'No one like that for me': UW's Taylor Rapp seeks to inspire as he aims for NFL Rapp, the former UW standout safety, has his sights set on another goal as well: to be a role model for kids who look like him.

UW safety Taylor Rapp talks with his agent C.J. LaBoy at Pro Day, which was hosted at UW's Dempsey Indoor Facility, April 1, 2019. Rapp is expected to be drafted into the NFL later this month. (Genna Martin, Seattlepi.com) less UW safety Taylor Rapp talks with his agent C.J. LaBoy at Pro Day, which was hosted at UW's Dempsey Indoor Facility, April 1, 2019. Rapp is expected to be drafted into the NFL later this month. (Genna Martin, ... more Photo: Genna Martin, Genna Martin/Seattlepi Photo: Genna Martin, Genna Martin/Seattlepi Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close 'No one like that for me': UW's Taylor Rapp seeks to inspire as he aims for NFL 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

It’s an oddly sunny April day in Seattle, but Taylor Rapp is spending it indoors.

The former University of Washington safety strips down to his compression shorts in front of scouts hailing from Seattle to Philadelphia. It’s Pro Day, and Rapp is about to run the 40-yard-dash. The often talked-about drill is the only major box he didn’t tick at the NFL Combine, due to a lingering hip-flexor injury. Now, prospective teams are anxious to see how one of the draft’s best defensive players runs.

Rapp runs twice and no official times are read off, but the word from various attendees is that he clocked in at around 4.7 seconds. It’s not the time teams were hoping to see, and the next 48 hours of draft news will be filled with questions about how his time could drop his stock.

Such is the world of an NFL prospect: his agility drills were at the top of the class at the Combine and his tape is excellent, but all anyone wants to talk about is that slow 40 time. It’s likely that the ultra-competitive Rapp isn’t thrilled with his performance, but if he is, he doesn’t show it. He chats briefly with his agents before leaving for a team interview, looking neither excited nor upset. After all, the 21-year-old has things on his mind beyond a single drill.

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Despite the murmurs about his speed, there’s no doubt that Rapp is on the cusp of fulfilling his dream of playing in the NFL.

Put another way, someone who looks like him – half Chinese, half Caucasian – is tantalizingly close to wearing an NFL uniform. Growing up, Rapp couldn't flip on Sunday Night Football and see players who shared his heritage taking the field. While playing pro ball has been a dream for Rapp, he wants to be more than just a player.

“Growing up, you always want to have a role model that you can relate to, and someone who looks like you,” Rapp says. “There was no one like that for me in football, so I want to fill that role for kids who don’t have that right now.”

Breaking the mold

Rapp always felt a connection with football, but the journey to this point wasn’t so simple.

Growing up in Bellingham, Washington, Rapp, whose father, Chris, is Canadian and mother, Chiyan, is Chinese, definitely stood out. Census data puts the Asian population in Bellingham at just 6.2 percent – and he was playing a sport that’s seen just a handful of prominent Asian players over the years.

According to NCAA’s official numbers for 2017-2018, 54 football Division I, FBS football players were Asian – just 0.3 percent of the sport’s 15,606 participants.

Asians are underrepresented at the pro level, too.

Tedi Bruschi (Filipino/Italian) and Dat Nguyen (Vietnamese) were both linebackers with success in the modern NFL, but Hines Ward (who was born to a Korean mother and black father) stands as the only player of East Asian heritage to find prolonged success at the professional level.

School makes its mark

Middle school and high school can be rough. Teenagers seem to have an almost boundless capacity for meanness, and it’s almost always the kids who stand out in some way who bear the brunt of this.

“It was difficult,” Rapp says. “I was almost embarrassed of what I looked like, of my heritage – just because I looked different than everybody else.”

Rapp's father Chris said Taylor was teased about his ethnicity growing up – something his older brother, Austin echoes. Last year, Rapp told NFL.com’s Andy Fenelon that other kids made fun of the shape of his eyes, and that the ch-word was tossed his way on occasion.

When he decided he was going to be a football player, it didn’t exactly make things better.

“People just thought it was just kinda odd for an Asian kid to be playing football,” his brother Austin says. “Casual racism is probably a good word for it – people were just picking on him because he looked different.”

That wasn’t enough to make the young athlete hang up his pads. Rapp had decided he was going to play Division I football – and nothing was going to persuade him otherwise.

Rapp often had to handle trash talk about his heritage on the football field, but he learned to just ignore it and play. Eventually, his older brother says, he started to take pride in his performance as an elite Asian-American athlete.

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“Yeah, he looks different,” Austin says. “He’s Asian, he’s Caucasian – and he’s the best DB on the field. At a certain point, he started being proud of being the Asian kid who locked other players down.”

That support from his brother was a constant pillar for Rapp as he grew up. Because he developed that prodigious athleticism at a young age, the younger Rapp often played with his older brother and his friends. When they weren’t playing or practicing, Austin was always encouraging his brother to keep pushing to reach his full potential. The two remain close to this day.

“I looked up to him, I tried to do everything he was doing,” Rapp says. “He still inspires me – I wouldn’t be anywhere near where I am today without him.”

Younger brother, Austin says, is now inspiring him.

Pride and tattoos

Rapp says it wasn’t until college that he really began to embrace his Chinese roots. Going from Bellingham to Seattle and UW confirmed that there were other people like him. Seattle’s Asian population sits at 14.1 percent – roughly 102,000 people. By contrast, Bellingham’s total population clocks is just over 89,000. The UW campus itself was also a diverse environment: as of fall 2018, Asian-American students made up 22.3 percent of the Husky student body.

Rapp’s newfound pride in his heritage isn’t exclusively internal; he's gotten several tattoos to show it off to the outside world. One of them is made up of Confucius’ five virtues: kindness, justice, morality, wisdom and loyalty. Rapp says he strives to live his life by those principles.

Others include the Chinese character for Ox – the animal of his birth year – and a proverb, both of which were first painted by his grandfather. More recently, Rapp and his brother got tattoos together, a sign of the deep bond they share.

With draft day on the horizon, Rapp has made no effort to hide who he is, or his desire to be a trailblazer for other Asian-American athletes. That's something that may or may not hinder his progress in an NFL career. The league hasn’t always taken kindly to players expressing interests that might extend beyond whoever next week’s opponent is.

Fans likely remember the endless questions about whether Josh Rosen’s off-field interests would diminish his on-field performance, as well as the chorus of voices insisting that Colin Kaepernick’s focus on police brutality and racial injustice meant that football didn’t matter to him.

Rapp’s ink means that he literally wears his passion and heritage on his sleeve – or more accurately, all over his body.

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With everything else NFL prospects have to deal with – signing with an agent, team interviews, workouts and more – that Rapp has held on to his dream of being a role model is impressive. It comes as no surprise to those close to him, though.

“He’s always been that way,” says Dale Archer, who coached Rapp at Sehome High School. “It’s just who he is. He’ll take the time to talk to anybody, shake a hand. On the field, off the field, he’s just a giving kid.”

His father, Chris, says that even from a young age, Rapp just always wanted to help people. He’d do his best to make sure people were comfortable when they came over and was mindful of making sure no one was left out. Like Archer, he added that it’s just part of who Taylor is.

That may be a somewhat jarring thing to hear for fans of rival Pac-12 schools who spent the past three years watching Rapp deliver crushing hit after crushing hit. As the old saying goes though, it doesn't often pay to judge a book by its cover.

Big hits and a big heart

When you watch Rapp’s games as a Husky, it’s easy to see why he has NFL scouts excited. On game film, he flies around the field, displaying an uncanny knack for tracking down the ball and making life very difficult for the player carrying it. Sometimes, he jumps a route and grabs an interception. Others, he times the snap count before streaking into the backfield to sack the quarterback.

During his three years at the University of Washington, Rapp developed into one of the NCAA’s premier talents at his position, and the accolades he’s earned speak for themselves. He was named the Pac-12 Freshman Defensive Player of the Year and made USA Today’s Freshman All-America First team in 2016, and would be named First Team All-Pac-12 the subsequent two years. Earlier this year Rapp was a consensus First-Team All-American to The Athletic, Pro Football Focus, ESPN and USA Today.

His blend of power and agility made him one of the Huskies’ best defensive assets on a team full of future NFL players. As Washington surged back to national prominence over the last three years, Rapp was one of the team’s key pieces. When that hip-flexor caused him to miss the 2019 Rose Bowl against Ohio State, his absence stuck out like a sore thumb.

The on-field production might be what draws in teams, but Archer says that it isn’t what makes Rapp a truly special player.

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“People know him as a great football player,” Archer says. “But if you ask me, he’s a better person than he is a football player.”

For an athlete as gifted as Rapp, that’s not insignificant praise. But with a passion for helping kids like he has, it's also not surprising.

"I just want to be able to inspire kids to never doubt themselves," Rapp says. "To tell them not to worry about what people are saying, to be determined and use their hard work – and that anything is possible."

His followers have clearly noticed. Take a quick scroll through Rapp’s Instagram and you’ll find numerous comments about how he’s inspired others. One user writes that he was told he couldn’t play football as a Chinese kid but became team captain anyway. A different commenter, writing in Chinese characters, says that people in Shanghai are cheering for him. Another simply says “Chinese pride.”

While he plans to make his mark on Sundays, he doesn't plan to stop there. Making plays on the biggest stage in the game might have to wait until September, but it's clear he's already making a mark on the game – and his fans.

And that 40 time doesn't seem to bother them.