Gardner didn’t set out to create what is now known as, “The Young Go Getters” — during his Michigan playing days he and roommate Jarrod Wilson used to call themselves go-getters, so the name seemed perfect.  It happened organically about a decade ago when he saw young Dante Moore, who played at Detroit King and now is the Oregon starting quarterback and a projected first-round NFL Draft pick, unable to forge a path as a quarterback.

“I’m just seeing this kid kind of walking around and people not being very kind to him,” said Gardner, who annually works the prestigious Elite 11 quarterback camp. “I want to see what he’s got. I put him through a workout, he’s throwing, he’s doing these things, and he wasn’t perfect, but I can see there’s something in him. I was like, ‘I think I want to help him out,’ and I helped him, and then Dequan Finn and Ahlon Mitchell, whose grandfather was my very first coach.

“It started with those three kids, and then from there, just started to build out. And then Austin Mitchell (now 15 at Harper Woods) came along. He was 7 years old. Didn’t like how he was being treated on his team, so it’s like, ‘Well, I guess I’ll teach him how to play.’ His grandfather was my pastor. So that’s how I started with little, little kids. Now you build out this group of kids, and it’s been amazing for me.”

Gardner has had a lasting effect on Moore, who mentions him often during interviews, as he did at the recent Big Ten Media Days.

“Devin Gardner was someone that took me under his wing and trained me all my life as a quarterback, a quarterback coming from Detroit, Black quarterback, and it was just great,” Moore said. “I learned a lot from him.”

Teaching toughness

This is about paying it forward, and Gardner foots the bill.

“Since I’ve been with FOX, I’ve gotten to a place where I can just do this all the time, and they don’t have to pay,” Gardner, 34, said. “It’s been really good to be able to give back and transform the future of the game of football. But not only that, just humans in general. You see so many people that are playing sports and they think it’s just all about becoming a pro, and it’s not really about that. It’s about becoming a pro in life. And I learned that through college and all those different things.”

Throughout the summer and even during the winter, Gardner will work with about two dozen young athletes. He meets with them every day during the offseason, although the number each day varies. Conditioning and weight training are as vital as throwing reps and instruction.

“My kids are extremely tough,” he said. “They don’t complain about hard work. Everything here is earned, and when we work out, it is hard. Suffering is important. Shared suffering. Understanding that, ‘Hey, I’m not the only one going through this, and I need to help others if I have a little extra juice.’ These kids are a little different.”

To the players, Gardner is just, “Dev.” They know he played at Michigan and that he’s on television, but they recognize him for his coaching and the work ethic he instills. Braylon Burnside, 18, who played receiver at Utica Eisenhower and is now on the Grand Valley State roster, started working with Gardner when he was in eighth grade. He would make the 45-minute drive for the training and by the time football camp started at school, Burnside felt way ahead.

“You see what we do,” Burnside said after a workout. “When we go into camp, we’re in condition. We’re not tired. We’re machines. We know how to be tired. Everybody’s gonna be tired. It’s just what you do when you’re tired when you tell yourself, ‘Don’t quit.’”

Gardner is a great leader, 11-year-old Musa El-Mubarak, a sixth-grader at McCollough Elementary in Dearborn said. He appreciates how Gardner simplifies the game to make it easier to grasp, and he enjoys the conditioning challenge.

“I always feel prepared,” El-Mubarak said. “I feel like ahead of everybody else. When we’re doing film, I always know what to do and know what is going on in the games.”

Mitchell, 15, is a quarterback at Harper Woods. After training with Gardner for years, he has found the game has slowed down. He’s patient, understands what he’s seeing from defenses and can make the right decisions.

“I personally think that he’s the best doing it,” Mitchell said of Gardner. “He doesn’t do it for himself like I feel a lot of people do it for themselves. He really does it because he wants us to be the best that we can be.”

Gardner likes to have fun, and the kids see that side of him in person and when he’s working college games on television, but he takes seriously shaping these young men and preparing them not only for football but for the real world.

He grew up in the Detroit projects, the Smith Homes on Evergreen and Linden in the Brightmoor neighborhood. His mother raised four kids on her own. They eventually moved to the East side, but that, he said, wasn’t much of an improvement.

“You’re growing up and understanding that sacrifice had to be made,” Gardner said. “I had to learn about sacrifice. It was kind of envy seeing other kids with their dads at practice, and everybody’s so invested in them, and it’s just like that kind of builds a fire in you of I want to make sure that I can be everything I can be without anyone. I don’t need anyone.

“But I did have a bunch of coaches and mentors that really helped me out that took the place of that father figure, so I almost got a little more than others because I didn’t have a father. So now I’ve got like 15 dads that are all helping me in different walks of my life, and it was really important for me growing up.”