Seahawks’ Kearse, aka Mr. Positivity, practices what his persona preaches

SEATTLE – Mr. Positivity walks through the Seahawks’ locker room most days with one mission. He wants to find the positive in everything.

A pair of shoes? Even if he has seen them before, he still might say, “Bro, those are some nice kicks right there! You really wear those well!” Or he might express excitement about practice, even if he isn’t all that excited. But by the end of spreading his positivity, he just might look forward to practicing.

Mr. Positivity has only one stated goal, which is to be “overly, exaggeratingly positive about ev-ery-thing.” And he has his believers.

“It creates an atmosphere,” says Seahawks tight end Luke Willson, a follower and practitioner of Mr. Positivity’s work.

But Mr. Positivity is not always present in the locker room. Sometimes he is simply Jermaine Kearse, the fourth-year Seahawks receiver who played at Lakes High School in Lakewood and at the University of Washington.

Kearse created Mr. Positivity as a joke last season when the Seahawks were struggling and has kept up the persona. Jermaine Kearse also is positive but far more human. There are times when the pressure and criticism gets to him, and it’s not so easy to be positive. Mr. Positivity is Kearse’s counterpunch to the criticism he has heard from coaches he has played for and from fans in the only state he has called home.

Kearse still is shadowed by his reputation with the Huskies – specifically, that he dropped too many passes. His problem is that he’s naturally interested in the opinions of others, and it is hard to turn that off just for football. In college, he read complaints on message boards or Twitter. He couldn’t help himself.

“My senior year, that was my worst year,” he says. “I just let all the noise really eat at me. There were times where I doubted myself. Am I going to catch this or not? I think that really, really messed with me. That was when I was really dropping it.”

He played against Oregon as a senior, in the last game before UW renovated Husky Stadium. He had three catches for 24 yards. An assistant under previous Huskies coach Steve Sarkisian – he didn’t want to say who – texted him that night about his chances in the NFL draft: “You’d be lucky if a team picked you next year.”

Kearse shut down after that text and finished his senior season with 699 yards, a year after having 1,000 yards. He left as UW’s second all-time leading receiver in catches, yards and touchdowns.

The Seahawks signed him as an undrafted free agent, and his agent later told him that coach Pete Carroll wasn’t immediately sold. But Kippy Brown, then the Seahawks receivers coach, spoke up. “He really fought for me,” Kearse says. “He always says that, anyway. I could see it.”

But now that he’s established in the NFL he still remembers his senior season, determined not to let that happen again.

“The thing is, I really do enjoy playing the game,” Kearse says. “Even though there’s a lot of other stuff that comes with it, I really try to keep it as simple as that. This is the game that I’ve been playing since I was young. And I had a point in my life that I let someone else take the fun out of the game when I was in college.”