K’Von Wallace looks like a defensive back. His shoulders are back, chin cocked upward, eyes daring you to challenge him to a one-on-one in something — it doesn’t matter what. He’s at least daunting and nearly hostile. Nobody in the room belongs more than Wallace does.

But Wallace doesn’t count himself among this group; he doesn’t belong because of the people that came before him. Wallace is from Creighton Court, in the East End of Richmond, and he belongs because of the people left behind.

As a Richmond, Virginia, native and Highland Springs High School product, Wallace should feel like he belongs. With him comes Louisville offensive tackle Mekhi Becton , with whom he won a state championship, and before Wallace came Rams wide receiver Greg Dortch, Chiefs receiver Felton Davis and 49ers cornerback Tim Harris — all Richmond products.

Creighton Court is a public housing community -- one of the largest in all of Richmond. It’s 504 units altogether, stacked like cells in crowded complexes, thrust between N. 29th St. and Nine Mile Road. As of 2016, the average Creighton Court family earned just over $9,000 a year, and a Creighton Court adult was 33% less likely than a Richmond adult to have received a high school degree or attended college.

“There were never any stores,” Wallace told The Draft Network. “And you couldn’t be out after 10 [p.m.], because of the robberies.”

Wallace was born in Creighton Court to Roxanne Barnes and Kevin Wallace and lived there until he was about three years old, when Barnes moved K’Von and his older sister down the road to Henrico County. It was there he had the best year of his life, when he was eight years old, and his father came to live with him.

Kevin Wallace’s story is a regretfully familiar one in Henrico County. In 2015, the New York Times published a study about the number of Black men aged 25-54 absent from everyday life, as a result of incarceration, death or other factors. Highland Springs, where K’Von would eventually play high school football, had the third-lowest percentage of 25-54-year-old Black men among cities in the United States. Kevin was one of the absent men, as he spent the first eight years of K’Von’s life in and out of prison for drug-related charges. That was where K’Von first met him: prison. The year of grade school, the best of K’Von’s life, was the first time he got to experience him as a father.

It was special while he was there; it was gone just as fast. Wallace’s father would never see him play a high school football game, win the state championship, get an offer at Clemson, and win a couple of national championships there. He returned to prison one year after he was released, in 2009.

Wallace’s father never took him to football practice or helped him with his homework; that job belonged to Wallace’s mother, his coaches and the community. Barnes’ mother, Wallace’s grandmother, still lived in Creighton Court; Wallace and his sister would go there on weekends when Barnes worked her third job at a men’s group home. During the school week, Barnes worked her day jobs, as a crisis counselor at Armstrong High School and driving a van for a daycare, taking children home. Because she was dropping them off, she wasn’t dropping Wallace off at practice; through junior high and high school, Wallace’s coaches shared that duty.

At the time when Wallace’s father was reincarcerated, a Boys & Girls Club had opened near Creighton Court. With his mother at work and his father suddenly absent again, Wallace spent a lot of his time there.

“It helped with those two years, to stay off the streets, make sure I was doing my homework, make sure I was staying active,” he said. “It was the outlet I needed, growing up in that area.”

That year had been hard on Wallace; he was angry, confused and determined not to show it. The Boys & Girls program let him play, compete and forget. He was tired of seeing violence and scared of hearing another gunshot. The club was quiet. It was different than what he knew.

It was special while it was there; it was gone just as fast. The club closed due to insufficient funding a year after Wallace’s father returned to prison.

“When it got shut down, a lot of my friends became criminals, went into the streets, selling drugs, doing drugs,” Wallace said.

Barnes remembers a time Wallace, then a junior high student, saw one of the boys he knew from the club. Still friends with Wallace, he approached, pulling out a wad of money so thick that Barnes was taken aback. He asked Wallace if he wanted him to buy Wallace a new pair of shoes. Wallace said no.

“He was just showboating his money and you know, his clout in the neighborhood because he was this young drug dealer,” Barnes said. “And I remember K’von had this look on his face when he left. I said, ‘Does that envy you at all? Does that bother you that he has all of this money and you don't?’ And he was like, ‘No, ma. No, that's not my life. That’s not what I want.’”

Wallace didn’t want in. He wanted out.

“You don’t want to stay in Richmond. This is not a place you want to be.” Wallace said. “You don’t grow up in Richmond to stay here. You find some way out of no way to make it out, and that’s what I did. I made it out.”

The way out was football; it was a narrow path. Wallace and his family moved to Highland Springs when he was about 11, and he played AAU ball through junior high and onto the high school team. But playing time did not come as easily in high school. Under head coach Loren Johnson, the program blossomed and talented juniors and seniors like Dortch and Davis kept Wallace from seeing the field.

Wallace knew the numbers on graduates from his area. His shot was long already, and he wasn’t going to pay for school without a scholarship. If he wasn’t playing varsity as a sophomore, he figured that scholarship was never going to come. So Wallace resolved to quit football, quit sports for the first time since he had played in the yard with his father.

Johnson would have none of it.

“When I sat down next to him on the bench on that fall night after practice, we had a long conversation about why, as a man, there can be no quit in you or anything that you do,” he said. “And he says from that point on, he could talk to me. We could have a conversation about this stuff. That no man had challenged him like that before.”

Johnson thinks that moment was when things first turned around for Wallace; he grew more active on the junior varsity team, and by the time he was a junior, Wallace had matured. He still didn’t have much playing time or production, so recruiting services looked over him as a rising senior who never found a foothold in the program. Wallace was unperturbed; he was patient.

Wallace thinks the lightbulb turned on at another moment. In the summer before his senior season, while messing around with his coaches and teammates during team camp, Wallace’s linebackers coach tackled him, and the back of Wallace’s head smacked against a pole.

“And the next day, he ran a 4.3-second 40 [yard dash],” Johnson remembered.

Wallace just remembers the knob on the back of his head and the skill he played with ever since. He entered his senior season as a 2-star recruit committed to Cincinnati, before putting up over 1,000 all-purpose yards and 14 total touchdowns while starting both ways. In Virginia’s 5A State Championship game, he had 100 yards, two touchdowns and an interception en route to Highland’s first state title in over 50 years. Wallace ended the season an All-Virginia player at receiver and defensive back.

A commitment to Cincinnati was enough to bring his mother to tears on “endless nights,” Wallace said, knowing that she had helped her son become successful. For Wallace, it was enough to see the potential: the path to Cincinnati, to graduation, to the league. The path away from Richmond.

On a whim, he updated his Hudl profile — a website that allows athletes to create their own profile page and share highlights and statistics with recruiters — with about two weeks left before signing day. Wallace titled his new highlight video “Man Amongst Boys,” shared it on social media and told his friends to as well. In days, it ripped through recruiting offices like wildfire. In less than three weeks, Barnes had Michigan State recruiters in her living room, Pittsburgh representatives in her kitchen and Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer waiting in the driveway. But when Wallace went to visit Clemson, he called his mother and told her, “I can’t explain it, but this is it. It just feels right.”

“I honestly don’t know one person in my area that made it to this point, not even to college,” Wallace said. “I know a few that graduated high school, but I know more high school dropouts in our area than high school graduates.”

He calls himself a member of the “Point Oh Oh” club, which reminds him of the percentage of people from Creighton Court who have graduated college.

But the degree -- a bachelor’s in communications -- doesn’t belong to Wallace; it belongs to Barnes. It belongs to Creighton Court.

“I always dreamed about being different, being that difference-maker,” Wallace said. “And now it starts with me. Once I achieve this goal of making it to the NFL and playing a long career, I can financially help kids in my community, and hopefully, that reason of me doing it can become contagious. They can know that it’s important to become different. It’s important to become unique.”

Wallace plans to rebuild the Boys & Girls Club that was shuttered in Henrico County. Like the drug dealer who wanted to buy him a new pair of shoes, Wallace sees himself in the poor kids around Creighton Court -- but that wasn’t the way, that life wasn’t what he wanted. He didn’t want the clout, the risk, the notoriety, the danger. He wanted out of Creighton Court -- but he only wanted out so that he could become different, and bring that different back with him.

It feels natural for Wallace -- he welcomes the weight as easily as he puts it on his own shoulders. He is the proof that Creighton Court needed: that kids can be pulled from low places and put on outstanding paths, and if he can show that to other Creighton kids, then he can multiply his success. It will be hard work; Wallace loves the opportunity. He was the first to make it out of Richmond, and now he’s the first to go back.