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Kwity Paye (1) a three-star defensive end from Bishop Hendricken High School in Rhode Island, is committed to Michigan.

(Photo courtesy of Paul Danesi)

Every one of Kwity Paye's memories are rooted in his life in the United States.

It wasn't until seventh grade, when he signed up for football, that he began to understand his past a little deeper.

"They said I needed a birth certificate, but I didn't have one," Paye recalled. "I had to show them the green card. I ended up asking my mom 'how come I have a green card and everyone else has a birth certificate?'"

A three-star defensive end from Bishop Hendricken High School in Rhode Island, Paye is one of 27 players committed to Michigan's 2017 class. Each one will have college paid for and a chance to shine on the field for the Wolverines. Each one has worked to become part of the small percentage of athletes to earn those opportunities.

Paye, however, overcame greater odds than most to get to this point.

Born in a refugee camp in Guinea, Paye immigrated to the United States with his mother and older brother when he was 6 months old. Family members, including his grandfather whom he's named after, were killed by rebels in civil war.

"It's a great journey for us," said his mother, Agnes. "I'm happy because through all my life in refugee camps we didn't have the opportunity to go to school, so that's why I really push my kids to go to school because I didn't have the opportunities they have now. When we were refugees in the camp, all we looked for was food to eat - that's it."

That's part of Paye's past, which makes his accomplishments and the future in front of him even more impressive.

"I get a free education and get to graduate from one of the best public universities in the world and get to be around some of the greatest people around," Paye said. "I sat back one day and was like, 'I really did everything I set out to do,' and it felt great."

DETERMINED TO BE A 'SUPERHERO'

While talking about the death of her father, Agnes begins sobbing and can't go on. It's a painful part of the life she escaped for a better one in the United States.

Agnes was born in Liberia but had to flee the country at a young age. Rebels were targeting and killing people who spoke Krahn, the language of her tribe, so she immigrated to Sierra Leone. After seven years in a refugee camp there, war resulted in her heading to Guinea, where she gave birth to Paye at age 21 in a refugee camp. Six months later, she immigrated to the United States with her two sons and arrived in Providence, where other family members already were settled.

"He was a baby," Agnes said of Paye's journey to America. "He didn't have any idea."

Paye and his older brother, Komotay Koffie, were natural athletes but Agnes didn't like the physicality involved with football, so they ran track. However, the desire for football was soon born.

"After track, they just wanted to stay active," said Paye's stepfather, Ronald Francis, who was born in the Virgin Islands. "They used to see the kids practicing football and saw them as some kind of superhero with the uniforms and the helmets and they were chasing each other with the ball. That's all they ever wanted to play once they saw that. They were just determined."

Kwity Paye (1) a three-star defensive end from Bishop Hendricken High School in Rhode Island, is committed to Michigan.

Paye started playing Pee Wee football and was hooked.

"For me, it was just being part of a team," he said. "In track, there's a bunch of individual events where you're not really part of a team. You score points for your team, but you're not really working as a team. Just for me to have my own job to take care of to help the team succeed in the game while working together for the same purpose is what really sold me on a football."

Paye was in eighth grade when he attended an athletic banquet and received a glimpse of what he could achieve. Will Blackmon, who grew up in Rhode Island and is now a 10-year NFL veteran, talked to him about his priorities and potential.

"We got to meet and he kind of told me that education should always come first," Paye recalled. "Even if you do love a sport, education is the first thing to come and athletics will follow. He told me to continue to grind and there will be people that doubt you, there will be people that tell you can't do it, but you have to put that all to the side and stay on your own path, just continue to follow your dreams."

Blackmon's springboard to success included prepping at Bishop Hendricken. So, despite his family's "modest means," as Francis put it, sacrifices were made for Paye to attend the all-boys Catholic school and continue on the path he sought.

"I thought if Will Blackmon can do it," Paye said, "why can't I do it?"

FLIPPING TO MICHIGAN

Paye, who now stands 6-foot-4 and weighs 235 pounds, was always the biggest kid in his class. But, when he entered Bishop Hendricken, he received a piece of advice that stuck: You may be big, but someone can always put you on your butt.

So, he went to work.

"I started to hit the weight room a lot, I started to work extra hard in practice," Paye said. "From freshman year to varsity football, I knew I had to study the playbook, I knew I had to ask questions, I had to make sure that I watched film to understand other teams' playbooks. Mentally I just had to focus a lot more, just try to buckle down and understand everything that was going on around me."

When he first started football, Paye lined up at running back, quarterback, wide receiver, linebacker -- basically a little bit of everything. After the required season on the freshman team at Bishop Hendricken, Paye graduated to the varsity squad and the coaches had to decide how to use him.

"When we got him sophomore year, we felt like he was going to project at the college level as an edge rusher, a defensive end ... and said let's do what's best for this kid, for his future," Bishop Hendricken coach Keith Croft said. "I think it would have possibly been easier for us to put him at a linebacker spot or even defensive back at times. ... We really felt like it was going to help his progression to keep him at defensive end. He's really just great at that position."

As a senior, Paye racked up 65 tackles, including 12 for a loss, and 4.5 sacks. He also rushed for 651 yards and 13 touchdowns while leading Bishop Hendricken (12-0) to its seventh consecutive state title.

"If you look at his stats, you may say he had a little bit of a downturn from his junior year to his senior year and statistically that's true, but what I'll tell you from a coaching standpoint is teams didn't run at him, they ran away from him," Croft said. "Quarterbacks completely rolled away from him."

Kwity Paye poses with Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh during his official visit in October.

Following Blackmon's path, Paye also was named the Gatorade Player of the Year in Rhode Island and verbally committed to Boston College. It was his dream school and, he thought, ended the recruiting process. However, when Boston College defensive coordinator Don Brown left for the same job at Michigan and once again offered Paye a scholarship, it was time to reconsider.

"His role was huge," Paye said of Brown. "When he offered me at BC, he had faith in me and I had faith in him. He wants me to go and play for him. For him to go to Michigan and to continue to recruit me just shows me how much trust he has in my play. That's just a guy that I want to play for."

Paye took an official visit to Michigan on Oct. 1, a Wolverines win over Wisconsin and flipped his commitment to the Wolverines a couple weeks later.

"BC was the college that I always wanted to go to since I was like 10 years old," he said. "Just decommitting from BC to go to Michigan was real hard, but BC's coaching stability was kind of shaky at the time, their program wasn't looking good. Me and my family just chose what was best for me and my future for me to develop into a great athlete and a great student."

DRIVEN TO ACHIEVE

When it comes to producing football talent, Rhode Island isn't Texas or Florida or California. Far from it, actually. And the perception from afar isn't lost on those at home.

"To be honest with you, I think that's something that we've ingrained in (Paye) - we ingrain that in all our players," Croft said. "We play, we coach, with a little bit of a chip on our shoulder. I'm not going to lie to you - we read the scouting reports, we read the message boards, we know what people think of Rhode Island high school football.

"All I can say is in our program, the way we run it, we try to run it like a college program and we don't allow our athletes to work not as hard as other programs around the country just because our level of competition people don't think is that good."

Since he was young, Paye has heard the doubts; that Rhode Island isn't known for football, that he will never make it out of Providence.

"That just drove me to prove everyone wrong," Paye said. "Now I'm going to play on a bigger stage."

Earlier this month, Paye, the No. 32 weak-side defensive end and No. 543 player overall in the 2017 class, according to 247 Sports Composite rankings, had a chance to prove himself against high-level competition in the Under Armour All-America Game in Orlando, Fla. He was one of two players to earn a spot through a final fan vote and, while bonding with fellow 2017 Michigan commits in the game, gauged his skill against some of the nation's top talents.

"The first day I struggled a lot because it was my first time seeing any of the competition like that," he said. "I had to sit down and think about what I was doing wrong and then just make that adjustment. I started to do well over the course of practice and when the game time came I would say I performed pretty well the time that I was in. I disrupted a couple passes and got to the quarterback a bit."

Kwity Paye (1) a three-star defensive end from Bishop Hendricken High School in Rhode Island, is committed to Michigan.

Paye is one of six defensive ends in Michigan's 2017 class. He said Brown recruited him primarily as a pass rusher and believes his future is as a defensive end, but there's a chance of moving to linebacker.

"Every kid, no matter whether they're an Under Armour All-American or a five-star, every kid is going to deal with an adjustment at the next level," Croft said. "They're going to come in and adjust to the speed of the game and the size and the players and the complex schemes that are being run. ... I have every expectation that they're going to give him a shot to play."

Paye's college goals on the field are simply to be a model teammate and give the Wolverines everything he has. He plans on studying criminology and business and, after previously considering a career as a police officer, now wants to be a firefighter. The decision comes from a longtime desire to help others, stemming from the hardships his mother endured.

"I will be a proud mother tomorrow because they are making a better life," Agnes said of her sons. "They're not on the street begging for money or being a bum, because we came from a long way. I didn't have the chance to go to school. ... We were always on the run, we didn't know what was going to happen the next day. Every day I tell them, so they know they've got to do what they can do to have a better life."

That message hasn't gone overlooked by Paye.

Although family members that still live in Africa, including his father whom he occasionally talks to, don't quite grasp the significance of him earning a college scholarship for football, they are proud of him. The same applies closer to home where children in Providence look up to Paye for what he has accomplished thus far. For Paye, it's fulfilling a longtime goal that has driven him this far.

"At a very young age I was more mature than the other kids," said Paye, who along with his mother, were guests of Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo for her State of the State address on Tuesday. "I knew that I wanted to go to college, I knew that I wanted to graduate, I knew that I wanted to eventually play professional football, if I could. If not, I would graduate from college with a degree and have a good life."