Hubbard shaped by lessons learned in Sherwood Park
AUSTIN, Texas — Chuba Hubbard loved his trips to Lilac Terrace.
The family would leave its modest home on Rainbow Crescent and drive north a few kilometers through the Canadian hamlet of Sherwood Park to Grandpa's house.
Living between Lil ac Terrace and Rainbow Crescent has the sound of a life picked ripe from the vine of a nursery rhyme.
But like most of us, not all of Chuba Hubbard's young life leapt from the pages of a Little Golden Book.
Playing in front of the house son Lil ac Terrace is where 9- year-old C hub a Hubbard met friends who taught him football.
Back home on Rainbow Crescent, that' s where Candace Hubbard taught her son hard work.
Now 20 years old and a redshirt sophomore running back at Oklahoma State, Chuba Hubbard is blending what he learned between Lilac Terrace and Rainbow Crescent to become a special kind of football player.
The 6-foot-1, 207-pound Hubbard leads the nation in rushing with 521 yards through three games, making highlight plays that have national media types throwing his name into the He is man Trophy conversation.
Asked about Heisman talk earlier this week as he and the Cowboys prepare for their Big 12 Conference opener at Texas at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Hubbard dismissed the question with a humble eye roll, if such a thing exists.
In the short term, Hubbard is playing for victories and championships. In the long term, he's playing for the payoff of the moments of struggleturned-to-strength that he and his family endured back home on Rainbow Crescent.
“I came here for a reason,” Hubbard said. “I didn't move to another country just to have fun and go to college. I came here to change my life, change my family's life.”
Candace didn't want her young son to play football. He'd been competing in track for a few years already when the family moved to Sherwood Park. That's where, on one of the visits to Lilac Terrace, he met a neighboring family with boys who played on a football team. Their father was a coach.
The boys' front-yard games revealed some of Hubbard's natural gifts, and Candace anxiously relented.
“He would ask me all the time,” Candace said. “Football was so rough, and I was used to him running track, and nobody touching him. But he was very persistent about football.”
Back home on Rainbow Crescent, Candace's lessons in hard work came mostly by showing rather than telling.
A single mother, with Chuba the youngest of four, Candace went to nursing school when her children were small, and worked long shifts as they grew older to make sure the family had what it needed.
“I've seen my mom work hard her whole life,” Chuba said. “We struggled throughout our lives, with my brothers and sisters. I didn't come here just for me. I came here for them. I want to make them proud and be able to take care of them.”
Candace and the family will make the trip to an OSU game once or twice a year, opportunities they enjoy since not all of the Cowboys' games can be picked up on television in Sherwood Park. Saturday's ABC telecast will be carried on a Canadian network, but Candace often has to rely on online streaming of video or radio broadcasts.
“He's such an amazing boy,” Candace said. “I'm very proud of him. It touches my heart when I hear those things.
“He's very motivated, and I think that's due to the struggles we went through.”
OSU coach Mike Gundy has seen a change in Hubbard since he became the team's starting running back, and even more so since offseason conditioning began last winter.
“He's very serious about football,” Gundy said. “He made a transition in February. When we got back from the bowl game I saw a completely different person on the field and off the field.
What does that mean? From Hubbard's perspective, Gundy described it this way: “There's no B.S. Practice is not funny to me. I'm working my butt off. This is my job. Meetings, I ain' t jacking around. I don't care about some stupid YouTube video. And when the game comes, I'm serious. I want in the game, I want the rock and I'm serious.”
With Hubbard's sophomore season off to a flourishing start, Gundy sees a player that could be on his way to superstar status.
“He' s just developing ,” Gundy said. “A year from now, if he stays healthy and everything works out, he's gonna be a guy who's potentially a top-10 pick.”
In the summer of 2017, Hubbard left Bev Facey High in Sherwood Park, and traveled 1,700 miles seeking a career in football, and eventually, a different life for his family.
All to re pay the lessons learned back home on Rainbow Crescent.