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Shortly before noon on Saturday, Izaiah Prouse-Lackey will hear his name echo from the Doak Campbell Stadium public address system.

Few of the 70,000-plus fans in attendance will recognize it.

Some classmates will, of course. As will his brothers from the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, where he currently serves as president.

Spectators watching on television might know his face, hair and jersey number. He’s the guy who wears No. 38 each week and feverishly flashes signals to Florida State’s defensive players before every snap. The guy with flowing black locks, covered by a green baseball cap and a coach's headset.

There was a time when Izaiah Prouse-Lackey hoped to be one of the Florida State players receiving those signals, instead of delivering them. He thought he would hear his name announced to the crowd several times each autumn Saturday, instead of only on Senior Day.

That was the dream.

It’s the dream of every undersized athlete who chooses to walk-on at a football power like Florida State University, as opposed to accepting offers from smaller programs.

Most of them were stars on their high school teams. Most were outstanding athletes, just maybe a few inches too short or a bunch of pounds too light.

They know what they’re signing up for.

They have to pay their way through school. They get few of the perks of the scholarship players. They’re sometimes seen as nothing more than tackling dummies, lining up on the scout team to give the starters and top backups someone to practice against.

Some walk-ons do it for the love of the game. Some do it because they’re chasing a dream, hoping to be the one who catches the coaches’ attention -- who earns precious playing time on a Saturday or an even more precious scholarship.

The odds are stacked heavily against all of them.

In gambling parlance, they’re longshots.

Izaiah Prouse-Lackey might be the longest longshot of all.

If you’re looking for a single word to describe the beginning of Izaiah Prouse-Lackey’s hopeful journey to college football stardom, it would be this:

Inauspicious.

A few months earlier, he was a star linebacker/safety for his high school football team in suburban Atlanta. He was a team captain since the end of his sophomore year. Not only did he rack up more than 100 tackles as a senior and lead the Riverwood Raiders to their first state playoff appearance in a decade, but he preserved that postseason trip by pouncing on a late onside kick in the final game of the regular season.

He was a high school hero.

Though undersized by even prep football standards -- five years later, he is listed on the FSU roster at 5-foot-8 and 184 pounds -- Prouse-Lackey’s coaches were so convinced the speedy defender could play college football that they sent his film to then-Seminoles defensive coordinator Jeremy Pruitt.

Pruitt, who was in the process of helping guide Florida State to its third national championship that season, liked what he saw from the hard-hitting defender and offered Prouse-Lackey an opportunity to come to FSU as a “preferred walk-on.” That meant he would not be on scholarship, but he would have a coveted spot on the team that fall. He wouldn't even need to attend a tryout.

While he had interest from Georgia State and other small programs, it took Prouse-Lackey about two seconds to jump at the chance.

“Who would pass up Florida State?” he said.

There was only one problem.

About one week after FSU’s national championship victory, Pruitt bolted from Tallahassee and accepted the defensive coordinator position at Georgia. In an instant, Prouse-Lackey’s FSU connection was gone.

Having already been accepted by the university and after receiving academic and need-based scholarships to offset the hefty out-of-state tuition, Prouse-Lackey decided to forge ahead with his plan to be a Seminole

It wasn’t until he got dropped off in Tallahassee by his barber -- yes, his barber (we’ll come back to that in a bit) -- that he really knew what he was in for.

“When I came in, nobody knew me,” Prouse-Lackey said. “They knew I was coming, but when I got here, my guy wasn’t here, so it wasn’t the same.”

The FSU staffer he spoke with was pleasant enough. They found his name on file, but by the time he made contact, they had filled up every spot for the fall.

“We’ll see you in the spring,” they said.

For the first time in nearly a decade, Izaiah Prouse-Lackey would have to endure a fall without football. That would be a painful reality for any college football hopeful, but it was excruciating for Prouse-Lackey.

Since he was 9 or 10 years old, football had been the lone consistent element of his life. When his family life was crumbling, he had football. When he was the new kid in school -- which was the case so many years -- he had football.

It was his passion. It was his release. It was the one thing that went right when so many other things were going wrong.

Suddenly, it was gone.

“It was the worst semester ever,” he said.

As one of 10 children from a broken home, Izaiah Prouse-Lackey defied the odds long before he was accepted into Florida State University.

His mother was only 16 when he was born; his father was 18 and already had three children.

The couple was never much of a couple -- they basically just had a child together -- and his father wasn’t often around.

“My dad was a rolling stone,” Prouse-Lackey said with a smile. “And my mom was really young. She was 15 when she got pregnant with me, so I feel like we kinda grew up together.”

It was anything but stable.

Though he was born in New Jersey, Prouse-Lackey would live in several states by the time he was in middle school. Three years in a row, around his April birthday, he came home to find a U-Haul truck waiting.

His mother, a Filipino-American, grew up in a military family and was used to frequent moves. So if things weren’t going well in one town, she wouldn’t hesitate to pick up and try somewhere new.

They lived in Jersey and Virginia. Maryland and Georgia.

It wasn’t until Prouse-Lackey began to focus on football -- and his father came back into the picture -- that structure started to enter his life.

After picking up the sport in the fourth grade -- “I was trash at first,” he says bluntly -- Prouse-Lackey started to excel in football about two years later. Playing on a youth-league team in Elkton, Md., he starred at running back, scored 15 touchdowns in a season and led his squad to a league championship.

“That’s when my dad started coming around more,” Prouse-Lackey said. “He was very into football. He would always go back to his glory days in high school. He never made it past high school because he didn’t do the work, and he wasn’t committed to the lifestyle. But he always talked about football. He loved football.”

Looking back on it now, Prouse-Lackey thinks he probably pursued the sport to gain some acceptance from his dad. He had always felt like a bit of an outsider around his father’s other sons. He was the only one with lighter skin, and his older brothers already had shown signs of their athletic ability.

So when his father invited him to move into his Newark, Del., home during the seventh grade, he couldn’t have been more excited.

“He was like my best friend,” Prouse-Lackey said.

For awhile, the new arrangement worked perfectly.

The son finally had a strong man in his life. The father felt like he could give his son stability that he missed out on as a youth. They bonded mostly around football -- whether it was at Prouse-Lackey’s practices and games, or watching the San Francisco 49ers on television.

The promising young athlete was doing so well in middle school that his coaches moved him to quarterback, and he started getting recruited by private prep schools around the northeast. He already was showing the speed and toughness that would pique the interest of Pruitt and Florida State several years later.

It should have been the time of their lives. Instead, Prouse-Lackey felt that his father was becoming more and more controlling.

After getting used to the freedom he enjoyed while living with his mother -- often staying out past midnight and roaming the streets with friends -- Prouse-Lackey suddenly felt saddled by a long list of rules.

There not only was a strict curfew, but he had to get his father’s permission to leave the neighborhood. And when those offers came in from the exclusive prep schools, his dad shot them down immediately. He wanted Prouse-Lackey to stay in public schools and learn how to be an underdog, just like he was.

“My life consisted of getting up and going to class, going to practice and going home,” Prouse-Lackey said. “At times, it felt suffocating.”

His frustration was compounded when he sustained a minor injury at the end of his ninth-grade season and his father decided that he would not be allowed to play basketball in the winter or run track in the spring.

“I just got really said,” Prouse-Lackey said. “I had all this free time, but there was nothing to do in Delaware.”

It didn’t help that his mother had moved to Atlanta, which seemed like Heaven compared to Newark. So as much as he hated being transient as a kid, he delivered some shocking news to his father -- he wanted to move back with his mother.

At first, his father agreed that it might be for the best. But then without warning, he changed his mind. He said he wouldn’t sign off on it.

“It destroyed our relationship,” Prouse-Lackey said. “Literally, we had arguments every day. Fights every day.”

Just before the school year ended, his mother came up to Delaware to take back her son. She picked him up and went to the courthouse to file the necessary paperwork to take him down to Atlanta.

While on the way, they received a text message from Prouse-Lackey’s father.

“I want to give up my parental rights,” the text read. “So make sure that happens, too.”

It was a horrible thing to read.

For a 15-year-old boy, who for so long wanted nothing more than to impress his father, it was crushing.

“That really hurt me,” Prouse-Lackey said. “That was my best friend. My support system. I felt like I got stabbed in the back."

Much like when he moved in with his father, the first year in Atlanta went great.

Prouse-Lackey’s mother placed him in Riverwood International Charter School in Sandy Springs, on the northern edge of the city. The school was challenging, but he was an outstanding student. The football program was a perfect fit.

He connected immediately with his teammates and coaches. For maybe the first time, he felt like he had a true support system around him.

But as had happened so many times earlier in his youth, Prouse-Lackey’s mother decided to make a move at the end of his sophomore year. She had started dating someone new, and they wanted to make a new beginning about an hour away in Athens, Ga.

He was only 16 years old at the time, but Prouse-Lackey had had enough.

“I was not leaving Atlanta,” he said. “I was not moving to Athens.”

One year after cutting off communication with his father, he told his mother she would have to leave him behind. Instead of heading east with his siblings, he moved into an apartment with a man he considered his step-father -- his mother’s ex-husband, who had been in and out of their life for years.

It was not exactly a traditional household. With his step-father on the road for weeks at a time for work, Prouse-Lackey essentially started raising himself. He had learned how to do maintenance work from his father, so he would take odd jobs after school and on weekends for money, while also going to school and playing sports.

He didn’t always earn enough to keep the power and utilities on consistently, but he was getting by. And things took a turn for the positive at the end of that year when his mother moved back in with them.

“It was good,” he said. “Everything went back to being normal.”

Until it didn’t.

At the end of his junior year of high school, Prouse-Lackey’s mother hooked back up with the guy who had taken her to Athens. The ex-husband was out of the picture again, and she invited the new boyfriend to move in with the family.

“I was already 18 at the time, and I was probably a little big-headed,” Prouse-Lackey said. “But my siblings didn’t feel comfortable with him at the house, so I told her not to bring him in or there’s gonna be a problem.”

Sure enough, he was right.

Fed up with all the drama -- “It was madness at the house,” he said -- Prouse-Lackey eventually was kicked out and spent the next couple of months sleeping on the floors and couches of his friends’ families. He had all of his belongings in a duffel bag, and he’d hop from home to home. One night here, two nights there.

He was essentially homeless.

By the time his senior year started, Prouse-Lackey found the smallest shred of stability through the generosity of one of his friends' families, who lived in the same development as his mother. The family agreed to let him stay in their home long-term, and someone even donated a small mattress that he could throw on the floor and sleep on at night.

At school, Prouse-Lackey looked like any other student. He performed well in class, earning As and Bs, and he was an exceptional athlete.

Outside of school, his life was anything but normal.

“In the early days, we never really knew he had any challenges, or much about his background,” Riverwood assistant coach Adam Beckman said. “He was just a kid that showed up every day and did a great job for us. … When you’re dealing with kids, it’s a delicate situation because you have no idea what's going on at home. And at Riverwood, it’s a very diverse population -- from a racial and ethnic makeup, but also from a socioeconomic makeup.

“It just goes to remind you that kids growing up in a 5,000-square-foot home have challenges, and kids living in lower-income housing also have challenges. And you never know what those challenges are.”

In the coming weeks, Prouse-Lackey would come across his biggest challenge yet.

While visiting his younger siblings one night, he was standing outside of his mother’s apartment when he says her boyfriend confronted him.

“He was talking crazy,” Prouse-Lackey said, adding that he assumed the man had been drinking.

Although he insists he wasn’t looking for trouble, the future Florida State football player wasn’t exactly going out of his way to defuse the situation, either.

First, harsh words were exchanged. Then fists.

Without going into too much detail, Prouse-Lackey made it clear that he got the best of it.

“I know how to defend myself,” he said.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the confrontation. Prouse-Lackey said his mother's boyfriend went back into the apartment and came out with a handgun.

He fired two or three rounds.

“I remember hearing the bullets (whizzing by),” Prouse-Lackey said, explaining how he darted as fast he could into a nearby alley and sprinted into the darkness.

The boyfriend would end up getting arrested, but there was more fallout than that.

Prouse-Lackey’s mother ended up being evicted from her apartment because of the incident. And once housing management investigated the case and discovered that he was staying on the floor of the neighbor’s home, that family was threatened with eviction if Prouse-Lackey didn’t move.

In the middle of his senior football season, with high school graduation just months away, he had nowhere to turn. The next day, he told his coaches what had happened.

"He said there was an incident and that he didn't have a place to stay," Beckman recalled.

The Riverwood coaches adored Prouse-Lackey.

He was a model student-athlete. Tremendous leader. Great high school football player.

There was no way they could let his chaotic home life destroy his promising future.

So Beckman made the then-18-year-old an offer. If he could abide by all of his rules -- everything from a curfew to cleaning up after himself and performing chores -- Prouse-Lackey could live with him for the rest of his senior year.

“This was a young man who didn’t come from a lot, but he always had a great attitude. He was always positive. He was always kind,” Beckman said. “He was always a great teammate. And then he tells you about this situation. And you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Here’s a kid with a 3.5 or 3.6 GPA, who has such a great presence about him, such a great heart. Is this really a kid that we want to lose?'

“We, as a staff, couldn’t let that happen. Because he is going to be something great. He already is something great. He just needed a little help. … And it was easier than I could have imagined. I’ve been coaching teenagers for a long time, and there was never anyone that was more appreciative and respectful than Izaiah.”

In Prouse-Lackey’s mind, it might have been the single best thing that ever happened to him.

Beckman, who was a University of Georgia graduate and had a successful career in banking as his “day job,” did more than merely provide Prouse-Lackey with his own bedroom and a safe, comfortable environment.

He gave him a crash-course on finances. He teamed with another Riverwood teacher, Heather Ingram, to urge Prouse-Lackey to apply to different colleges. He even helped him pay for some of those college applications and drove him to meet with football coaches at different schools -- offering pointers on how to speak professionally in those settings along the way.

“He was the complete opposite side of the spectrum from what I was used to,” Prouse-Lackey said. “He was hard on me, and I didn’t always like what he was saying at the time. But if it was not for him, I probably would not be here.

“He gave me the foundation to actually establish a life.”

Beckman appreciates that sentiment but disputes the notion. He says Izaiah Prouse-Lackey was going to be a success no matter what life threw at him.

“Izaiah is an extremely intelligent young man,” Beckman said. “When he was here, he was taking classes like AP calculus and doing very well in school. And when you would talk to his teachers, they would all tell you he was a very smart kid. He just needed a little help."

Izaiah Prouse-Lackey can only laugh now as he tells the story about the barber -- the one who dropped him off at Florida State five years ago.

The day after he graduated from Riverwood, it was time to find a new home. Beckman was leaving for a summer trip overseas, and Prouse-Lackey would need to find a temporary residence before leaving for college.

“He was like, ‘I love you, but I’m not going to leave you in my house for the summer,’” Prouse-Lackey said with a laugh.

He wasn't looking for long. Once he shared his story with the lady who styled his hair, he suddenly had a new host.

“I slept on her couch that whole summer,” Prouse-Lackey said. “When classes started at Florida State and it was move-in day, I packed my stuff up -- which was like two or three suitcases and a handful of stuff -- and she took me down here in her truck.

“When we got down here, we took my stuff off her truck, put it in my room, she gave me a hug and slid … that was the last person I knew. I was stuck. I was like, ‘I don’t know anybody here. Anybody. Zero people.’”

And, of course, the coach who told him he’d be welcome to play for Florida State, Jeremy Pruitt, was no longer with the program.

That made for a difficult first semester -- especially without football. And Prouse-Lackey told himself at the time that if things didn’t work out with the Seminoles the following spring, he would transfer to another school.

As it turned out, that wouldn’t be necessary.

While the transition to college football was difficult, especially since he had to learn how to play defensive back after mostly lining up at linebacker in high school, Prouse-Lackey quickly earned the respect of his new teammates and coaches.

“Luckily, I got on that spring, and I had a great spring,” he said. “It was rough at first, but I impressed the coaches enough that they wanted me back (in the fall).”

There would be challenges off the field as well.

Although he earned some scholarship money and had a solid financial-aid package, paying out-of-state tuition that first year was a bear. He would go to class in the mornings, practice in the afternoons, and then work nights at the Tallahassee airport -- which led to some funny looks and questions from teammates and coaches when they would arrive for flights to road games.

“After practice, I would go to the airport and I would push the plane out for the team if they were traveling,” Prouse-Lackey said. “I would literally pack their bags and push their plane. Then bring them back when they came in (following the trip).”

Although his lack of size would keep him from getting on the field on Saturdays during the fall, Prouse-Lackey quickly earned the praise of his coaches.

In 2015, he was named the team’s Most Valuable Scout Team Player on defense.

Then in the summer of 2017, FSU’s coaches agreed to let him work in their office to fulfill his practicum as a sports management major. With his sights now set on becoming a college football coach, it would be the opportunity of a lifetime -- to sit in meetings and gather information from Jimbo Fisher and other veteran college coaches.

Instead, tragedy struck.

Prouse-Lackey’s father, who had started making efforts to mend their fractured relationship in recent months, died suddenly due to kidney failure.

“It really did a number on me,” Prouse-Lackey said, “because we didn’t end on a good note. I wasn’t able to tell him I loved him. It was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever gone through.”

More than a year later, it still haunts him. There are mornings when he doesn’t want to get out of bed. When he can’t stop thinking about how much he wishes he had welcomed his father back into his life. When he regrets ever holding a grudge.

He has leaned heavily on the support of his fraternity brothers to make it through those tough times.

“Our motto is, ‘Friendship is essential to the soul,’ and I believe that,” he said. “I’ve got 1,000 friends now.”

Things are working out in football as well.

When Willie Taggart put together his new coaching staff early this year, Prouse-Lackey explained his situation. He filled them in on what happened the previous summer and asked if he could do his practicum with them.

They graciously agreed, and it didn’t take long for him to earn their trust as well. Just before the 2018 season started, they tapped him to help them out on game days, relaying play calls from defensive coordinator Harlon Barnett to the players on the field.

“He’s an intelligent kid, and he’s diligent,” Barnett said. “He knows how to pay attention to detail, and he cares. He also has a good understanding of the game and knows how to translate it. He’s a good kid … we’ll miss him.”

Said Taggart: “I know for me, it's pretty neat to sit down there and see him with his hat on and headphones. I think that's pretty cool. That's like that was me one day before, and hopefully it's something he wants to stick with. … Hopefully, as he continues to grow and get into it, he'll appreciate it and realize the impact that he can have on young men when it comes to coaching and hopefully he cherishes that and wants that to be a part of his life to help impact others.”

That is precisely the plan.

As Beckman and other teachers at Riverwood hoped when they reached out to help him, Prouse-Lackey can’t wait to start paying it forward. He wants to coach at the highest levels of college football, and he wants to inspire other young men who will be battling their own trials and tribulations.

“Football has given me so much,” he said. “And I know how much it can give to other people, too.”

When his name is announced during the Senior Day introductions on Saturday, Izaiah Prouse-Lackey will be flanked by his mother, his younger brother and sister, and his sister’s boyfriend. There will be a few extended family members in the stands.

While he hasn’t completely patched things up with his mother since the shooting incident a few years ago, Prouse-Lackey is hoping this weekend will be a step in that direction.

He would love to hear her say that she’s sorry for taking her then-boyfriend’s side in the dispute, but if he’s learned anything from the painful loss of his father, it’s that tomorrow is not guaranteed.

“You only get two parents,” he said. “I still want to work things out. Hopefully, we can get there.”

There will be an even larger contingent in attendance when Prouse-Lackey graduates with his degree in sports management. He expects at least 40 family members to descend upon Tallahassee for that one.

Coming from a family where very few people have attended any college, let alone graduated from a school like Florida State, Prouse-Lackey has become kind of a big deal.

“I’ve got siblings that didn’t move around at all,” Prouse-Lackey said. “They’ve stayed in one city their whole life. They’re literally living in the same city, staying on the same block that my family grew up on.

“I’m the first in my family to go to a four-year college.”

He’s the first to do that. He’s the first to be a member of a national power football team, getting camera time each week while sending in the signals. And he’s the first to be president of a fraternity.

He did all of that -- and more -- against the greatest of odds. While escaping the “madness” of a dysfunctional family. While getting over the scars of abandonment. While bouncing back from homelessness and heartache.

“The great thing is that Izaiah will be the kind of person -- he has been and will be the kind of person -- that will help other people along the way,” Beckman said. “I honestly feel lucky to know him, and I’m sure everyone that spends a lot of time with him feels the same way.”

Izaiah Prouse-Lackey already has accomplished so much in his first 23 years, while overcoming a life's worth of obstacles.

Beckman and his other supporters can’t wait to see what will come next.

Sometimes, the longest of longshots come through.

And when they do, the payoff can be priceless.

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Talk about this story with other Florida State football fans in the Tribal Council