He has lightly curled blonde hair, checks in at 6-foot-2 and around 200 pounds, and recently got a tattoo on his right arm.
Eric Harris can be fiery on a football field with his helmet on and his teammates around, but on this late August day, in the second week of training camp, he walks off the practice field for a few minutes in a ho-hum manner. He isn’t boisterous but can hold conversation with ease. He doesn’t demand attention but it’s easy to gravitate toward him. He can deliver an aw-shucks laugh.
Harris has the look of a lifelong quarterback. He’s one of the best in the Mid-Penn Conference and will be in the conversation for best in the state if he once again leads Pennsylvania in yards.
And yet, football is hardly what defines him.
From nothing
to something
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It was all so sudden and so impressive.
Harris didn’t play football his sophomore season, so when he stepped back into the locker room before the 2015 campaign he was mired in a four-way battle for the quarterback job vying to replace Billy Burger, who went to Dickinson after a record-setting 2014 season.
There’s no doubting his passing acumen now. Harris, who was named the Herd starter within 24 hours of the season opener, broke Burger’s record with 3,635 yards on 274-of-405 passing, and tossed 35 touchdowns last season in leading Carlisle to a 5-6 season and another District 3-AAAA playoff appearance under coach Josh Oswalt, now at Central York.
How, then, did he go from walking back onto the team in July to the state’s leading passer?
“He’s self-driven,” Oswalt said. “He’s always wanting to make himself better.”
Harris’ mastery of an offense predicated on getting the ball to any of five receivers quickly and in space belied the fact that he had a year of rust to shake off even to win the starting gig.
“It was just insane,” said Harris, who admitted he wouldn’t have believed before the season he’d put up those numbers. “You know that you’re the one that they chose, so you had to kinda show out so they know they made the right decision.”
His best game was a 20-for-27, 400-yard, four-touchdown dismantling of Harrisburg in the regular-season finale that clinched Carlisle’s playoff berth. He was pin-point that November night. But the lightbulb went off, Oswalt thinks, in the season opener against Mechanicsburg when Harris threw for 368 yards, three TDs and two interceptions while completing 25 of 31 attempts.
“He became fully committed after that Week 1 win against Mechanicsburg,” Oswalt said. “My cell was blowing up left and right (with questions).”
But it almost never came to be.
Growing up fast
The tattoo Harris has is a recent addition.
It’s on the inside of his right arm, his throwing arm. On it are the initials “D.L.H.” and the date Sept. 13, 2011.
That day will hang with him forever. Harris, then in seventh grade, found his dad, Dave Harris, at home dead of a heart attack at 50 years old.
“That’s definitely something that you try to step into your own, had the feeling of being the man of the house,” Eric Harris said. “Definitely had to pick up more responsibilities — and I’m not saying that I’ve completely taken ahold of everything that I wanted to the right way.”
Father and son were close. The youngest brother to siblings Christi Fraker (28, teaches in Mount Holly) and Brett (27, lives in California), Eric was coached by his dad in baseball. Football wasn’t originally in the cards, but Dave’s friends convinced the family to let little Eric give the sport a try when he was young.
“He was the dad at the Little League baseball games getting mad when you struck out and getting mad if you had errors and everything,” Eric Harris said. “It pushed me to be better and be great and not settle with mediocrity.”
He has tremendous respect for his mom, Debbie. With two older children out of the house, she had to finish raising Eric by herself. When his sister was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor — successfully removed, but seriously scary — Eric decided to stay out of football his sophomore year to ease his mother’s stress.
“She’s doing a tremendous amount of work for being the only parent in the house,” he said. “It’s amazing. I’m scared leaving her in a year, what she’s gonna be doing.”
He wishes his dad was here to watch on Friday nights, but Harris won’t let it hold him back. He sees his sister and her 3-year-old son regularly, and Brett flew in from Los Angeles to see little bro’s first game of the season tonight at Mechanicsburg.
More than football
Harris is getting some NCAA Division I looks, including Columbia University. He spent the summer at camps and developed a rapport with a coach from Catholic University who helped mentor him. He exchanged texts with Oswalt even after the coach departed for Central York, and former Carlisle QB Clem Johnson has worked with him this summer. The emphasis has been on footwork, since it’s not as polished as he’d like it to be running primarily out of shotgun formations.
But he’s not fixated on a future in football. He sees it as an opportunity to get to college on a scholarship and help his mom financially. A pro career? He’s realistic about the odds.
One thing is for sure: He wants to get into film.
Harris and his older brother have a very close relationship, despite the elder Harris living in Los Angeles. There’s a large DVD collection in the Harris household that Eric has pored through.
“I’ve really taken after (my brother); a lot of things I do are because of him,” Harris said. “And (an interest in film is) one of them.
“We just have clever battles back and forth. It’s fun, I just like writing stuff that would happen. (…) I just like the idea of realistic conversation, I don’t know how to explain.”
His favorite movie is “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” because he likes coming-of-age movies. Some of his favorite shows are “The Office” and “Entourage.”
Where once he wanted to go into the medical field because it paid well, he’s now working on revisions to a TV show his brother is writing based on his life in college (and maybe some of the lengthy conversations the siblings have had over the years). Eric’s name is on the script if it ever gets sold or produced.
“It’s the only thing that I do that I could see myself doing for a living and being into rather than settling for something for money,” Harris said.
“I just feel like I have a natural ability to do what I want to do instead of having to force myself to learn different stuff. It’s better, definitely, to be in a job that you’re excited about.”
He might help out with Carlisle’s stage crew when they produce a Shakespeare play, but he has no intent to act. His brother studied history in college before deciding to pursue his dreams in L.A. Harris wants to follow suit, using football as a springboard into a career writing scripts.
And when he puts his mind to something, it tends to work out.