the season as Seawell made the difficult decision to remove him from the lineup in advance of the SEC Championship and NCAA Championships.

For the team, that decision was prudent as the team advanced all the way to the NCAA Championships Final before falling to Texas. For the competitor in Mullinax, his play that week — and his coach’s subsequent decision to bench him — ate at him.

His response, though, is a lesson that Seawell still shares with his team and juniors today.

“He could have done one of two things — got discouraged and quit, or (asked himself), ‘What do I need to do for this not to happen again?’” Seawell said. “He came probably two days later. After two days of being mad, he came and was like, ‘What do you think I need to do so that I will be more ready to handle all these things?’ So we sat down and made a plan of just playing. From there, he just took off. I think that was a huge crossroads right there.”

"Trey's done more for me than I could have ever done for him."- Alabama golf coach Jay Seawell

Take off he did. As a junior and senior, Mullinax played an integral role in back-to-back national championship teams and earned All-American honors.

“(Seawell) stuck with me through thick and thin,” Mullinax said. “When I was playing bad, he pushed me and didn’t quit on me. He taught me how to play golf. I knew how to hit the ball, and I knew how to get it on the green, but I didn’t know how to play golf. He taught me how to score and how to play and what to do to score.”

That experience of earning his keep and securing his spot with his play is exactly what he needed when he turned professional.

“I learned how to qualify, and I needed that at Q-School,” Mullinax said. “It helped to learn how to qualify. I had a lot of guys on TOUR now that pushed me.”

If his old coach is correct, one day soon Mullinax will be the one pushing them.