REGINA — Before he was the No. 5 receiver in the country in 2016, before he’d made that miracle catch at the Panda Bowl for the Carleton Ravens in 2014 and long before he was a CFL draft prospect, Nate Behar by his own account had a few wrinkles to iron out of himself when he was younger.

“I was an angsty, dumb teenager,” he said on Saturday, after he’d posted a receiver-best 4.613-second 40-yard dash at the CFL Combine presented by adidas.

Four years of life and football at Carleton have helped smooth him out, he says. While the Ravens improved from a winless debut season in 2013, to a 4-4 team a year later, to 5-3, then a 6-2 team last year, Behar has grown along with them, on and off the field.

“The person part I think is (where the growth) happened the most,” he said.

Behar came to the Ravens as a highly-touted prospect out of London, Ont. In its announcement of Behar’s signing, the school hailed him as “a milestone in the recruitment process. He is ranked as the No. 1 wide receiver and is one of the top 10 football players in the country.”

He was all of that, but they were bringing in a player that had been living on his own since he was 16.

As soon as the topic came up, Behar said that the move his decision.

“It was me, my mom and my brother growing up and around 16, me and my mom got in some fights and I can confidently say now that 95 per cent of them were my fault, for sure,” he said.

“Then toward the end of grade 11 I left home and again, being a dumb teenager, I didn’t talk to her for a while. I was living with friends and then in grade 12 I moved into my own apartment and rode that out into my fifth year (of high school).

“In my fifth year my mom and I started talking again. I lived in one of her rental units. I was right down the street from her, which was awesome.”

He said that friends, their parents and his coaches at London Central High School made sure he was OK.

“I can’t say that I was alone. I lived alone but I didn’t do anything alone,” he said. “It made me appreciate people a lot more.”

Through his last year of high school Behar and his mom began to patch things up and are in a much better place today.

“Our relationship today from where it was is night and day,” he said. “She’s my best friend, she’s the queen of my world, she’s the person I call whenever anything is up. I’m not upset that it happened. I grew so much and it made us grow in our relationship.”

At Carleton, football helped Behar continue to grow. He admits that he was something of a reluctant student, but the communications major used the game as motivation in his early days on campus.

“I enjoy my program but my passion, my fire, my drive to make it to campus was definitely football,” he said. An 8:30 a.m. class was a lot more appealing with an 11:30 a.m. workout waiting for him after.

“I respect the institution of school and I know my mom’s going to beat me up, my brother probably will too if I don’t get that certificate,” he said. “I’m close and I’ve learned a lot. University, I think the best part is the experience. The time that I’ve had at Carleton is the dopest thing I’ve ever experienced.”

He’s used the last four years to develop the talent that he’s always had and meld it with his personal growth.

“I went in Day 1 and was expected to be a leader but I had no idea how to lead. I was an idiot,” he said, laughing at himself.

“I was 18 trying to lead other 18-, 19-year-olds and I definitely did a poor job a lot of the time. I wasn’t even a captain in my second year. Coach had to put more on my plate and made me a captain in my third-year.”

“You’re 17 or 18 and you get recruited and you think, ‘Oh yeah, I’m going to lead this team . . . of course it’s going to work’.” Nate Behar on the Ravens’ winless first season

As Behar learned and found his place on the Ravens, the team found its place in the competitive OUA conference. He thinks the Ravens’ quick success might stem from being too young and inexperienced to know any better.

“I had the benefit of being ignorant. I had the benefit of having adolescent stupidity where I thought that everything was going to be great because I was the greatest thing to ever happen to the world, in my mind,” he said.

“You’re 17 or 18 and you get recruited and you think, ‘Oh yeah, I’m going to lead this team. Coach (Steve) Sumarah, he’s the smartest person to ever walk the face of the Earth, of course it’s going to work.’

“I think most of us thought it was going to work. I think without that, if we had some 23 or 24-year olds come in were like, ‘Damn this team sucks, these kids suck,’ and that negativity was around, we might not have made it. It was kind of the fact that we were so optimistically dumb, that, ‘Yeah, it’s going to be great, it’s not not going to work.’ It’s Week 9 and we get blown out by Mac at the end of the season first year and we just thought it’s going to work out. We hadn’t won a single game, hadn’t been closer than 20 points, but it’s like, ‘No, it’ll be fine’.”

He’s clear that he has no preference on which team drafts him, but he’s been in Ottawa through his team’s re-emergence in university football and watched up close as Ottawa has re-joined the CFL and fit in like it never left. Behar has gotten to know many of the REDBLACKS over the last few years, through a serving job he had nearby Landsdowne Park, and then by working as an assistant equipment manager with the REDBLACKS the last two years.

It’d be a great story if the REDBLACKS took him, he admitted.

“My mom always talks about that,” he said. “She says, ‘That’d be so cool. They could write a movie about that’.”

She used to give him a hard time about choosing Carleton over Western and staying home. She stopped doing that a few years ago.

“Every single time now she’s like, ‘I’m so happy you made your choice. You’re a man now. We’ve turned you into a man’.”