Do not be fooled by his enormous size. Adam Carriker would not harm a fly.

Unless, of course, a fly was so unlucky to have been sitting on the door a miniature Adam put his fist through.

Yeah, there was that one time he was playing some game with Mom. He was just a little squirt then. Somehow, he got locked out of the house during the game.

Displeased at this turn of events, he sent his hand through the screen door.

“He was a little fiery then,” recalled Adam’s father, Dave.

Adam was a fireball like that until puberty came playing its tricks.

“Then he just turned into the most laid-back guy. It just amazed me,” Dave said. “It’s a great temperament for life. I don’t know if it’s super great for playing defense. He has to flip a switch.”

Adam has flipped the switch well enough, rising to become one of the Blackshirts’ best players as a Husker junior defensive end.

If you didn’t know his personality, he’d seem a scary guy to pass at the grocery store. He looks the part of a pro wrestler at 6-foot-6, 280 pounds, which is a little confusing if you’ve ever seen his father and mother.

Dad’s 5-10. Mom’s 5-6. Go figure.

“Oh geez, he was taller than I was probably before he turned 13, maybe by 12,” Dave said. “By 13, he already had the knees and thighs of a lineman.”

He also had a cannon for an arm. By his sophomore year in high school, Los Angeles Dodgers had  their scouts clocking his pitch speeds.

He threw it 89 mph for the scouts that year. The next summer he came back and made the radar gun read 93.

Baseball might have been an option, but Adam had muscles meant for mashing linemen, not throwing curves. Pitching was always hurting his arm and eventually he gave it up to play a game that better matched his body.

By age 14, Adam was 6-2 and 175 pounds. If he seems fast for his size when you see him on a football field today, you should have seen him running for his life at Kennewick High School in Washington.

He played quarterback for three years for a team that won about as much as the Washington Generals. His linemen were smaller than him. His receivers were kind of slow. And the team ran the ball about as well as Nebraska does this year.

Despite Adam’s best efforts at quarterback and as a defensive end, the team didn’t get a win his senior year.

His work at summer camps, however, was enough to impress Division I coaches, particularly Oregon State’s head man at the time, Dennis Erickson.

But when Nebraska came knocking, poor Dennis hadn’t a chance.

Born in Hastings, Adam’s family watched the Huskers every Saturday they were on TV even after moving to Washington when he was 3.

“Evidently he was a lot more of a Husker fan than I realized,” Dave said. “I knew he liked them, but I was a fanatic.”

The Carrikers are also fanatics for four-wheelers. Adam was tackling four-wheeling at about the same time he took on kindergarten.

When he goes back to see his family, they’ll often travel six hours to Florence, Ore., to four-wheel on a 41-mile sand park with giant dunes.

It’s a good getaway and provides a much better time for the family than that one outing they had at a packed Disneyland.

Adam was 4 then and a lot more restless.

“I carried him all day, and my wife finally said she’d take him for a while,” Dave recalled. “I said, ‘Don’t let go of his hand.’ All of a sudden, we didn’t have him. It was just instant panic.”

Little Adam was soon found, crawling on the ground.

Who knew then that little man would become as big as Space Mountain?

Reach Brian Christopherson at 473-7438 or bchristopherson@journalstar.com.