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What Dreams May Come

Joey Porter Jr. is a protector and he has his sister to thank for that skill.


Penn State’s Joey Porter Jr. (9) celebrates following the No. 4/6 Nittany Lions shutout of the Hoosiers, 24-0 on Saturday night October 2, 2021at Beaver Stadium in the annual Penn State Stripe Out game. Photo by Mark Selders

On autumn Saturdays — and, if all goes as planned on future autumn Sundays — Penn State’s redshirt junior cornerback will protect the end zone, or the first down marker, from opposing wide receivers with his physical, aggressive style of play.

For almost their entire lives, Porter has protected his older sister, Jasmine, who has nonverbal autism, from the potential threats — traffic, hot stoves, scissors on the table — that she did not have the instincts to avoid herself.

These duties have shaped Porter’s life and his goals, which include playing in the NFL like his father, who was a longtime Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker. Eventually, he also plans to play a more formal role in the educational facilities for special needs children that the Porters own and operate at opposite ends of the country.

When Porter was growing up, the family would sit at the dinner table and discuss the children’s aspirations and passions. For Joey Jr., they revolved around football. From almost the time he could walk, he was following his father into NFL locker rooms and putting on his helmet and shoulder pads. His talent and skills were evident, and he had a four-time Pro Bowler down the hall if he needed advice or guidance. But with the name came expectations.

“People would say, ‘You’re Joey Porter’s son. You’ve got to do this or do that. You’ve got to play linebacker,’” Porter says. “That would always affect me. But me and my dad would have talks and would just be real with each other. He’d tell me, ‘You’re your own person. You’re doing this for you, you’re not doing this for me.’”

Joey Sr. and Christy Porter would have been fine if their son hadn’t played football at all. But if he was serious about it — and Joey Jr. was always serious about it — then they wanted him to put in the work.

“His father always told him, if you’re serious about your craft, whatever you do in life, have the blueprint,” Christy says. “It’s hard work. It’s dedication. What you put in is what you get out.”

During his senior season at North Allegheny High School in Wexford, Pennsylvania, Porter was a captain of a team that went 10-1 and won a Quad County Conference Class 6A championship. A four-star recruit and one of Pennsylvania’s top high school players according to most recruiting services, he chose Penn State over offers from Pitt, Miami, LSU and others. He was a safety in high school but the Nittany Lions felt his brighter future was at cornerback, He has embraced the risk/reward nature of a position that can make a player the game’s hero or its goat in one snap.

“That’s the pressure that a lot of people are scared of,” Porter says. “That’s where the good players thrive. I feel like I’m one of the players that thrive in those moments, that handle the bright lights. If you can handle that pressure, you can deal with anything.”

Porter has always been able to keep football pressure in perspective, because it’s always been his second job. The first was to look after Jasmine.

“If you leave the room, you take your sister with you,” Christy Porter would tell Joey and her other children, daughter, Jayla, and sons, Willie and Jacob. “She’s your shadow.”

Jasmine helped her younger brother learn to be patient, whether that was Porter waiting a few extra minutes for their mother to get her dressed before the family could go to the park or seeing the long view of football during expected periods of frustration.

“It’s understanding that everything doesn’t have to be now, everything’s not in a rush,” he says. “And that your time’s coming. Even though somebody else may be doing great, that doesn’t mean you’ve got to be in a rush. Just be patient and wait for your time.”

Porter, who was a third-team all-conference selection in each of the last two seasons, is being patient with his NFL dreams. He entertained the thought of leaving Penn State early to try his luck in the draft this past offseason but after conversations with his family, elected to play another season in college. When his football career is over, he plans to take a more active role in the family business, which has long been more of a calling than a career for his mother.

During Joey Sr.’s third year in the NFL, in 2001, Christy decided to go back to school and complete her college degree. After she received her teaching credentials, her first assignment, and most of those after that, was substituting in a special education classroom at Ridgeview High School in Bakersfield, California. She was pregnant with Jasmine at the time.

“It was God’s way of setting me up for what was to come,” she says.

Once Jasmine was born and the Porters began to learn about the challenges of raising a child with autism, Christy began to see the cracks in the system that special needs children would slip through. She attended school board meetings and, with the perspective of both a special-needs parent and a teacher, would wonder aloud where families could find the support their children needed. At one point, a school board member asked her why she didn’t just open her own school.

“Maybe I will,” Christy replied. And she did.

Nearly 20 years after that passing comment, the Porters run the Jasmine Nyree Day Center in Bakersfield, which provides care for children with special needs from ages 3-12, and the Jasmine Nyree Campus in Pittsburgh, which offers education, counseling, assessment, and other services for special needs individuals. Christy Porter estimates the centers have helped 5,000 families.

“It’s inspirational to see what they’ve done in such a short amount of time,” Porter Jr. says. “It’s really trying to help people that can’t get the help they really need.”

Penn State’s Joey Porter Jr. (9) during fourth quarter action of the game with Michigan State. The Nittany Lions outscored the Spartans, 29-3, in the second half on its way to a 39-24 win on Saturday December 12, 2020 at Beaver Stadium. Photo by Mark Selders

Christy is proud of the way her children have made helping others their life’s work. Jayla earned a degree in special education from Duquesne University and is the junior vice president at Jasmine Nyree Campus. For his part, Porter is studying rehabilitation and human services at Penn State. His mother has been pleased to see not only the way he dotes on Jasmine — “When she hears his voice, she immediately takes off and goes to wherever he is,” Christy says — but also the way he would seek out other special needs children during junior high or high school to include them in activities or ensure they didn’t have to eat lunch alone.

It’s the heart they’ve shown, as much as the formal training they’ve received, that gives her confidence that her children will continue to grow the schools and their services.

“Our life’s work is giving back and helping the special needs community,” Christy says. “I’m more than overjoyed that my children will take the baton and carry this thing for years to come.”

But first, Porter has some business in Beaver Stadium.

He hopes to generate more turnovers — he forced one fumble and one interception in 25 career games – and be called for fewer pass interference penalties this season. The expectations he strives to meet now are those that he has set for himself, not those that others have set for him. The blueprint his father helped him draw up has led him this far and he intends to continue to follow it.

“I always loved the game of football, but now I’m taking care of my body, doing film study, eating better, being a better teammate,” he says. “It’s that whole process of a boy turning into a man and treating it more like a job, but a job that I love doing.”

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