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There are thousands of routes to the NFL. Sean Davis chose a less-traveled one. Well, a never-traveled one, really.

His path involved nine years of home schooling in Prince George’s County, and then enrollment into an elite D.C. private school that had never produced an NFL player. The Maret football team had 24 players Davis’s senior season. The starting left guard was Hillary Clinton’s nephew. The school’s entire football conference — the Mid Atlantic Athletic Conference — hadn’t produced an NFL player in at least 15 years.

On the other hand, the Frogs once sent an alum to a training camp. Two decades ago. He was waived in August.

“At a school like Maret, sometimes you believe that might be the pinnacle: an invite to camp,” said Antoine Williams, the baseball coach and assistant football coach at the Northwest school. “Sean getting drafted, a second-round pick, and now slated to be in the starting lineup opening day against his hometown team? I mean, you can’t write a better story than that.”

Spoiler alert! But yes, eight years after Davis enrolled at Maret — drawn mostly by the academics and the baseball team — he is the starting slot corner for the Pittsburgh Steelers, set to make his debut Monday night, a few miles from his family’s home, against his (formerly) favorite team. There are gym-class lessons galore in this story. Here’s the one they’re focusing on inside Maret’s athletic department: All those times they’ve promised kids that who they are matters more than which school or conference they came from? Well, Davis’s story won’t hurt that argument.

“In this area, you’ve got these powerhouse football factory schools, but it just shows that you can truly come from anywhere,” said Mike Engelberg, Maret’s football coach. “You don’t have to have all the hype and the five stars, playing on a national schedule. If you’re good enough, you’re going to rise up, and this is proof. … He was a well-rounded kid. He didn’t have to focus on football and make that his life to get there. And he played on a high school team with a bunch of just regular guys.”

How did he wind up at that school? Davis grew up playing neighborhood rec sports with future NFL players such as Ravens cornerback Tavon Young and Bills cornerback Ron Darby. Coaches at the local public school wanted him on their roster. But Davis liked baseball more than football. Then there was the home-schooling thing. And then there was his size.

“He looked like a little beanstalk,” said Williams, who first met Davis when he tried out for his travel baseball team as an eighth-grader. “His smile was almost bigger than his body.”

“Sean looked like he was 9 years old, and he was applying for ninth grade,” said Engelberg, who was introduced to Davis soon after. “I kind of looked at Antoine like, ‘Iiiiiiii don’t know about him as a football player.’ “

Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

Maret admissions officials, meantime, thought Davis might have had some gaps in his home-schooling, and asked him to do another year of work. The coaches weren’t sure if they’d see the kid again. But a year later, Davis showed up for another school tour, and went through the admissions process again, and soon enrolled in a school that required his mom to make an hour-long one-way commute — a school where he didn’t know a single classmate.

Football, in any case, wasn’t high on the family’s list in choosing a school. Baseball wasn’t, either. Neither were track and wrestling, which Davis also starred at for Maret.

“We wanted to properly educate Sean, to the best possible education that we could attain,” said his dad, also named Sean Davis, who worked two full-time jobs to help pay for private school tuition.

Once at Maret, Davis started growing. His hero was Sean Taylor, and he flung his body around the football field like Taylor did. His baseball swing was vicious — coaches called him Chili Davis, and opponents once thought he actually was Chili Davis’s son — and his football style was similar.

“It was fun watching him play, but you covered your eyes,” Williams said. “You thought he was gonna get hurt, he was just so violent in his actions.”

With Davis showing signs of stardom, he began to hear from other local prep coaches. They wondered if he wouldn’t rather face a higher level of competition, go to a more traditional football program, get back on a familiar path to big-time college football and beyond. Davis — the middle of five children — said he wasn’t interested.

“He could have transferred,” Engelberg said. “He grew and became a stud. Everybody transfers these days to the biggest, baddest schools around, but his parents were all about academics from day one. ”

“At the end of the day, the NFL is the icing on the cake,” the elder Davis said. “But it’s education that is his foundation for life. And that’s our key motivation, not just for Sean but for all of our children.”

By the time he started wowing college football coaches at recruiting camps, Davis’s path veered back into something more recognizable. He earned Big East and ACC scholarship offers, went to Maryland (where he graduated in three-and-a-half years), attracted NFL eyes, and was taken in the second round by the Steelers in April’s draft. Now he figures to get plenty of snaps Monday night at FedEx Field — just a couple good punts away from the Prince George’s Sports and Learning Complex field where Engelberg first saw him play.

Maybe he’ll even have a run-in with Pierre Garcon, the Redskins receiver who takes such pride in his own unconventional path to the NFL, which went through Division III Mount Union. Garcon, at least, was preceded by a handful of mostly obscure Mount Union products. Davis is the first of his kind.

“It’s not sort of what we’re set up to do: to prepare kids to go to the National Football League,” Maret Head of School Marjo Talbott said. “Certainly Sean’s story is a remarkable one … but watching any of our students hit the pinnacle of their passions — whether it’s as a doctor, or a researcher, or a football player — is really wonderful.”

Engelberg, meantime, has a new talking point at practice.

“We talked about it the other day as a team, just kind of saying ‘Look, anything can happen,’ ” the coach said. “You don’t have to give up all your passions. Just work your butt off, and anything can truly happen.”

University of Delaware, BA in history and political science

Dan Steinberg is an editor and columnist for Sports and the founder of the D.C. Sports Bog. He joined The Washington post in 2001 and has covered high school and college sports, two Olympics, the Super Bowl, National Spelling Bee and New Zealand curling team. He became an editor in 2018.

Dan Steinberg

The Washington Post

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