Not bad for a middle linebacker with zero college scholarship offers who didn’t start playing the sport until his sophomore year of high school. Adapting has been a recurring theme throughout his life. Like Diaz predicted, van den Berg has gone on to great things – even if those things took a little longer to accomplish.
Said van den Berg, that chipper, melodic accent poking out again: “I just felt like I needed a real true opportunity to show people what I could do.”
***
Most kids have their favorite football teams and players growing up.
Van den Berg did too – though his may have been Michael Oher and T.C. Williams High School.
Growing up in South Africa’s largest city – auspiciously, Johannesburg is nicknamed “The City of Gold” – van den Berg was a talented rugby player in his youth. The sport is revered in his home country, with the Springboks winning a record four Rugby World Cups. Yet van den Berg also fell in love with American football, though not exactly by conventional means.
“Watching The Blind Side. I remember watching that when I was a kid. Remember The Titans, just watching that. I was like, wow. I loved it,” he recalled.
The oldest of five boys, he remembers the day his mom, Lisa, and stepfather, John Hendry, gathered their children together to deliver the news. With the economy sluggish in South Africa, they were moving their family to Lilburn, Ga., outside Atlanta, “to have the American Dream” as van den Berg put it. Lisa would continue her career as a photographer, while John had lined up a job in engineering.
“Me and my brothers were all excited. You grow up watching movies, and every movie is in America. We were all young. We were like, America’s got Disney World. Everyone was happy,” he said, adding that his father, Michael van den Berg, moved to the U.S. two years later.
His career in football wasn’t as glamorous as those movies or as storybook as Disney. Every time he asked his parents to let him play – a natural transition from rugby, he figured – they resisted. Concussion concerns, they told him.
“It took me many years to beg them, beg them, and finally they allowed me to play in 10th grade,” van den Berg said. “When I played in high school, you could see that hunger because I really wanted to play it my whole life.”
He made up for lost time, emerging as an all-state middle linebacker at Providence Christian Academy in Lilburn. But his Class A private school didn’t historically produce many Division I players and, despite racking up 157 tackles as a senior, college recruiters stayed off his scent. If he wanted to continue playing, van den Berg realized he’d have to bet on himself at the junior college level.
The coaching staff at Iowa Western Community College in Council Bluffs, Iowa, took a flier on him – with a catch.
“They didn’t have any linebacker spots, and they told me I could walk on and be a defensive end. I had no other offers, so I was like, I’ll do anything. I just want to keep playing the game,” he said.
***
van den Berg had already handled the assimilation from South Africa to Atlanta as a 10-year-old. Moving from metro Atlanta to Council Bluffs, Iowa, he insisted, wasn’t that daunting. The move to defensive end didn’t prove daunting either: in his lone season at Iowa Western in the spring of 2021, he earned first team JuCo All-American honors despite only playing six games.
His film ultimately attracted the attention of Penn State, where he converted to defensive tackle and appeared in 28 games across three seasons (2021-23). His playing time slowly increased with the Nittany Lions, from six tackles as a freshman to nine as a redshirt freshman to 11 as a redshirt sophomore in 2023.
Van den Berg showed flashes of production, but not quite the sustained level he had hoped for. His inclusion on The Athletic’s “Freaks List” may have felt like a hollow achievement in hindsight. When he entered the transfer portal, telecommunications degree in hand, in February 2024, he wanted a place where he could continue his development as a player.
He found a match 25 miles from where his family’s American journey began. Under the tutelage of Georgia Tech defensive line coach Jess Simpson – “probably the best D-Line coach in college football,” van den Berg said – he feels he’s finally tapped into the kind of player he knew he could become.
“J.J. is a great competitor, very physical, very powerful. He’s known for what he’s done in the weight room. He’s probably the strongest guy on our football team. But he combines all that stuff. He plays with relentless effort, he finishes on the ball and he’s really done a great job fitting in to the room,” Simpson said.
He’ll need all of those attributes on Saturday as Tech looks to shake off a pair of frustrating road losses to begin ACC play. Their revived run defense will also get a test from North Carolina running back Omarion Hampton, who ranks fifth in the nation in rushing (127.3 ypg).
However the second half of the season plays out, van den Berg will adapt just like he always has, determined to keep his re-sculpted career going strong.
“I knew that Georgia Tech was the right place,” he said, gazing out at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Hyundai Field.
“I was really happy that I was able to capitalize on my opportunity.”
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