Oregon cornerback’s journey began in Youngstown

January 11, 2015 at 12:10a.m.

As the story goes, Troy Hill was homesick and wanted to move back to the south side of Youngstown after just a short time in the Los Angeles suburb of Oxnard, Calif.

He called his mother, Sandra Jennings, who had sent Hill to live with his uncle on the West Coast and get him off the streets before they got to him. When she heard her son’s wish, she gave him one piece of advice.

“Start walking,” she told him. “Maybe you’ll get home within the year.”

Needless to say, Hill decided to stick it out in California. Now he’s playing in the first-ever College Football Playoff national championship on Monday in Arlington, Texas.

Hill is a redshirt senior at the University of Oregon by way of St. Bonaventure High School in Ventura, Calif, and before that, the south side of Youngstown. He’s a starting cornerback for the Ducks, who will face Ohio State at AT&T Stadium.

Thanks to college football’s recent decision to help with the cost of expenses for families to travel to the title game, Jennings will be able to see her son play his final college game. And she won’t have to walk to get there.

It’s an ending she wasn’t sure was possible nine years ago. And yet it feels like only the beginning of a story worth celebrating, regardless of the game’s outcome.

(Note: Hill didn’t respond to an interview request for this story.)

‘TOUGH LITTLE KID’

The first time Hill strapped on a football helmet was at age 6 with the New Bethel Braves pee wee team.

His first coach was Chris Amill, who had recently wrapped up a playing career that began at Cardinal Mooney High and continued at Kent State University. Amill, who’s coached the last 13 years as an assistant with his high school alma mater, remembers his initial thoughts of Hill.

“There was no fear that Troy had,” Amill said. “He would go out there and play hard, stick his nose in there and he would hit anyone.

“There was no fear whatsoever, even at a young age.”

Hill’s brother, Tony, was on one of the older teams, so Troy had no choice but to play that way growing up in the backyard. Brian Marrow was also a coach of the Braves at the time and has a similar memory of the young Hill.

“He was a tough little kid,” said Marrow, now the head coach at Youngstown Christian.

“He was always real small. He was a real little guy as a kid, but he was real tough.

“He could cover and he could come up and hit you.”

Hill wasn’t the only kid with talent on that Braves team. Braylon Heard, who spent two seasons as running back at Nebraska before transferring to Kentucky last year, played linebacker for the little league team. The last year Marrow coached there, Hill and Raymond R’amel Hayes were the team’s two cornerbacks.

“We always talked about how, at that age, we had two lockdown corners,” Marrow said. “That team was extremely talented.”

In November 2011, Hayes was murdered on the east side of Youngstown. Marrow spoke at his funeral, and although Hill had been removed from the city for five years at that point, the message hit home for everyone who knew Hayes.

“R’amel was just as good as those two guys, especially in basketball where he had great, great opportunities, but kinda fell off the wrong end of the stick,” Marrow said. “It turned out tragic.”

That was one of many examples of what Jennings didn’t want her son to run into back home. So when Hill decided to quit playing football after his first year at Chaney High School in 2006, his mother became concerned.

“I’m not sure what went down, but he decided not to play any more football there,” Jennings recalled. “He said, ‘Mom, I want to run track for a while. I’m tired of playing football.’

“He didn’t want to play football that year. He just wanted to turn around and run track.”

Jennings, who watched her son grow up scoring touchdowns and have fun doing it, couldn’t believe what she was hearing. But she let things play out, hoping her son would change his mind. It never got to that point.

According to Jennings, the school wouldn’t let Hill run track, so that prompted the once-promising young athlete to want to quit sports altogether. Instead of watching her son become just another statistic, Jennings made a call to her bother, Jim Gilmer, who was a minister in California.

She was prepared to make a decision no mother wants to make, but Jennings felt she had to make.

‘OUT OF THE SLUMP’

Gilmer grew up in Youngstown, so he was aware of the possible dangers kids could fall into. When he heard his nephew was starting to run with the wrong crowd and gangs were involved, Gilmer was on the next plane to northeastern Ohio.

“I had to let my brother come down here and get him,” Jennings said. “He helped me bring him out of the slump that he was in.

“Things just weren’t working out for him down here and I didn’t want to see him slip into the system.”

So Jennings sent her 15-year-old son more than 2,000 miles away in the midst of his freshman year at Chaney. Many were sad to see him go, including Amill and Marrow who were hoping the budding young football player would make it at the schools at which they were now coaching. But they also knew it was the best decision for the kid’s future.

“I didn’t blame her whatsoever,” Amill said. “Youngstown can be a rough place and if you’re not involved in things and on that straight path, it can get ugly pretty fast.”

The first road bump on the West Coast came when Hill showed up with zero high school credits. He stopped going to classes at Chaney, which set him back when he enrolled at St. Bonaventure High School. His first year wasn’t easy, by any stretch, according to his uncle.

“He came in with bad grades, pretty much his whole freshman year,” Gilmer said. “So he was behind and had to go to regular classes, in addition to adult education to catch up.”

The game plan from the beginning was to get Hill a college scholarship, but that wouldn’t be possible unless he straightened up in the classroom. With a busy academic schedule, in addition to football, Hill didn’t have time to do much else in his first year.

That’s when he called his mother and told her he wanted to come home.

“We all saw how that turned out,” Gilmer said with a chuckle.

That was also the last time Hill even considered leaving, according to Gilmer. Instead, he worked his way into a starting role on the football team as a sophomore for head coach Todd Therrien at St. Bonaventure. From that point on, Gilmer could tell Hill was focused on one goal.

“It was a natural thing for him to rise to the top,” Gilmer said. “He really excelled on the athletic field.”

He also performed well enough academically to get attention from major college football programs. Hill and Gilmer went on official visits to a few schools, including University of Arizona, where Youngstown native Mike Stoops was the head coach. His brother, Mark, was the defensive coordinator and coached defensive backs for the Wildcats.

“I was concerned about Troy just having another family to take him on, because I had been there for him and know the sensitive nature of him coming from Youngstown and everything there,” Gilmer said. “So I was leaning more toward Arizona.”

But Gilmer left the choice to Hill. And what teenager is going to pass up a flashy program on the rise with more wardrobe changes than a rock star? Not Hill.

“He felt that Autzen Stadium was the place to play in,” Gilmer said.

Hill committed to Oregon in 2009. He planned to major in sports management with an eye on a future career at Nike. A degree-based decision was all Gilmer needed to hear to be convinced.

‘DREAM COME TRUE’

Jennings has seen her son play three times as a member of the Ducks.

The first came in 2012 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. Hill recorded a career-high nine tackles in an Oregon win over Wisconsin. She also traveled to Virginia in 2013 and made a trip to Eugene to see the Ducks beat Stanford this season.

“It is awesome to go watch him play,” Jennings said. “It’s just a dream come true for him.”

Gilmer makes it to a few more than his sister because of his proximity to many of Oregon’s games.

“Believe me, even in college, they look up in the stands to see what family members are there,” Gilmer said. “That’s such a big confidence booster for them.”

If playing for a national championship on Monday isn’t exciting enough, when Hill looks into the crowd he’s going to see as many as eight family members cheering on his every move. He’ll also have a few more back in his hometown of Youngstown — which Hill pays homage to by writing the area code ‘330’ on his eye black.

“Knowing where he’s come from: sitting on the porch, contemplating with a pellet gun or something like that, thinking these guys are after him and ‘I need to defend myself,’ ” Gilmer reflected. “When I saw that, I said, ‘We gotta get you out of here.’

“I think he would’ve hurt somebody, or somebody would’ve hurt him.”

Instead, Hill’s become an example for others who may find themselves at a similar crossroads. He graduated and earned a degree from Oregon — although it’s not the one he originally planned. He’s instead decided to follow in his uncle’s footsteps and get involved with community service and work with kids — if a run at the NFL doesn’t work out.

It’s a far cry from the high school freshman who wanted to quit football.

“He tells me every time we speak he’s glad that I did what I did,” Jennings said. “And so am I.”