Competitiveness drilled into QB early
A late-blooming Rising thrived in his athletic family on way to UT commitment.
Competitiveness was a trait forced upon Texas quarterback commit Cameron Rising. He’s the youngest of three athletic brothers and the son of an alpha-male. It was his destiny to shine against kids his own age. Rising was fighting bigger competition his whole life.
Rising’s older brother, Tyson, is a 6-5, 300-pound offensive lineman at Arizona State.
“Tyson used to manhandle Cam, but Cam never backed down,” recalled their father, Nicko. “I was probably even harder on the kid in competitive settings like 1-on-1 in basketball and ping-pong. He hated to lose.”
Cam — a four-star quarterback prospect from Newbury Park, Calif. — would figure out a way to win. By the time he was in middle school he was a budding star on the basketball court. He admits basketball, not football, was his first love, and it’s also where Nicko first saw the poise and hate-to-lose attitude that would come to define his youngest son as a high school football player.
The Risings don’t mind trash talk. It comes with forging a strong-willed personality on and off the field of play. Nicko let his son know when he beat him repeatedly in games growing up, so Cam found his turn in a game of 21 after a day of middle » » school.
“Cam beat me the day before and wouldn’t be quiet about it, so I told him he was getting beat in 21 when he was done with school,” Nicko recalled. “I crushed him the first game and he demanded we play two out of three for $40. I was up 18-3 in the second game before I missed my free throw, he scored and ended up beating me in the next two games.”
Football wasn’t Rising’s first love. That distinction fell to basketball. It changed in the eighth grade when his dad made the decision to move Cam to quarterback with the help of a local youth league coach, Matt Rosene. California doesn’t sanction middle school football like it does in Texas, so youth league football dominates the landscape until ninth grade begins.
“I had an epiphany that he needed to be a quarterback and Matt is a legend-