SEATTLE – Shelton Sampson says he feels like he’s back at home.
The Washington senior is back as a member of the Huskies football team, and back at running back. He wishes he would have handled last season differently, but says he believes that it happened for a reason, and he’s returned to the team with a new attitude.
“You lose track of things sometimes,” said Sampson, a 200-pounder from Lakewood’s Clover Park High School. “I was stuck on what I really, really wanted to do to help the team, but it should have been about what the team needed me to do at the time. I didn’t see it that way at the time. Now I’m here to do whatever it is the team needs me to do, and that’s the way it should have been in the first place.”
To Sampson’s delight, what the team needs for him now is what he most wants, and that’s the carry the football.
He spent his first three seasons (including a redshirt year) at tailback for Washington, gaining a total of 530 yards and scoring 10 touchdowns. But with Washington’s secondary struggling, coaches asked Sampson to move to cornerback last season, hoping to take advantage of his speed (his 21.18 time in the 200 meters is the third-fastest all-time for the UW track team) in a unit that desperately needed it.
But the position move didn’t sit well with Sampson, and he left the team in October.
“I should have done it a little different,” Sampson said. “It was a mishap on my part leaving the team, because I made a promise to the team that I wouldn’t leave. But things happen, and I’m blessed to have a team and coaching staff that would bring me back and say, ‘You know you made a mistake and we’re willing to give you a second chance.’”
After missing the final six games of the season, Sampson decided he wanted to return to the team. He said he approached head coach Tyrone Willingham and left “everything on the table.”
“I just wanted to let them know I’d do whatever I needed to do to help the team,” Sampson said. “I wanted them to know they wouldn’t have any more problems with me.”
Sampson said he wasn’t nervous about how he would be accepted back, because he knew that Willingham would be fair.
“I just needed to be straightforward with him and let him know what I wanted to do,” Sampson said. “The one thing about coach is that he’s fair, and he’ll let you know exactly the possibilities and what you need to do. He never led me astray. He said if you do this, then you can come back. I just had to be a man about it.”
Sampson, who lost his scholarship and is now a walk-on, returned to the team in time for spring practice and immediately began trying to learn to play cornerback, not an easy task for someone who had rarely played defense even in high school. He earned his art degree in June, and it was about that time that coaches told him they’d like to move him back to running back.
“That’s my heart right there,” Sampson said. “I was going to give my all to defensive back. I was going to play it and do my best. I was working on it and I was learning a lot from coach (J.D.) Williams. But when I got that call about moving back to tailback, it uplifted my spirits. That’s what I always wanted to hear them say.”
It’s a good thing Sampson did move back to running back, because the Huskies are suddenly thin at that spot. Heralded redshirt freshman J.R. Hasty is lost for the season for academic reasons, and incoming freshman Leilyon Myers is also waiting for academic clearance to join the team. Another freshman, Matt Mosley, suffered a head injury this week in practice. On top of that, Kenny James is recovering from a fractured forearm, and though he’s practicing, he’s still an injury risk. That leaves just Sampson and Louis Rankin as the only completely healthy and available players at the position.
“We don’t have that many guys there, so I need to step up,” Sampson said. “This is an opportunity for me to go out and do things that I’ve always wanted to do. But if they need me to do something else – return kicks, move back to DB – I’m ready to do that. I just want to do whatever I need to do to help out the team.”
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