The walls of head coach Mark Duda’s office at Lackawanna College in Scranton, Pa., are lined with rows and rows of framed portraits of the players he has helped climb from the obscurity of junior-college football to Division I in the past two decades.
Kevin White remembers staring at those photographs every night. Assistant coach Charles Grande met with the wide receivers in Duda’s office, and White would gaze around the room at snapshots of players who had made the leap to Division I, and the 15 who reached the NFL.
“I want to be up there one day,” White would say.
His photo still isn’t there, and it’s his own fault.
“He hasn’t sent me one, the bugger!” Duda said, laughing, earlier this week.
White spent two seasons at Lackawanna before transferring to West Virginia before the 2013 season. He had 35 catches for 507 yards and five touchdowns in his first season at the Division I level but didn’t truly burst onto the national scene until a 143-yard receiving day in a 33-23 loss Saturday against No. 2 Alabama.
The highlight of White’s banner day in Atlanta was a picture-perfect diving catch in the back of the end zone, where he plucked the ball out of the air just beyond the reach of Crimson Tide cornerback Bradley Sylve, who he bullied all night.
“It’s all coming together for him,” Duda said. “And it really couldn’t happen to a better kid.”
Keeping good company
After White left the locker room Saturday night, weaved through the crowded Georgia Dome tunnels and stepped onto the team bus, he finally fired up his cell phone. He watched as the notifications flooded in, one ping after another, until one in particular caught his eye.
Shortly after the final whistle, Arizona Cardinals receiver Larry Fitzgerald, a Pitt alum, had tweeted: “My [timeline] is full of @kwhite8 comparisons today. Did he ball out?”
“That was crazy,” White said Tuesday. “[Fitzgerald] is one of the guys I watch a lot and try to mold my game after.” As for being compared to a seven-time Pro Bowler, White grinned and said, “It’s just the dreads and the number.”
The hairstyle and No. 11 aren’t quite the only similarities. Listed at 6-foot-3 and 210 pounds, White is only 8 pounds shy of being Fitzgerald’s body double.
Plus, White revealed, as a high-school senior in Emmaus, Pa., his first college choice was Pitt, until his grades forced him to pursue the junior-college route.
White always “passed the eye test,” Duda said, but he was raw. His college-ready body and speed allowed him to ad lib on the field in high school. He didn’t need to read coverages or run precise routes; he could break off a route anytime he wanted and still make defenders look silly.
At Lackawanna, that wasn’t going to fly, so Duda redshirted White as a freshman. White started fast as a sophomore and saw Division I offers start to trickle in. First Hawaii, then Texas Tech.
“And then, all of the sudden, everyone was recruiting him,” Duda said. “It kind of went insane. Then there were so many schools it was almost impossible to keep them straight. It was offer after offer after offer.”
White, then listed as a three-star recruit by Rivals.com, selected West Virginia in part to the proximity to home and also because fellow Lackawanna teammates Mark Glowinski and Dayron Wilson were there.
The genes are good, too
White followed a path less traveled to Division I football, but his certainly isn’t a unique story. His younger brothers, Kyzir (defensive back) and Ka’Raun White (receiver), are at Lackawanna now and have the same Division I dreams.
And they’re hardly “little” brothers.
“There’s obviously a genetic component, because they’re the strongest guys in their positional groups,” Duda said. “That cannot be by accident.”
The brothers got a taste of Division I life when they visited White in Morgantown last weekend and got the grand tour of the facilities, shaking hands with everyone from teammates to coaches to administrators.
To them, there’s nothing cooler than having a big brother playing big-time college football, but, like most, they’re aware West Virginia is likely just a another rung on White’s climb. Duda was contacted by the Cleveland Browns recently — the NFL is calling.
“If and when he gets to the Combine, he’s going to vertical out of the gym, he’s going to broad jump out of the gym and he’s going to 40 off the chart,” Duda said. “People are going to say, oh my god, because he’s really gifted.”
At this point, receivers coach Lonnie Galloway said, White is “his own worst enemy.” For him, it has always been a mental game.
With West Virginia trailing Oklahoma by six points in the third quarter of his debut, White caught a pass in the red zone but had the ball stripped away. White made seven catches that day but the Mountaineers lost, 16-7.
The fumble stuck with him all season.
“The only thing Kevin needed is to believe,” offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson said. “Believe that you’re that good. Believe you’re that kid and make plays.”
White has all the tools to be West Virginia’s go-to threat, his current and former coaches all say, he just might have been the last one to discover it. Even now, White swears he’s not focused on the future.
“Every football player thinks about going to the NFL,” White said. “That’s normal. I don’t give it a lot of attention at all. You’ve got to crawl before you walk.”
First Published: September 5, 2014, 4:00 a.m.
