Illinois State secondary coach Cody Deti remembers the day well. It was preseason 2013 and he and his wife Megan were hosting the defensive backs for dinner, an annual pre training camp tradition. That evening, a true freshman from Kansas holed up in an adjacent play room for kids, never saying a word.
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That freshman was Davontae Harris, and he was ashamed of his stuttering. This weekend, Harris may very well get drafted into the NFL, but nearly five years ago, he struggled to take the crisp thoughts on his mind and push them clearly past his lips. So he just didn't say anything. Today, you would never know he had that problem (listen to his podcast with HERO Sports below).
"It was the second time I'd seen this with an athlete I coached," Deti told HERO Sports. "I had a young man who stuttered when I was the defensive coordinator at Northern Colorado, also. It was scarily similar. Davontae was very gifted, intellectually and athletically, and he just had to tie it all together. But he gained more confidence as he played the game and did well academically. It went away."
Indeed. Today, Mel Kiper has him as a fifth-round draft pick, while NFLDraftScout has him going in the fourth round on Saturday. If he is drafted, he'll be the first to be taken from ISU since his former teammate James O'Shaughnessy was picked in 2015.
Harris admits he hasn't talked much about the stuttering problem publicly, but now that he will have a national platform in the NFL, he wants people to know — mainly because he doesn't want kids with the same problem to feel like they too must stay in a proverbial side room to themselves, away from social contact. It was a social anxiety problem, that's truly all it was, Harris told HERO Sports. He had to conquer his anxiety around others, and he did. Not with therapy or really any outside help — he just faced it on and owned it.
This week, after being complimented on his interview style — something that will come in handy at the next level — he admitted he once could never have done an interview like that. He even noted that he'd been stuttering through the entire interview, but has learned how to control it and work with it to the point where others just don't pick up on it.
"It was one of those things where I didn't like to speak in front of people, even at the beginning of the season when you just introduce yourself and say your 
name and position," Harris told HERO Sports. "I just had to man up and realize that my stutter was more of a confidence thing. So I just had to grow my confidence and up my speaking ability. I knew I was intelligent, I knew I had a lot to say. But I just couldn't get my words out.
"I sounded like I had marbles in my mouth."
One might ask, OK, he may have stuttered early in his college career, but how would that affect a cornerback? It certainly could be an issue for a quarterback, a center, a middle linebacker — positions that require constant communication to the rest of the unit. But that's just it — Harris may be more naturally fitted to play safety in the pros, a position where he would need to be vocal. In college he was so dominant he could play anywhere in the secondary, but NFL scouts asked head coach Brock Spack if he'd ever considered playing Harris at safety. Spack's response stunned the NFL representatives.
"They've asked me so many times if I thought he could play safety," Spack told HERO Sports this week. "Early in his career we always used hand signals but you have to bark out as a safety some concepts based on the coverage, and he just couldn't do it. So he played at corner for that reason. Now NFL scouts come in and meet him, and he has such a great personality, but I knew they'd find out about (the stuttering) one day because they always find out everything, so we were up front about it. They said, "You've got to be kidding me". They're stunned when they hear about it because he's really outgoing today."
"He can play safety now."
Deti calls Harris a perfectionist, and it is that personality trait that got him through the problem. As mentioned above, ISU didn't put him in any kind of therapy, Harris just asked around, did some research, and found his method to beat it on his own. He knew it was purely mental. He recalls driving around campus over and over again, recording his voice with the memo app on his phone — files he still has stored as a reminder. He just worked on it and worked on it and worked on it.
Meanwhile … he was performing well in the classroom, notching All-American honors on the field, and landing invites to the Shrine Game and NFL Combine — no small feat for the prospect from the "small" school.
"I was just over stuttering," Harris said. "It was becoming a crutch for me, that I felt like my life was going to be limited in opportunities because I couldn't speak in front of people … what I've done is I've learned how to manipulate my stuttering to my advantage."
That he has. This weekend, he will very likely receive a phone call from an NFL team that wants him, and he's looking forward to the biggest phone call of his life and the conversation that ensues — instead of dreading it.
SAM HERDER: Illinois State DB Harris Staying Humble
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