Damien Harris weighs hometown team against traditional powers
By Ethan Levine
Published:
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The University of Kentucky is familiar with convincing elite high school athletes to come to the Bluegrass to don the Wildcats’ blue and white.
It just so happens those recruits usually play basketball, not football.
But that’s not the case with Kentucky’s best high school football player in the class of 2015, Madison Southern tailback Damien Harris. The five-star back has the Wildcats firmly entrenched among the final three schools he’s considering, and he has the potential to become the first five-star commitment of the Mark Stoops era.
The other two schools he’s considering are Alabama and Ohio State, two of the traditional titans of college football led by two of the game’s best coaches this century.
It’s a strange dichotomy among the last three contenders in the Harris sweepstakes, and all three parties have had to take a unique approach during his recruitment.
Kentucky has laid on the “hometown effect,” and has sold him on its emergence in the SEC East since Stoops’ arrival. His high school, located in Barea, Ky., is located just 39 miles from Kentucky’s campus.
“Home is where the heart is,” Harris said of Kentucky following Friday’s Under Armour All-America game. “You know it’s a school, they’re 15 minutes away from my house. It’s real close. And the program is on the rise for sure and they’re doing a lot of great things.”
Harris explained his entire Berea community has been encouraging to play at Kentucky, including friends, administrators and teachers.
“It’s everywhere. You can’t get away from it,” he said.
He also explained his familiarity with building a program from the ground up. Harris recounted his high school career, stating his program had won “two or four games” in the four years before his arrival.
After a 2-8 freshman season his team finished 7-5 his sophomore year and 10-2 his junior year. He knows how difficult it is to build something from nothing, and he embraces that challenge.
“I definitely know what that’s like and I know the time, the effort, the hard work that goes into (a rebuilding process),” Harris said. But he wasn’t finished.
“But at the same time I’ve been battling with do I want to go somewhere that’s already established where I have great players around me.”
And there we have the other side of the coin — the schools with the championship pedigrees and the heaps of fellow four- and five-star talents and the Hall of Fame coaches. Those schools sell themselves simply by embodying the previous sentence.
“It’s like (Nick) Saban and (Urban) Meyer, once you hear those names it just rings with you. There’s not much to say about them except Alabama is Alabama and Ohio State is Ohio State,” Harris said.
Alabama has a history of producing NFL running backs in the Saban era, from Mark Ingram to Trent Richardson to Eddie Lacy to soon T.J. Yeldon. Meyer has accomplished more with raw athletes in his career than perhaps any coach ever. There’s plenty of appeal for a lesser grind than Kentucky can offer.
And yet Harris is not ruling out Kentucky just yet. Even after former offensive coordinator Neal Brown departed for the head coaching vacancy at Troy. Even though he’s never met new offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson due to an ongoing recruiting dead period.
Harris said aside from Stoops and running backs coach Chad Scott, “one coaching change doesn’t necessarily affect me.” He understands the impact he can have on a program on the rise, and he understands the impact the program and the university have on the commonwealth of Kentucky.
But at the end of the day, the power programs have plenty of upside, and Harris was not shy in acknowledging that. As most recruits do, and should do for that matter, he’s making the decision that’s best for he and his family, not his home town or home state.
When asked for his frontrunner as of Friday’s game, Harris said there wasn’t one.
“I’m not committing today for a reason because I have no idea,” he said.
A former newspaper reporter who has roamed the southeastern United States for years covering football and eating way too many barbecue ribs, if there is such a thing.
