‘No shortcut’
Trevor Harris and his windy road to Grey Cup starting quarterback
EDMONTON Trevor Harris describes it like being in a washing machine.
His path from a tiny college in a tiny town in Pennsylvania to starting quarterback for the CFL’s Ottawa Redblacks in Sunday’s Grey Cup has been anything but delicate.
The spin cycle involved labour strife, delinquent teams and stops barely long enough to unpack.
“It’s been very challenging,” Harris said Wednesday as he reflected on his career.
“I was thrown around every which way, but when I got out of it, I was able to stand up, stand tall and say I can still do this and I still believe in myself.”
Harris was a star for the Edinboro University Fighting Scots, a small Division 2 school in Edinboro, Penn., population 6,500.
He set every passing record at the school while playing from 2006-2009 and was a four-time all-PSAC West selection.
His former coach in Edinboro, Scott Browning, remembers a kid who was focused and driven.
“His fun on a Friday night was to get a whole bunch of guys together and see who could drink a gallon of milk,” Browning said from his home in Maryland.
Browning said he would often get a call from Harris on Friday nights pestering him to open the gym first thing Saturday morning. Harris would collect teammates’ cell numbers, Browning recalled, and would text them inspirational phrases everyday in the off season.
Coming out of university things were looking up for Harris.
He signed as a free agent with the Jacksonville Jaguars of the NFL in 2010 and made it to the final round of cuts. That’s when the fun began. Harris has got the story so well rehearsed he can tell it in about a minute.
From Jacksonville it was off to Arizona and a job playing with the Rattlers in the Arena Football League.
Midway through that season, however, he got picked up by the Hartford Colonials of the United Football League. He went there only to see that team fold nine days into their 2011 campaign, so it was back to Arizona.
A couple of weeks later he got picked up by the Buffalo Bills, but the NFL was having labour issues that off season.
“Because of the rules of the lockout, I couldn’t report by a certain date and 36 hours after the Bills signed me, they rescinded my contract,” Harris recalled. Back in Arizona, he finished the season and then got opportunity with the Sacramento Mountain Lions, again in the UFL.
“The season got cut short in Week 5 of 8, because they couldn’t pay the players.”
He went back to the AFL with the Orlando Predators in 2012.
“We’re going to the first game and they release all the players and play with a replacement team because they thought the players were going to strike,” he said.