He belongs.
That’s the mindset Alex Highsmith, a former no-star prospect out of high school, has taken to heart during the process of proving why he’s worthy of being selected in next week’s NFL Draft. Not many college programs wanted Highsmith coming out of high school. Davidson and Furman inquired, with Highsmith eventually walking on at Charlotte. And even that came through Highsmith’s own initiative when he asked a rival head coach if he could send his tape to his son on the Charlotte staff.
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Through sheer will, work ethic and determination, Highsmith developed into a player who has gone from overlooked to a near-lock to be selected before the end of the draft. But while Highsmith is all but certain to be selected, there’s still a belief that he’s being overlooked again. His numbers as a fifth-year senior are eye-popping. In 2019, he had 14 sacks, which tied for third in all of college football, and only 2.5 behind Ohio State’s Chase Young. Leading up to Charlotte’s game against Clemson, Tigers head coach Dabo Swinney declared that Highsmith “could play for anybody in the country.”
After the game, Clemson left tackle Jackson Carman said that Highsmith was, “by far the fastest off the ball I’ve ever gone against. Ever.”
Still, Highsmith is considered a mid-round selection entering the draft. A part of him still wants to prove how wrong most of the local Power 5 colleges were by overlooking him out Eugene Ashley High School just outside of Wilmington, N.C. At the same time, despite his stellar past two seasons, he’s not getting the kind of attention he otherwise should be getting. Highsmith records these slights in his mind to further add to his desire to prove why he deserves to be considered among the best pass-rushing prospects in this year’s draft class.
“The lower I get drafted will be more motivation for me,” Highsmith said. “No matter where I get drafted, I’m going to go into a team’s locker room and work my butt off to be the best I can be and help them win games. I came from that walk-on spot, and I know what it’s like to be at the bottom.”
An overlooked star from the beginning
Here’s a little-known fact about Highsmith. He appeared for the first time on television when he was a baby on the television program “Dawson’s Creek.” He played the role of the newborn son of characters Bessie Potter (Nina Repeta) and Bodie Wells (Obi Ndefo), making his screen debut near the end of the sixth episode of the first season. Katie Holmes, who rose to stardom after playing the character Joey Potter, held Highsmith in her arms.
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Despite his rise as a football prospect, this also remains an overlooked aspect of his background. Highsmith was born and raised in Wilmington, so he is frequently asked about “Dawson’s Creek” since the show was filmed there. Little do those questioners know that he played a role in the television series.
Highsmith recently made an appearance on Doug Gottlieb’s radio show, with Gottlieb asking the same question. To Gottlieb’s surprise, he found out Highsmith had more than just the coincidence of growing up in the show’s filming location.
“That’s something I want people to know, too, that I was a little TV show star as a baby,” Highsmith said.
@GottliebShow thanks for having @CharlotteFTBL alum @highsmith34 on your show today. I love how you guys got on the conversation of #DawsonsCreek and Alex's first time on TV. He helped make @KatieHolmes212 a star!! 😆 pic.twitter.com/1y3vAZUqMm
— Sam Highsmith (@HeelsNinersDad) April 1, 2020
Charlotte head coach Will Healy, who finished his first season with the 49ers, said his wife Emily remains amazed over Highsmith’s brief television career.
“My wife talks to him about it more than I do,” Healy said. “She’s starstruck every time she sees him. He’d play pretty well on Saturday and she’s like, ‘No, that was the baby on Dawson’s Creek!’ OK, however you want to talk about him I’m good. He’s a man of a million talents.”
In high school, Highsmith didn’t have many suitors wanting to add him to their college teams. He was only a little more than 200 pounds and didn’t hit a growth spurt to 6-foot-1 until later in adolescence. It didn’t help that during his senior season of high school, Eugene Ashley finished with an 0-10 record.
“I was pretty skinny,” Highsmith said. “That’s probably why I didn’t get many offers. I hit a late growth spurt; no one knew about me. I feel like I bloomed at the right time; that’s what I’d say.”
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He didn’t get Charlotte’s attention until he asked then-Hoggard head coach Scott Braswell to pass along his tape to his son, Scotty Braswell Jr., who was a graduate assistant on the Charlotte team’s staff. Sure enough, the 49ers started recruiting Highsmith to walk on to the program.
Even so, Highsmith wasn’t sure if he actually had a spot with Charlotte as he was graduating from high school in 2015. He didn’t find out he was a preferred walk-on until the summer before his redshirt freshman season when his college living assignment changed from rooming with some high school friends to the football dorm. From there, Highsmith’s path was anything but conventional. He redshirted but put on 20 pounds of bad weight, he said. After the 2016 season, he lost 20 pounds after pulling a hamstring and getting sick. As a result, he played the 2017 season — he was awarded a scholarship before that season — as a 235-pound outside linebacker, feeling faster but too light against the competition.
The 2018 season is when Highsmith began to blossom. Playing in a 3-4 under former head coach Brad Lambert, Highsmith was a 4i-technique defensive end. In this scheme, there weren’t many pass-rushing opportunities, as Highsmith recorded three sacks. But being one of three players rushing the passer, Highsmith was forced to learn a lot about how to best get after the quarterback. While the sack opportunities weren’t there, he was still a disruptive presence with 17.5 tackles for loss, a single-season program record at the time. The following summer, agents began to recruit Highsmith, which marked the first moment that Highsmith realized the NFL might be a reality.
Highsmith’s draft stock got a boost when Healy took over and implemented a four-man front. Healy also hired Marcus West to be the team’s co-defensive coordinator and defensive line coach after he spent one season at Minnesota, with the two moving Highsmith to a true edge-rusher position.
By this point, Highsmith had the cross chop and chop rip moves in his pass-rush arsenal. To counter those, he learned a spin move, which is his favorite. With a new scheme and new coaches, they were able to bring the most out of Highsmith when it came to rushing the passer.
“I attribute my production increase to (West), with what he taught me about pass rush and so many things I never known,” Highsmith said. “He broke down so many things about my game that I didn’t know that I could fix. He helped me learn more moves, improve my get-off with my hands, improve my hips. He also put me in a scheme to be an effective pass rusher off the edge, we ran a 4-2-5 last year. He gave me a lot of freedom off the edge.”
Healy wanted to put the bulk of Highsmith’s improvements on him and not the new coaching staff.
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“I love Marcus West, but Marcus isn’t a miracle worker,” Healy said. “Alex already had a lot of that in his repertoire. Maybe how he explained it, and why he used it and when he used it that he fine-tuned. Alex knew how to rush the passer when we got him. It was just giving him some tricks and some tools to where he could do it more effectively. And I think our scheme gave him that opportunity, as well.”
The timing worked perfectly with Highsmith exploding as a senior. He recorded two sacks apiece against Gardner-Webb and Appalachian State before recording another sack against Clemson two games later. With 9.5 sacks heading into the regular season-finale at Old Dominion, Highsmith added 4.5 more.
But there was a moment during his senior season that stood out to Healy. Before the Appalachian State game, Charlotte held a Friday practice that began with the requisite stretching. Highsmith’s back was giving him an issue, and he grimaced in pain. Healy approached him in the stretching line to ask what the issue was. Highsmith said his back was locking up, to which Healy told him to go get treatment so he would be available for the game the next day. Initially, Highsmith refused, telling his coach he wanted to finish the practice. Healy then demanded Highsmith go get treatment for what turned out to be back spasms.
“He went out there Saturday against App, and you would have thought nothing was the matter,” Healy said. “He was going to play through it. Very, very tough. A very low maintenance football player who just loves playing the game, wants to do his job and will do everything you ask him to do exactly like you ask him to do it.”
Two words
During the 2019 season, every NFL team stopped by a Charlotte practice to get a glimpse of Highsmith. But what further elevated his draft stock was his performance in the East-West Shrine Bowl. At 6-3 and 247 pounds, Highsmith had an excellent week of practice leading into the all-star showcase. Among defensive linemen, he ran the fourth-fastest 40-yard dash in 4.7 seconds at the NFL Scouting Combine. His 33-inch vertical leap tied for sixth in his position group. His 20-yard shuttle ranked first among defensive linemen at 4.31 seconds.
The Athletic’s Dane Brugler has Highsmith pegged as his 14th-ranked edge rusher in this year’s class, although in his yearly draft guide, dubbed “The Beast,” he noted there could be great potential to uncover.
“The former walk-on needs to continue to expand his rush plan, but his coaches rave about his ability to quickly adapt to new techniques,” Brugler wrote. “Overall, Highsmith has tweener tendencies with his size and play strength, which especially shows in the run game, but he is an athletic edge player who has yet to reach his ceiling as a pass rusher, projecting as an intriguing mid-round value.”
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Brugler has a fourth-round grade on Highsmith, with a general consensus being that he could go anywhere from the third to the fifth round. Highsmith met with most teams at the East-West Shrine Bowl and spoke with 20 teams at the combine, which included two formal interviews.
For Highsmith, the fact he’s set to be drafted could serve as validation for what he believed all along. Before he was set to go through his drills at the combine, Healy reminded Highsmith about his rise in the college football world, considering he went from a little-known walk-on to being praised by Clemson’s head coach and starting left tackle.
“He told me two words. He said, ‘You belong,’” Highsmith said. “I went out there with that mindset, with a chip on my shoulder, to show I have an edge over all these guys.”
(Photo: Jacob Kupferman / Getty Images)
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