You’ll have to forgive Austin Harnetiaux, he’s often thought of as playing with a chip on his shoulder. He doesn’t have a chip on his shoulder–but he should. As one of the most highly-decorated athletes to come out of Seattle Prep in a while, he somehow slipped under the radar of the rest of the Pac-12 Conference, only receiving walk-on offers from the Washington Huskies and the Washington State Cougars.
To Austin, that’s just fine. To some scouts it’s curious.
“He’s a Power 5 kid, no doubt about it,” said one scout. “How do some coaches cash their checks with a clear conscience, missing on a player like this.”
To some former opponents, it’s perplexing.
“He’s is no fun to get hit by,” said a running back from a rival school. “He’s not just going to tackle you, he’ll let you know that he’s going to do it again. I will and I won’t miss him. He made me better a running back to make sure that I use my vision, but it was no fun to get tackled by him.”
That’s not a chip on his shoulder, that’s what’s in his heart. It’s the way that he plays.
“I just like to hit,” he said, with a shrug and a smile. “I just like to hit–with everything I got.”
Whenever he dons a uniform it triggers a certain mentality.
He knows that most people probably can’t pronounce his name and that “AH” just doesn’t roll off the tongue like “DJ or JJ” so he’s just simply known as four-four–even around his school.
“When I pass kids in the hall they just say, ‘What’s up four-four?’ Even the teachers call me by my number”
It’s a good distance to have come from when they didn’t know his name to where they couldn’t pronounce his name.
Austin remembers former Washington linebacker coach Bob Gregory pretty much gave up on trying to pronounce his name, “he just called me ‘Juice Man’ because I always brought the juice (energy).”
But early in his high school, Austin was the one that kept on getting hit. First, he tore a quad muscle and his sophomore season ended abruptly. Then in his junior season, the fall high school football was shut down from the pandemic, only to have an abbreviated season in the spring of 2021. But his quad healed and he used the downtime to close the gap between himself and the other players.
“I transformed my body and my mind,” he said. “Missing so much time my sophomore year I felt like I had some ground to make up.”
He viewed the shutdown as an opportunity to outwork other kids and close the gap between himself and other area players. And it paid off.
“Nobody knew who I was in March 2021,” he said, lowering his voice. “Nobody knew who that Prep linebacker was until they looked at the tape and saw number 44 flying around.”
That’s when they discovered the player whose name they couldn’t pronounce.
44 had a breakout game against Eastside Catholic. He forced a fumble and collected 3 tackles for loss among his 14 tackles. Then late in the 4th quarter, he personally slammed the door on the Crusaders. He had a fumble recovery with 3:37 left in the game. Just over two minutes later he capped off the upset with an interception.
He finished his junior campaign with first-team all-league honors.
He backed up his breakout season by earning MVP honors at multiple off-season football camps. And colleges started to take notice.
Harvard came calling. Dartmouth too. Then Georgetown. Air Force and Army offered him as well. From the other side of the Cascade Mountains, Central Washington and Eastern Washington joined the fray.
After his senior season, he was named the league’s defensive MVP as well as a first-team all-state linebacker by SBLive.com. He’d finally won over the scouts, but the offer that he coveted, the one from the school a 5-minute drive from the Seattle Prep campus never arrived.
There was another UW, the University of Wisconsin, that first offered him a Power 5 opportunity, as a walk-on. He committed to Wisconsin on December the 12th, thinking that the door was closed at the University of Washington. In fact, he was so much of a Badger that during the early signing period in December 2021 that the university released a video of him in a red Wisconsin shirt with the slogan “Jump Around” on it.
But then the pendulum started back the other way for 44.
Washington dismissed Jimmy Lake and with Kalen DeBoer, Harnetiaux finally found the opening that he was looking for, receiving a preferred walk-on offer from the new Washington staff.
“It was difficult to decommit from Wisconsin,” Austin recalled. “They were the first Power 5 program to believe in me and I’m eternally grateful to them. They’re pure class.”
However, the lure of playing in his backyard in the purple and gold was too good to pass up.
