Time stands Sills: A look at the JUCO season of David Sills Part 1

SUBSCRIBE today to stay up on the latest in Mountaineer sports and recruiting.

The heavily covered journey story of David Sills contains a chapter that isn’t discussed in detail very often.

We all know about his commitment to USC as an eighth-grader and his freshman season at West Virginia as a wide receiver, but it was his lone junior college season that helped him to get to where he is now which is back in Morgantown as a star wideout for the Mountaineers.

Today we begin part one of a three-part series where we cover that junior college season as well as Sills's journey back to Morgantown.

A familiar face

Sills’s interest in attending a junior college for another shot at playing quarterback at the Division 1 college level began following his freshman season at West Virginia. Although he impressed in his first season playing primarily wide receiver, Sills decided to give playing quarterback one more shot.

From there, he contacted Tim Kaub, who currently serves as the offensive coordinator at El Camino and has known Sills since he was 10 years old. Sills used to train with private quarterback coach Steve Clarkson, who Kaub has assisted for 15 years.

One of the things that first stood out to Kaub about Sills was his maturity and Kaub himself got to see that firsthand.

Kaub was tasked with managing Clarkson’s YouTube and social media accounts and once the news of Sills’s commitment to USC became a national story, Kaub posted a promotional video of Sills on YouTube which was then subjected to vicious and disturbing comments, which caused Kaub to filter out these negative comments.

According to Kaub, these comments ranged from parents believing their sons were a better quarterback to critics of Clarkson and USC, but above all else, Kaub saw Sills’s character grow and withstand the criticism.

“Knowing that that’s what he was walking into, that that’s what was waiting for him, I was just like, ‘I don’t know how this kid can handle it,’ and then knowing him through those 10 years before he played for me at El (Camino), it was seeing him and saying, man this kid stood all of that stuff and is still a great kid, good person, good heart and caring, compassionate,” Kaub said.

Sills and Kaub talked in May of 2016 at Clarkson’s annual quarterback retreat held in San Diego. There, Sills asked Kaub, who had just been hired at El Camino that April, about the team’s quarterback situation.

El Camino was entering a rebuilding phase under first-year head coach, Gifford Lindheim. Kaub told Sills that the competition was wide open.

“I wasn’t really recruiting him I was just filling in the blanks and then he reached out to me and asked what I thought, if he could compete for the job and I said absolutely,” Kaub said.

“He’d always know where he stood with me and I’d always know where I stood with him and it was good,” he later added.

Kaub noticed Sills making strides in his athleticism and believes he added an inch or two to his height during his freshman year at West Virginia, but again, it was his maturity that stood out to Kaub during this phase as he entered junior college as well as how he carried himself mentally.

“He was just super mature, super mellow. In junior college you tend to have kids that aren’t that,” Kaub said. “Just his maturity was what jumped out to me the most.”

A program in rebuild

As mentioned above, Sills joined an El Camino football program that was in complete rebuild mode.

Lindheim was hired as the new head coach of the program during late March of 2016 and some of the new assistants, including Kaub, were officially a month later. The timing of these hirings were late and the numbers on the roster were not great.

“They didn’t officially hire us until a month after they announced him as the head coach,” Kaub said. “But when we got there, in the spring class there were 32 football players, which would be low for a high school.”

Kaub was part of Lindheim’s staff at Santa Monica College that became a power under Lindheim’s regime, winning five straight conference titles and 34-consecutive conference games, including an undefeated season in 2015. Santa Monica’s offense during their the 2015 season was averaging 51 points per game.

Lindheim was hired as a full-time employee at El Camino, but was tasked with rebuilding a football program that had fallen on hard times.

El Camino has a rich football history which began under the man Lindheim was replacing in John Featherstone, who coached 31 years at El Camino, finishing with a 214-119-1 record and winning a national title in 1987 as well as two state titles and 11 conference championships.

The main problem these new coaches faced was rebuilding a roster that was thin in terms of numbers--so much to the point where if you were had any interest in attending and playing football at El Camino, the coaching staff made sure to respond to you if you contacted them.

Sills would be part of this rebuild and amongst the numerous new faces on the team that year.

“In year one I had no returning offensive line starters, I had no returning wide receiver starters and I had no returning running back starters and no returning quarterback starter because the two years before us they were 3-7 both years, not very competitive, low numbers,” Kaub said.

“If you sent your highlights to us in 2016, you heard back from us because we knew we had to build depth. There wasn’t a crazy hard expectation to win right away but because they had won national championships before and they had a hall of fame coach that retired, he had been there 30 years and most of his staff had been there just as long, there were a lot of eyes on us all over the place,” he later added.

Preseason competition

Although the quarterback competition heading into the 2016 campaign was wide open, it was easy to assume at the time that Sills would be the starting quarterback from the get-go.

Word quickly spread that the once quarterback prodigy had slipped down to junior college and was trying to rise up in the ranks and achieve his goal of playing quarterback at the Division 1 level--an intriguing storyline indeed for press and media alike which led to Kaub doing interviews about Sills before he even took a snap.

“On day one, everyone already knew that David was coming to play at El Camino because it was a huge thought piece that a bunch of journalists jumped on and said look what happened to this kid,” Kaub said. “So as a staff, we had to kinda step back and let it sort itself out because we didn’t want anyone to think the other three or four quarterbacks in the room didn’t have a chance at the job.”

It didn’t take long for Sills to assert himself and gain the respect of his teammates. In fact, that came on day one.

“He walks in the weight room, the strength coach has a plan and he just goes to work and all of the sudden guys are just watching him go to work and he’s not working to impress anybody, he’s not looking around, he’s not nervous, he’s just working,” Lindheim said. “After that first weight session, guys were ready to accept him.”

From that point on, that assertiveness during workouts and non-padded practices is what allowed Sills to gain a leadership role in a quiet way as the team began to rally around him.

That same intense dedication and work ethic is what would eventually land him the starting quarterback job. It’s even more impressive when you consider the circumstances and disadvantage he was at prior.

What was that disadvantage?

While in high school, Sills suffered a hand/wrist injury that caused a hitch in his release and extra movement in his throwing motion that slowed everything down.

From there, Sills just wasn’t the same from a quarterback mechanics standpoint and that was evident to Kaub during one quarterback retreat at Santa Barbara where some of the best quarterbacks in the country gathered and competed.

It’s more common than you think for high school quarterbacks to get away with negative mechanics and have success if they possess some athleticism, but when competing against other top quarterbacks, those negatives will catch up as they did with Sills during this time.

“I’ll always remember that retreat was at Santa Barbara and he came out and it was really windy and his ball just didn’t look good,” Kaub said. “He didn’t look good out there throwing, his motion looked weird and erratic, something we hadn’t seen because before that injury he was almost flawless.”

“He still had impressive statistics and impressive resume coming out of high school but when he was standing next to the best, he was clearly not at their level anymore. It’s so hard to fix mechanics that late in the game on a guy,” he later added.

Despite this, Sills would win the starting quarterback job against a fellow competitor that possessed talent and a cleaner release by simply outworking him. By winning the job, he was another step closer to achieving his dream of playing quarterback at the Division 1 college level.

“David mentally was so acute as far as knowing his reads, knowing his assignments, but he almost had to be faster than normal just to get the ball out on time mentally, like he’d have to start his process earlier,” Kaub said.

“He executed better than a kid that didn’t have that negative motion and that was just grit, throwing himself into his reads, studying film, just doing all of the little things on his end to equalize the playing field and he won the job.”

NEXT UP: In Part two, we'll discuss what the regular season had in store for Sills and El Camino as well as his other go-around through the recruiting process.

Enter the contest by clicking on the following link and choosing to subscribe to the channel: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=VideoGlide