Through the Fire
Trevor Harris
Professional football is a big dream. Few people talk about how steep and rocky this journey can be, but I know a lot of athletes can relate to the first few years of my story after college. In fact, that journey involved seven teams in four different leagues in just two years, hitting every variety of dead-end you could imagine.
Excelling at my small college program did not prepare me for what happened between 2009 and 2011. After college, I was cut by my first NFL team, Jacksonville, on the final possible day when a player could be released. Then I went to the Arizona Rattlers in the AFL for a short time, followed by the Hartford Colonials in the UFL, a team that folded in the middle of training camp. I finished that season back with the Rattlers, only to have my NFL hopes resurface when the Bills picked me up. That excitement was short-lived, however, when they dropped me after realizing I wasn’t a rookie so I couldn’t report when they wanted me to.
Next, I signed with the UFL’s Sacramento Mountain Lions, but this time the entire league went under during the fifth week of the season. So, it was back to the AFL and the Orlando Predators, but a players’ strike led to the entire roster being cut in favor of replacement players. By the time I left Orlando and headed to the Toronto Argonauts for a shot at the CFL, I was wondering if my football dream was over. Certainly, no one would have blamed me for finding another line of work at that point.
But once I started playing in Canada, things slowly started to change. For my first three seasons in Toronto, I was just trying to perform well enough to stick around in hopes that I might eventually get a chance to start. I was on the team and working just to be named the consistent backup quarterback when the athletic director from my alma mater called.
He was offering me the offensive coordinator position at Edinboro University, the school I loved, where my younger brother was the starting quarterback. It was such an appealing opportunity, and my football prospects were still so uncertain, that I accepted it. But about 48 hours after I made that decision, the Holy Spirit woke me up in the middle of the night. I was restless and unsettled, and I knew God was telling me that I needed to stay with pro football. I hated to call my head coach from Edinboro to tell him that I wouldn’t be taking the job after all, but he gave me only love and support. And right after that about-face, things started to turn for me in the CFL.
In 2015, an injury to the starting quarterback finally handed me the opportunity to start for the Argonauts. I played in 15 games and performed well enough to catch the eye of the Ottawa Redblacks, who signed me to share starting time with CFL legend Henry Burris as he neared retirement. After a season of duel quarterbacking with Henry, the starting job became mine alone, and in 2019 I signed with the Edmonton Eskimos as their starting quarterback.
My success in the past few years—a Grey Cup championship in 2016, three straight 4,000-plus-yard passing seasons from 2017-’19, a new CFL record for most touchdown passes in a playoff game in 2018—has served to verify the Lord’s hand in my career path and solidify the lessons He has been teaching me along the way.
In those early years of the football career rollercoaster, God led me into humility. Prior to my first NFL training camp release everything had fallen my way as an athlete. I needed that season of life to experience the other side of the coin. On every step of the way, God has been teaching me to prize faithfulness over stability, even when I still had to live with my parents and I feared that I might never have a steady income or the ability to support a family.
Today, as I train six days a week with the prospect of returning to Edmonton in the spring, my wife and I are raising our two young sons with the assurance that God will continue to lead. Just as we have to discipline our boys at times because we love them and care about forming their character, God had to put me through the fire at times to help turn me into a man who puts Him first.