Celebrating Stanford Senior Gabriel Harris
Posted by AMurawa on March 3rd, 2013When Stanford celebrates its Senior Day today, we’re not going to be saying goodbye to multiple all-conference type players. Instead the crowd at Maples Pavilion will be saluting a guy who has averaged roughly 10 minutes per outing in the 81 games he’s played for Johnny Dawkins, scoring a grand total of just 157 points over four years. But for the Cardinal’s lone senior, Gabriel Harris and his family, that isn’t going to make it any less special.
Gabriel Harris Earned A Reputation As Stanford’s Defensive Specialist (Getty Images)
When Harris first chose Stanford over schools like Alabama and Georgia Tech – schools much closer to his Birmingham, Alabama, hometown –his mom was mad at him for a month after leaving home. But with a Stanford degree in psychology already under his belt and work on a Masters degree underway, you can bet his parents will be plenty proud to stand beside him this afternoon. A defensive specialist by trade, he’s only started six games in his career, and missed the bulk of 2011-12 due to a knee injury, but he’s been a veteran leader for this team, a guy his teammates call “Old Man” in part because he’s slightly older than most of them and in part due to the effect that knee injury had on his game. But Harris has had his moments, including a buzzer-beating three-quarter court shot on a national television broadcast against Colorado State last season in a game in which he not only played a career-high 26 minutes, but also scored a career-high 12 points.
For the most part, Harris has been content to be a role player, working hard in practice, talking care of his academics and doing what his coaching staff asks of him. He might be a guy with a game that is easily forgotten as the 2012-13 fades into a distant memory in the years to come, but his time at Stanford will surely serve him well as he moves forward.
Andrew Murawa Likes Basketball.
