The 212cm-tall Texan was busy representing Oklahoma State University in basketball at the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament.
However, that soon changed when he was scouted by the Australian Football League and starred at a testing camp in Los Angeles.
Cox says that after a ''crazy, crazy string of events'', he arrived in Australia in August to join the Melbourne-based Collingwood AFL club, commonly known as the Magpies, which beat four other clubs to his signature.
The 23-year-old is in Queenstown for a week-long training camp with a 78-strong group of players, staff and corporate clients from the club.
Team spokesman Stephen Rielly said Cox had ''outstanding athletic attributes'' but was still learning the game and would probably spend a few seasons in the game's second-tier competition before stepping up to the highest level.
He is the tallest player measured at an AFL testing camp, but brings more than height to the game.
His test numbers, including a 3sec 20m sprint and an 11.59min 3km time trial, demonstrated speed, endurance and agility, and since then he has achieved the highest vertical jump recorded in Australia.
He also has a pedigree of sporting success, having played college basketball only five years after taking up the game.
Before that, he played in the feeder side for Major League Soccer team FC Dallas, but gave up the game when he was 18, to focus on his engineering studies.
His sporting prowess is matched by academic success. He did a mechanical engineering degree ''pretty much because it was hardest thing I thought I could do'' and turned down a lucrative job at Exxon Mobil to take up his scholarship with Collingwood.
He is now vying with two other Americans contracted to AFL clubs to be the first to play a game at the highest level, but says if and when he achieves that ''is in someone else's hands''.
''I'm not going to set any targets to achieve that. I'm just going to try my hardest and let the coaches decide when they want me to play or not,'' Cox said.
However, he was drawing on the skills learned from other sports - endurance and spatial awareness from football and ball-handling and aerial skills from basketball - to give himself the best shot.
''There's no way I'd be in this position if it wasn't for all the other sports I've played.''
