ASU Football: N’Keal Harry, talented from beginning

With N’Keal Harry’s entrance into college football, all eyes have been drawn to him.

The freshman wide-receiver has scored 3 touchdowns in 4 games and has 195 receiving yards under his belt. Not to mention his spectacular one-handed touchdown catch with 3 seconds left in the first half during the University of Texas-San Antonio game.

After an impressive first game of the season, where he scored his first touchdown of his college career, Harry was a trending topic on Twitter. Weeks later, his one-handed catch was featured on ESPN. This is not the first time he was one of the more well-known players on a team.

Even before his impressive career with Chandler High School, where he was a 5-star ranked recruit, Harry was impressing parents and students alike at Dobson Academy, a K-8 charter school where basketball was the number one focus.

Harry had originally quit playing youth football in favor of focusing on basketball due to concussion concerns, and when he first appeared on the Dobson Academy court and joined the game of pick-up before lunch, he instantly became a mini-celebrity amongst the small junior high population.

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Harry, who now stands at 6’4” and 220 pounds, was tall even back then and quickly became friends with the other looming basketball player of the school. The two affectionately earned a nickname: “The Twin Towers”.

When Harry arrived at his high school, Marcos de Niza, it was football head coach Roy Lopez who convinced him to give the sport another try – his sophomore year resulted in 5 touchdowns and 716 receiving yards on the varsity team.

The next semester, however, he transferred over to Chandler High School – the oldest active high school in Arizona and home to a division I football team that had not won a championship in 65 years.

That all changed when N’Keal Harry, Bryce Perkins and Chase Lucas (both Perkins and Lucas are also on the Arizona State football team) led Chandler to a victory over long-time rival Hamilton High.

The team wasn’t able to repeat their victory for Harry’s senior year; however, he still stunned with a spectacular season of 14 touchdowns and 802 receiving yards in 11 games. All the while, the athlete never dropped his passion for basketball as he averaged a double-double in his last year of high school.

Now, as an ASU receiver, Harry has a good shot at breaking the freshman receiving records previously set in 2004 by Zach Miller.

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Regardless of whether he actually accomplishes that or not, it should be exciting to see how he develops throughout the rest of his career.