Penn State center Nick Dawkins looks back (and forward) ahead of massive opportunity
Nick Dawkins is in line to begin the season as Penn State’s starting center.
But there was a time when he was almost a Northwestern Wildcat.
The veteran Nittany Lion, who is squarely in the mix to be a team captain in his fifth year in Happy Valley, once carried a chip on his shoulder as an in-state prospect that had him thinking that there were greener pastures away from home. As a standout at Parkland High School in Allentown in the Class of 2020, things didn’t come as quickly for Dawkins and the Nittany Lions as he originally planned.
Dawkins had to wait until late March of his junior year for that scholarship offer to come along. By that point, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, Tennessee and West Virginia were among the programs that had beaten Penn State to the punch.
“For me, I got my Penn State offer a little later than I guess I wanted to. I’d shown Penn State that I was interested and didn’t get an offer. So my mentality as a young 17-year-old boy like was like, all right, bet. If don’t want me, I’m gonna go somewhere else and beat you,” he said in an interview with BWI this week. “And then.. that’s just the adolescence speaking as opposed to like the maturity of where I’m at now. It’s kind of weird, that was like five years ago. I’m old now.”
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Then came a trip to Chicago in early April. Pat Fitzgerald and Northwestern were an appealing option at the time. He gave the Wildcats a serious look, but conversations with his family and James Franklin ended up swinging him back to the Nittany Lions.
“I was pretty close to going to Northwestern,” said Dawkins. “I really, really value academics and I was like, you know what, maybe this is a good move. But my decision was bigger than me. If something were to happen to my mom, I’m the legal guardian of my sisters. I can’t be an airplane ride away. I need to be within driving distance of my hometown. If something were to happen, I need to get there. That was something we talked about with coach Franklin and when I was getting recruited.”
Dawkins, instead of leaning on the reasons he had to get away from Allentown, instead pivoted to the pros of growing up for the next few years a couple of hours from his home.
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“When you have something so close you take it for granted,” he said. “You kind of look exterior trying to be different. I had so many people from my high school went to Penn State. I had cousins that went to Penn State, family members that went [to Penn State]. And I’m like, man, I want to be different. I want to be the guy that does his own this that and the other thing and all that. But I think when I was so obsessed with what other people were doing, I lost sight of my own vision of what I could create what I could do here.
“To be honest with you, what I want to do, what I want to be for my family, this was the perfect, perfect, perfect fit for what I wanted to do. We always talk about that gut feeling. I felt right coming here. And I don’t regret any of my decision to come here. I’m so elated and happy that this was the decision that I made and I know that I’ll be a Penn Stater for life.”
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Dawkins has earned Academic All-Big Ten honors three years running and will enter 2024 as the expected starter at center. He played as a reserve center and guard last season after missing most of 2022 with an injury. While most of the chatter around his impact has been off the field as a leader and a pillar of the Nittany Lions’ community efforts, he’s excited to bring the focus back between the lines.
“Since I’ve been here, it’s always been about what I do off the field,” said Dawkins. “I think that’s important, because it’s the mark of who I am as a man, not my identity as a football player.
“But I’ll be honest with you. I have all the confidence in the world that I’m the best center in the country. I’ve worked my dang tail off to be that and to be in the position that I’m in. I think there are a lot of guys in this world who have more talent than I do, but I promise you that they will never outwork me. They’ll never put in the work and the time and the effort that I have put in to be in the position that I’m in now.”
