STANFORD — It’s hardly a surprise that literacy is a passion of Harrison Phillips. After all, it’s because of books that the 6-foot-4, 295-pound defensive tackle at Stanford garnered the nickname Horrible Harry.

“It wasn’t that he was so horrible,” said his mother, Tammie Rose Phillips, a retired teacher who with her son used to leaf through pages of the popular children’s book series “Horrible Harry,” which elementary schools employ to teach reading with tales of a third-grader’s misadventures. “His great grandfather was quite a character. He was absolutely a barrel of fun and a great guy, so we named Harrison after him. And then we had a choice between Dirty Harry — you know, Clint Eastwood — which is what they called grandpa. So we thought, ‘Well, we can’t go with Dirty Harry, we probably better go with Horrible Harry.’

“So then we read all those books and he loved it and he thought it was funny that he was named that, too.”

Education clearly matters to the double major on The Farm — and not just his.

That’s why this past Friday, during a surprise ceremony at Skycrest Elementary School in the outskirts of Sacramento, Phillips was recognized with a prestigious off-the-field honor as one of 22 college football members of the 2017 Allstate AFCA Good Works Team.

Phillips was nominated for his volunteer work over the past few years as a mentor for the Sacramento-based Playmakers Mentoring Foundation, which provides afterschool and summer reading programs for at-risk youth.

“I kind of caught wind,” Phillips said. “It was a little fishy when I was like, ‘Well, normally we should be working with the kids now.’ The program had started, but I was just off to the side and then we ended up walking outside instead of the classroom and I saw the whole set up and the kids all started applauding.

“I kind of blushed with a big, joyful smile.”

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The instinct to give back to the community was on full display while growing up in Omaha, Nebraska.

With his family in need of supplemental income after Tammie Rose Phillips opted to become a stay-at-home mother, she opened a daycare at their house.

“At one time I had 17 kids,” she said.

The parents would drop the kids off, then it was time to walk to school. When the last bell rang, she would pick them up and return home.

“Our yard was just a playground of fun,” she said.

It was up to Harrison and his older sister, Delanie, to help out with games in the backyard and in the pool as de facto teacher’s aides.

“I would say that’s kind of where it started,” his mother said. “And then at that time, also, he’s going to Sunday school every weekend and he’s learning about giving back to your community — and he always did.”

“I love Omaha, it was great to me,” said Phillips, whose grandmother paid for his trip to a Stanford camp, otherwise he may have joined the Big Red in Nebraska instead of the Cardinal in Palo Alto. “I had a fantastic family background. They gave everything they could to me so I could live and get everything I needed, but I definitely saw struggle. In my community I saw other athletes that were probably just as good or had as much talent as I had, but didn’t make it out and didn’t get the scholarships due to disadvantages in their home life. And the way the system was set up was stacked against them, so I had a large passion for that.”

As a freshman at Stanford, he forged a strong bond with strong safety Jordan Richards at bible study.

It turns out Richards, a Super Bowl champion after he was taken in the second round of the 2015 NFL Draft by the New England Patriots, also attended a different bible study up in the Sacramento area. That’s where he met Greg “Coach Roz” Roeszler, the founder and executive director of Playmakers.

Needless to say, Richards set up an introduction.

“He’s a Folsom guy and he was going off to the next level as this nonprofit was just getting ready to explode,” Phillips said.

Fate also intervened.

Turns out after tearing his ACL in the 2015 season opener at Northwestern, which wiped away his sophomore year, Phillips found extra time to volunteer.

“It’s a three-tiered approach afterschool program, 90 minutes,” Phillips said. “It’s 30 minutes each tier. The first one is literacy skills, trying to attack the achievement gap between minority and low-socioeconomic-class children who don’t really have as much privilege. We’re targeting at-risk kids. … We try to build character value and be a need of what real family structure is and things that they’ve been missing in their life coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.”

“He’s always had that inkling to go help,” his mother said. “He definitely has a very, very gentle and soft heart, and he wears his heart on his sleeve. He always is there for the underdog, or the kid that got left behind, or the kid that was bullied. He was always there to grab that kid and make them part of the group.” Like the Palo Alto Daily News Facebook page for neighborhood news and conversation from Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton, Redwood City and beyond.

Of course, the moment he puts on a helmet and pads, Phillips turns into the bully, sort of, as he wreaks havoc in the trenches.

“There is switch that goes, but at the same time he can be that Horrible Harry and he can knock over a quarterback — and the next thing he’s doing is he’s lifting him up,” his mother said. “It’s like he wanted to do it so badly, he couldn’t wait to do it. But then once he does it, he’s like, ‘Oh man, I just about killed this guy. I gotta help him up.’ ”

An all-Pac-12 honorable mention last year with 46 tackles and 6½ sacks as a junior, he’s found another gear and leads the No. 20 Cardinal (5-2, 4-1 Pac-12) with 50 tackles and 3½ sacks prior to Thursday night’s game at Oregon State.

“This offseason I focused on becoming the best football player I could, working to be more explosive, faster, stronger,” Phillips said. “But my biggest concern was the team and making sure I could do my job the best. That’s why it’s this weird dynamic where the byproduct of me trying to do my job has been getting a lot of production.

“I know that’s not technically the job of the nose guard, but I’m just trying to eat up the blocks and let our linebackers run free. It just so happens that I’m able to make a lot of plays.”

“He’s that rock-solid force right there in the middle,” defensive coordinator Lance Anderson said. “He’s also a tremendous student. It’s amazing to me how he’s taken a full load — 18 credits, 20 credits — to be able to graduate almost even ahead of time I think is what he will. It’s pretty amazing that he’s been able to balance so much and excel in so many areas, whether on the football field, in the classroom, everything else off the field, charity work. It’s great to see.”

Consider head coach David Shaw among those flabbergasted by the endeavors of his co-captain.

But where does Phillips find the time?

“I still don’t know,” Shaw said. “I have no idea. That doesn’t make any sense. He does so many things outside of school and outside of football — and still does so well in football and still does so well in school with a double major and a minor. I have absolutely no idea how he does it.”

Technology certainly helps.

Unable to make the roughly six-hour round-trip on weekdays because of class and football, Phillips will create minute-long videos with his iPad and the students in turn send some back.

“I’ll ask them questions or send over articles to Coach Roz to have them look at or read that I think are very interesting,” Phillips said. “I know that the elementary school we were at, which is a feeder to San Juan High, for one of their third- and fourth-grade reading assignments they printed out an article posted about me and that was the thing that they had to read and circle the verbs for and stuff like that.

“So their lesson plans involved me, so when I came it was a lot more special.”

Still, he wishes it would be possible to do more.

“The biggest thing I want to serve is my time, but it’s an afterschool program Monday through Friday,” said Phillips, who raised money to initiate a Playmakers program in his hometown and is working with Richards and Roeszler to bring the foundation to East Palo Alto. “Oftentimes I normally get up there on Saturday, and in those situations we’re only able to grab a handful of kids that their parents allow us to grab. So I’ve only been able to get extremely close with a few of them. It’s a three-hour drive there, three-hour drive back, so it’s hard to budget that time. Sometimes in the summer I have a lot more time since it’s a 12-month program.”

Are the kids aware of his nickname?

“No, I don’t think they’re into Twitter quite, yet,” Phillips said. “Coach Harrison, I guess, is what they call me. Sometimes Harry, but they don’t know about the Horrible side. Maybe all of our West Coast games are too late for them to watch. They can’t stay up and see that.”

It’s going to be much easier to watch Horrible Harry in action on Sundays if he bypasses the one year of eligibility he has left to join Richards in the NFL.

“When we let him start playing football at seventh grade, he asked me to print out on the computer a huge N, a huge L and a huge F one day,” his mother said. “I really wasn’t sure what he was doing and he said, ‘Can I put these up in my room?’ And I’m like, ‘Sure.’ I didn’t even know what they meant. I went down there later to tuck him at night and he put them above his bed and they spelled NFL. And every night he looked up to the 12-inch letters N-F-L in black.”

Apparently, spelling is just as important as literacy for this Horrible Harry.