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Catawba’s men’s basketball team was winning big but most of the attention was being paid to an athlete sitting on the front row of the Goodman Gym bleachers.
DeVonte Peterson was in the house. Shaking hands.
Shaking a lot of hands.
Why? Wouldn’t you want to say you shook the hand of a soon-to-be professional football player?
Peterson’s place in the upcoming April draft was all but secured recently when he was invited — and participated — in the annual NFL Combine, held at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis.
Actually, the Catawba All-American slightly participated. Coming off a late-season leg injury, where he broke the fibula in his left leg, the scouts knew he wouldn’t be timed in the 40 or able do some of the other drills at 100 percent.
So Peterson — as well as teammate Radell Lockhart — will get an own up-close-and-personal tryout March 30 when a horde of NFL scouts converge on Catawba College to give the impressive 6-foot-4, 275-pound defensive end a workout.
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Peterson caught a glimpse of how intense professional football is when he arrived in Indy for the Combine.
Security was tight. No press. A rigid schedule had the players flying in at this time and flying out at another. If you were a couple of minutes late, you missed your flight. There was testing — the written kind and the on-the-field kind. Orientations to attend.
And then, there were the participants. Suddenly, Peterson, a country boy from the small eastern North Carolina town of Clinton, was right there in a mix of Seminoles, Sooners and Huskers.
It could be a bit intimidating to most people. But not Peterson.
“I looked around at everybody,” Peterson said. “And we’re all people. Division I players are the same shapes and sizes. The only difference was your attitude and how you talked to people. Everybody was real funny. There were some characters out there.”
Peterson had the usual problems of a Division II prospect.
“I roomed with Jonathan Beasley, the quarterback at Kansas State,” he said. “I told him I was from Catawba and he asked, ‘Where’s that at?’”
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Once the rapid-fire drills began, it didn’t matter where Catawba was located — or where Kansas State is located for that matter (for the record, it’s in Manhattan, Ks.). Each player got the same treatment.
Peterson flew in on a Friday and didn’t have time to think. He attended orientation, going over rules and regulations. Then, a rookie seminar. Talks on good behavior. A drug test. X-rays.
Peterson found out that if NFL teams are going to pour millions of dollars toward draft picks, they want to know more than your 40-yard dash time.
And that means making sure everything works. Doctors would probe and search and peer at every part of a player’s body.
There were three tables in a room, three doctors to a table.
“You went to nine different rooms,” marveled Peterson. “They pulled on ligaments, knees, hips, shoulders — everything, trying to find any nick they could.”
There were no surprises with Peterson. The scouts and doctors knew of the broken fibula.
“It’s an injury you can come back from,” Peterson explained. “The bone won’t break again because I’ve got two metal plates in there.”
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Peterson shook his head when remembering the written tests. Most of the Combine players had taken them when they played in all-star games. Because of the injury, Peterson did not play in any so he was forced to take three tests, composed of hundreds of questions, in one weekend.
“They were just common sense questions,” he said. “It was the same questions over and over and over just to see what you’d say.”
Peterson found most of the physical drills were no more than what he went through each day for defensive line coach Jim Tomsula at Catawba.
“Shuttle drills, hitting the bag, quick-feet drills, vertical leap, broad jump, checking quickness, agility and balance — it was nothing new,” he said. “With the big boys (D-I prospects)there, you try to go even farther because the scouts are watching.”
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Oh yes, the scouts watched Peterson. He couldn’t do any drill without one of them sitting in a chair taking notes. Even when he had free time, he was accosted by NFL personnel.
“They’d see you walking, grab you and pull you over,” said Peterson. “They’d say stuff like, ‘I’ve been trying to get up with you, DeVonte. Tell me this and tell me that. How’s your family? Where is Catawba?’”
When the weekend Combine ended, Peterson was gone as quickly as he came. But he left feeling happy.
“Before I went up there, I weighed 280,” he said. “When I got there, I was 275. I was like, ‘Where did the weight go?’ But 275 in a very good weight.”
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Peterson is back in Salisbury now, working with Indians trainer Bob Casmus, who is preparing him for next Friday’s workout.
Peterson will be drafted. There’s no doubt about that. Players are not invited to Indianapolis unless their stock is high. And Peterson has heard he and Lockhart, another 6-4, 270-pound defensive end, could go anywhere from the second to the sixth round.
But who knows?
Not Peterson,who is trying to keep a level head.
“I haven’t seen anything yet,” he said, referring to the large paychecks NFL prospects covet. “It hadn’t really hit me.
“I’m still just DeVonte. I’m still just No. 95.”
And then he proved it. He went back to what he was doing — shaking a lot of hands.
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Ronnie Gallagher is the sports editor of the Post.
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Ronnie