At home on the road

Former Packers prospect settles in at Saint Mary’s

Monty Mosher, The Chronicle Herald Sports

September 24, 2009

DEVON HICKS is just happy to be here — literally.

The defensive end for the Saint Mary’s Huskies has kicked around over the last few years — even attending training camp as an undrafted free agent with the NFL’s Green Bay Packers in 2007 — in a search for a safe harbour in and out of football.

That’s because his real home, his mother’s all-encompassing love aside, isn’t much of a home at all.

He’s a 24-year-old product of Dade City, Fla. The crime-infested streets of his youth are where hopes go to die and he lives with painful reminders of a past he can’t escape — even in a part of the world he knew nothing about not long ago.

"It’s nice up here," the six-foot-one, 265-pound powerhouse said prior to practice Wednesday. "Canada is nice, period. Everyone up here is friendly, helpful, everything like that. It’s way different from back home."

Hicks, once a running back with blazing speed, made his debut for the Huskies last Saturday in a 38-10 win at Acadia. Without knowing much about his team’s defensive systems, he had two tackles for a loss, forcing a fumble, and nearly had an interception later in the game.

In some ways he believes playing three-down university football in Nova Scotia is a sort of penance for a lack of humility he’s shown since the Packers signed him out of junior college to a two-year contract with a signing bonus he pretty much wasted.

"I was all the way in the NFL and I believe it took God to humble me back down," he said. "I needed this. I was up on my pedestal for a while. I’m not saying I had a big head, but I just got there too quick. I believe it came too easy. But I don’t mind working my way back up."

Huskies head coach Steve Sumarah said once he talked to Hicks and his mother, he knew he was dealing with a solid person.

"He’s an outstanding young man," said Sumarah. "As a player, when he gets more comfortable in our system, he’s going to be more dominant week to week."

Playing football in Canada, even the kind that doesn’t pay, allows Hicks to temporarily forget about Florida, where he has a brother facing decades in prison. He didn’t offer his brother’s name or the nature of his misdeed.

"Being away from home, it’s much safer," he said. "It’s all drugs and killing and I’m just trying not to be around that.

"I’ve got a brother that’s incarcerated right now and he just got caught up with the wrong crowd and that’s mainly the big thing back home. When I’m home I know everybody, and I know what they do, and I’m just trying to steer myself away from that."

Violent death is real to him. He’s had a cousin gunned down on the streets he’s trying to escape.

He said he spent the last several months close to home out of apprehension.

"I stayed in the house," he said. "Just about every time I go out there’s trouble. It’s crazy.

"People just don’t want to see you prosper. They see you do something with yourself and they look down on you and talk bad about you. I could care less. I’m still going to make it."

His mother, Carie Brown, who raised him as a single parent, is his source of inspiration. She works and goes to school parttime, approaching a second degree.

He nearly lost her due to kidney failure, the same affliction that killed an uncle.

"She raised me and gave me everything I could possibly want," he said. "She took both parts — mom and dad."

A basketball and track star in school, Hicks has NFL talent and intends to make it back with better health and more maturity.

The Packers signed him after an impressive tryout and his play in the team’s mini-camp had some Green Bay followers expecting him to stick with the team. Even with a groin injury and unable to practise during full training camp, the Packers kept him around until the last cuts.

He realizes he’s got some growing up to do before he can even think about a return to pro football in the U.S.

"Right now the CFL is the safest place for me," he said. "I need to become a man in some ways. All that money I signed for, that was just too much for a 22-year-old young man."

Since his failed attempt to make it to the NFL out of Northwest Mississippi Community College, where he was an all-American in 2006, he’s had two cracks in the CFL. A stop in Saskatchewan in 2008 ended with a groin injury, the same groin injury that caused him to get cut in Green Bay, and his time in Winnipeg this year was cut short when he injured his knee.

Chris Jones, the Calgary Stampeders defensive co-ordinator, contacted Hicks’s old junior college coach and suggested Hicks find a Canadian university to better learn the Canadian brand and to get his speed back up to where it was before the injuries. Sumarah’s phone rang a short time later.

Hicks said the CIS doesn’t compare to the speed of the NFL, but he’s not complaining.

"Football is football," he said. "There’s nothing really different, just different coaches and different players. These guys just aren’t getting paid like they were in Green Bay."

He said playing for Saint Mary’s is about advancing his prospects in professional football, but he’s also serious about acquiring credits toward an undergraduate degree.

"I need to get back on track in school and in football because there’s nothing to do back at home but bad things."

( mmosher@herald.ca)