Inside The Huskies

UW Roster Review, No. 2-99: Racanelli Made People Notice Him in Spring Football

The wide receiver is even better than most people think and making for a highly competitive situation.
Dan Raley|
UW Roster Review, No. 2-99: Racanelli Made People Notice Him in Spring Football
UW Roster Review, No. 2-99: Racanelli Made People Notice Him in Spring Football

In the middle of a month of University of Washington spring football practices, Jimmy Lake sat behind a table and a microphone, and he answered a question with a challenge.

Asked who among his 100-plus players stood out, the Husky coach offered an initial response that seemed to imply the media types before him weren't paying close enough attention.

"Sawyer Racanelli," Lake said. "I'm surprised I didn't get a question about Sawyer."

At 6-foot-2 and 210 pounds, Racanelli is hard to miss as this physical wide-receiver presence from Brush Prairie, Washington, yet he's still a relative newcomer acquainting himself with everyone around the program.

There even was some debate among the press corps on whether or not he had stepped on the field during the Huskies' four-game pandemic season, and if he had pulled scrimmage plays or merely special-teams duty.

The athletic department's answer to that was yes, and confirmed this involved scrimmage plays for sure, where he made appearances against Arizona and Stanford.

As for spring football, Racanelli put himself in the middle of the competition for serious playing time where observers might have assumed the starting jobs automatically will go to fellow redshirt freshmen Rome Odunze and Jalen McMillan and senior Terrell Bynum.

Add in Racanelli, plus Texas Tech transfer Ja'Lynn Polk, Michigan transfer Giles Jackson and sophomore opt-in Taj Davis, and the grab bag for starts and minutes will be as intense as it is for any position group.

"He has made some tough, tough catches, with DBs draped all over him, with possible holding or PI (pass interference) calls," Lake said of Racanelli. "He's still made some phenomenal catches."

Going down the roster in numerical order, this is another of our post-spring assessments of all of the Husky talent at hand, gleaned from a month of observations, as a way to keep everyone engaged during the offseason.

Racanelli brings us to No. 19. He showed up at the UW after enduring a significant knee injury that forced him to miss his senior season at little Hockinson High School in Southwest Washington. He was greatly missed after catching 101 passes as a junior and scoring 32 times receiving and rushing while helping the Hawks to consecutive 2A state titles.

Even after tearing his ACL, the 3-star recruit fielded nearly a dozen scholarship offers, with Michigan, Kansas State and California among them. Ironically, Peter Sirmon, the Golden Bears' defensive coordinator and father of UW starting linebacker Jackson Sirmon and uncle of walk-on quarterback Camden Sirmon, worked hard to bring him to Berkeley.

Racanelli comes from a football family. His father Josh played quarterback at Portland State, where he was coached by former UW coach Chris Petersen, and his older brother Canon currently is a safety and a former quarterback at Central Washington.

This Racanelli is a wide receiver and very much his own player, as everyone, prodded by Jimmy Lake, is beginning to realize.

Racanelli's 2021 Outlook: Wide-receiver starting candidate

UW Service Time: Played in 2 games

Stats: None

Individual Honors: None

Pro prospects: 2025 NFL mid-round draft pick

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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