For the starting cornerback of a Top 25 college football team, Marvin Ward showed surprisingly little interest in watching Saturday-afternoon ACC games with his mom as a kid.

“I always watched football every weekend, but it was hard to get him to watch,” said Mattie, Ward’s mother. “He was always out somewhere playing basketball.”

Not only was Ward ambivalent about catching football games with his mom, he also had no interest in playing pickup with his buddies in the school yard. And he didn’t even keep track of his high school team in Landover, Md., which, by the way, he didn’t play for until his senior year.

Ward’s emergence as a starter last weekend against Minnesota seemed to be an impressive accomplishment for a redshirt freshman. But here’s something even more impressive: While many of his current teammates started playing in Pee Wee leagues, Ward’s experience on the gridiron amounts to all of a handful of high school games two years ago.

“This is really only his third year playing football,” NU defensive backs coach Pat Fitzgerald said. “I started playing football in the second grade, so in my terms, he’s a fifth-grader.”

Ward spent most of his high school career starring at point guard for the Eleanor Roosevelt High basketball team and fending off inquiries from the school’s football coach, Rick Houchens.

In Ward, Houchens saw natural athletic talent — and some big calf muscles — that could transfer from the hardcourt to the football field. But Mattie Ward was reluctant to let her son add football to a sports schedule that already included basketball and track. She worried that Marvin would injure himself and jeopardize his chances at a college basketball scholarship.

But during his junior year, Ward became burned out from playing basketball.

“I was expecting to go to college to play basketball,” he said. “But after a while I guess I kind of fell out of love with the game.”

His mother then relaxed her no-football rule and sent Marvin off to train with Houchens. The decision was made easier when the coach promised his late bloomer that, entering his senior year, he could still obtain a Division I football scholarship.

Houchens began to mold Ward into a tailback and a cornerback. Meanwhile, he mailed off a basketball highlight tape to NU and several other college football programs.

“I looked at the video tape and saw a lot of hand-eye coordination, a lot of dunks, a lot of explosiveness,” said NU wide receivers coach Howard Feggins, who recruited Ward. “From that tape, I was like ‘Wow.'”

It was the basketball tape that really impressed Feggins and head coach Randy Walker. But Ward took the little time left in high school to put together an impressive seven-game career.

After seeing little action in the first four games of the season, he decided to drop the tailback idea to concentrate on playing cornerback. Ward then started the team’s last seven games, snaring five interceptions to help lead the team to a 4A state title. Capping off the transition to a new sport, Ward returned an interception 32 yards to the end zone during the championship game.

But the tackles and interceptions didn’t come quite as easily once he got to NU. He sat out his freshman year as a redshirt.

“I had to learn the game all over again,” Ward said. “I thought I was getting it in high school. But when I came here, there are so many different schemes and defensive coverages. Everything was new.”

He said he didn’t truly begin to pick up the finer points of football until preseason training camp this summer. But his rapid improvement since Camp Kenosha caught the eye of Walker and the rest of the staff.

Ward began running with the first team defense in practice the week before playing Minnesota. On Wednesday prior to game day, Fitzgerald and Walker formally informed him that he was replacing junior Chasda Martin in the starting lineup.

“You take a chance on a player like that, and so far so good,” Feggins said. “You always want to find that kid that might get overlooked.”

Houchens has been following his former player from afar. He couldn’t be happier that he was able to make good on the promise of a college football scholarship. And Houchens wasn’t surprised to hear that Ward was starting after playing in just four college games.

“I felt it would be only a matter of time,” Houchens said. “He is an exception to the rule on adversity, and given the odds he’s beaten, it doesn’t really surprise me.”

As for Mattie Ward, she is getting to do something even better than watching college games on the tube with her son.

She’s traveling to Evanston to see him play against Penn State on Saturday.

“I had already planned to come up, but I had no idea he would be starting,” she said. “And I always thought I would be somewhere trying to watch him play basketball.”