When Sarasota, a town in southwestern Florida, was rated America’s meanest city in 2006, Karan Higdon was just a nine-year-old kid who wore size nine-and-a-half shoes. He was a big kid, no doubt, who went to the Boys and Girls Club most days after school and sometimes met his friends for kickball outside in the neighborhood. He played Pee Wee football for the Port Charlotte Bandits, and even back then he was running over every tackler in his path. Todd Johnson, though, spent that year with the Chicago Bears. Then in his late 20s, the professional defensive back was in his fourth season in the National Football League since getting drafted out of the University of Florida. After games, Johnson would pick up leftover football gloves and shoes from the Bears’ locker room to send back to Sarasota’s Riverview High School, his alma mater. It was also the year Karan’s mother, Samantha Christian, decided the family should move out of Newtown. On the outskirts of Sarasota’s inner city, Newtown was a tight-knit community where everyone knew everyone, but it was also an area where you didn’t want to make a wrong turn. Higdon, Johnson and Christian are just three characters in a bigger story of how one boy from Florida did what so many others couldn’t — get out. Higdon’s story is one of motivation, hard work and commitment. It’s a story about someone who made the right choices when others didn’t and stuck by them against adversity. It’s a story about a protagonist and a supporting cast that never left each other’s side. This story begins in Sarasota. *** Karan Higdon almost quit football when he was five years old. It was too hot, and they had him running laps. After one day of flag football with the Sarasota Redskins, the kindergartner decided it was enough. One of the other boys’ fathers was the team’s coach, so that boy got to play running back. That’s how youth football teams usually worked — the coach’s son got to play a position that always got the ball, and if the coach had a nephew as well, then that kid might get a few runs. The other kids, though, were usually just thrown in wherever. For Karan, that position was center. Eventually, after Karan’s mother told him to “suck it up” and go play, one of the coaches noticed how fast he could run. So in the next game, Karan played running back, they handed him the ball and it was all go from there. Karan was still young, but realized that running out in the Florida heat wasn’t so bad when he had the ball in his hands. He also realized that people were invested in him, and nobody more so than his mother. Christian wanted to be Karan’s biggest fan and be just as involved in his life as her parents were for her, especially her mother. Christian’s mother never skipped her daughter’s sporting events, award ceremonies or parent- teacher conferences. She made sure her daughter had whatever resources she needed to succeed. “To see my mother sitting in the stands as I’m playing basketball or see her in the stands as I’m running the 100- yard dash, it meant everything to me,” Christian said. “I didn’t care if nobody else was there to support me. I wanted my mother there.” So when Christian became a mother to three boys, she approached parenthood the very same way: staying as involved as possible in her kids’ upbringing. Growing up, Christian pushed Karan to be very active. She described him as bubbly, happy and always smiling. When he wasn’t in class, he was playing sports. He’d meet up with other friends in the neighborhood to play touch football, because that’s what most of the kids in Sarasota would do. Christian had also grown up in Sarasota, though, and she knew all too well how easy it was for boys like Karan to get distracted. Newtown’s neighboring areas were fairly impoverished, and homelessness was a major problem for the city. On certain streets, Christian always saw kids getting caught up by older guys. There were fights and drugs, and Christian knew how malleable a young boy growing up there would be seeing people flaunting around money with shiny jewelry and the newest pairs of shoes. She didn’t want Karan seeing police officers handcuffing drug dealers or attending a school where he’d hear about “so-and-so’s parents getting busted” and going to jail. She didn’t want Karan to get the idea that stealing or selling drugs was a productive way to go through life. “I didn’t want Karan to get hypnotized with the fascination of that illusion of what a man is supposed to be,” Christian said. She’d grown up in the city and seen it all herself. So when Karan was nine, Christian moved the family out of the inner city to North Port, a neighborhood much further south of the county. She wanted to make sure that Karan didn’t become like some of the people she had seen in Newtown, because as he moved up into middle school, she was starting to realize how significant football could really be for him. *** When Karan was playing Pop Warner football at the age of 12, his nickname was “Nightmare.” “This kid was literally a nightmare on the football field on offense and defense,” Christian said about her son. “He was just unbelievable. He used to carry his team on his shoulders. They would run Karan so much, that I was like, ‘Hey coach, don’t you think you need to give the ball to somebody else? You’re running him so much!’ But Karan was able to carry that load. He would average at least four touchdowns a game.” Karan, too, started to realize how good he was. “I was pretty big as a kid, compared to other kids, so I would just run through a lot of people,” he said. High school coaches started paying attention, too. It became clear that wherever Karan went for school, he would go straight to varsity. Riverview High School was always the likely candidate to land Karan. Christian had gone to Riverview herself, and FootballSaturday, November 4, 2017 4 Karan Higdon’s Sarasota success story TED JANES Daily Sports Writer Michigan’s running back saw one way out of Florida. With the help of his mother, he took it and ran. COURTESY OF SAMANTHA CHRISTIAN Junior running back Karan Higdon poses with his mother, Samantha, after rushing for 200 yards and three touchdowns against Indiana this year. I didn’t want Karan to get hypnotized with the fascination of that illusion of what a man is supposed to be.