DETROIT – “Who is this kid?”

Mark Dantonio had just descended the steps from the football turf to the gymnasium at a Detroit Catholic high school and wanted to know. He had come to take a look at a defensive back who also played basketball, but now his gaze turned to someone else on the court.

It was a lean kid with a thick lower body and a tight torso who seemed to glide through the air.

“Elijah Collins” University of Detroit Jesuit coach Pat Donnelly replied.

“Does he play football?” Dantonio asked.

Donnelly replied, “No. He used to.”

The Michigan State coach watched as the kid passed, defended and scored with equal amounts of grace and fury.

“Well," Dantonio said, "he should.”

'Basketball was my true love'

Now, everyone wants know.

Just last Saturday, the crowd at Spartan Stadium held its collective breath as the offense started up again. A redshirt freshman running back burst through a hole, then through an arm tackle, then to the right sideline and all of a sudden, he was out in the open field.

Elijah Collins ran 29 yards before most of the stadium knew his name, or that he played running back, or that Michigan State had a running back whose name was worth knowing. One carry outdid all the yardage he’d compiled in college so far, and it came in his first career start.

Those were the first 29 of the 192 yards Collins churned out against Western Michigan on Saturday. On just 17 carries, this was his breakout. They were the most rushing yards by any Spartan back in two seasons and the most by a freshman since Javon Ringer back in 2005.

That’s when Google lit up with fans trying to find out who he was.

Dantonio hadn’t forgotten, not since the day in the gym and certainly not after a season opener that left him still searching for a runner. The Spartans managed just 2.7 yards per rush against Tulsa, but one that got called back for a penalty stayed fresh in his mind.

It was of Elijah knifing, with uncommon burst, through the middle of the defense for a score.

The following Wednesday, Dantonio found Elijah, the kid named after a resurrecting prophet who arrived to heaven on fire. The coach told him he was going to start at running back that week.

Elijah was juiced up, ready to show off the 25-plus pounds of muscle he’d packed on during his redshirt season in 2018. But to call this a childhood dream would be to distort the memory. It would ignore that day in the gym.

“Basketball was my true love,” Elijah said.

He knows that because basketball made him hurt inside. Just months before Dantonio’s visit, Elijah was a freshman shooting guard coming off the bench for Cassius Winston's high school team. His freshman limbs couldn’t quite guard the varsity bodies of the postseason, and a loss sent his team home for the year.

That’s when he started to cry.

“He wanted it so bad,” said his father, Garry Collins. “I told him, ‘I’m going to help you, son.’ ”

Gary Collins was the AAU coach for the kids in the area, the head of a basketball household, and together they crafted a plan to build his son into a state champion. They hired trainers and ironed out an AAU schedule.

What they didn’t find time for was football.

It was a game Elijah had often dominated, scoring almost every touchdown for his youth teams as defenses spied him and coaches maneuvered to make sure he was on their team. But he remembers fearing it, too.

The first few times his mother drove him to practice when he was 8, he spent the car ride over crying.

He wasn’t ready to dress in shoulder pads and a helmet and take a pounding. He felt so much more right when he’d cross his street in northern Detroit to the fenced-in grass field where he could run, pass, catch and chase without feeling like anything could bring him down.

“It was one of the best moments,” Elijah said. “I just felt free.”

That was the feeling basketball often brought, too, partly because he was quick enough to guard anyone. That skill allowed him to play heavy minutes for a state contender as a freshman, something football would not, given the way the levels are structured.

As a result, it was basketball coaches at the college level who first saw what he could do. They were coming to the brown fortress of a school all the time, as University of Detroit Jesuit rostered several athletes bound for major programs, including Winston, who is now Michigan State's All-America point guard.

Back when they played together, Winston had the crafty tools but Elijah was the better athlete, said their head coach, Donnelly. When Elijah was a freshman and Winston was a junior, Elijah’s job was to lock down the opposing top scorer on defense.

One night in the playoffs, it was Foster Loyer, now a freshman playing with Winston on the MSU basketball team. He came in with a string of 20-plus-point performances, and Elijah held him to two baskets from the floor.

“He was a confident kid without being arrogant or cocky,” Donnelly said. “He was a guy who accepted a role.”

That’s how coaches and teammates, alike, knew he could be a great varsity running back if he ever returned to the field. They’d seen how he looked like a man among boys at the other levels.

They tried to tell him. The varsity football coach, Oscar Olejniczak, had been a college assistant before, including for two years as a graduate assistant to John L. Smith at Michigan State. He denounced specialization in sports and preached to his players that becoming a well-rounded athlete is the best path to success.

But it wasn’t until Dantonio visited the gym that day, looking for that defensive back, that the message started to get through. Olejniczak and Donnelly sat Elijah down to tell him a two-time Big Ten coach of the year thought he should play football.

“It was a little shocker,” Elijah said.

He joined the football team that next season and ran with fire, piling up 14 touchdowns and scoring as a runner, receiver, kick returner and defender.

“We already knew it was going to happen,” Winston said. “We weren’t even surprised.”

By giving up the plan to just focus on one sport, Elijah fell in love with two. He reached near equal heights in both, starting next to Winston on the 28-0 state championship basketball team his sophomore year and racking up 1,000 rushing yards his senior year.

But due to his 6-foot-1-inch height, football held the stronger college offers. As a three-star prospect, he received 17 of them.

He tried to sort through the possibilities, but he remained fixated on a certain one. He visited Spartan Stadium, went down on the sidelines with his father and basked in the roar of a crowd. And then, just feet away from Dantonio, Elijah made his commitment to the one coach who stopped and noticed him.

A growing identity

Now, Elijah Collins is trying to figure out who Elijah Collins can be.

He’s no longer splitting his time between sports. The keys to the MSU basketball team belong to Winston, whereas it may now be Elijah who holds the ones to the football team’s seemingly revived offense.

His 192 yards last week were a strong first statement, but they came against Western Michigan, meaning much harder tasks await. Soon enough, Big Ten defenders will not only know his name but be on explicit orders to stop him.

There's one conference foe who won’t have to look him up. His name is Scotty Nelson, he’s a sophomore starting safety for Wisconsin, and he’s the kid Dantonio really came to scout in the high school gym that day. He strongly considered the Spartans, with Winston’s urging, but instead chose another Big Ten school with strong recent tradition.

Now, it’s Elijah’s turn to play for Michigan State instead.

“Deserving is how I can explain it,” Nelson said. “Everything that happened, everything that he worked for, whether he was working really hard for basketball or finally realizing that football is his calling. Whenever he did it, he just went all out.”

This is Elijah Collins, running free.

RELATED: Couch: Elijah Collins gives Michigan State its next running back, in the nick of time

RELATED: How 'crybaby' Cassius Winston evolved into Michigan State basketball's iron man

WANT MORE MSU FOOTBALL? Get our coverage of MSU football all season long with a Lansing State Journal subscription, just $1 for the first 3 months

Contact Nate Atkins at natkins@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @NateAtkins_.