After a stellar junior season, Gilroy High quarterback Jamie
Jensen has been hearing from many of the best college football
programs.
Eight months ago, nobody knew a thing about a kid named Jamie Jensen.
Maybe Jensen’s family and friends knew some things, but 10,000 screaming fans didn’t know him. High school defensive coordinators from across the Bay Area didn’t know him. And certainly, some of the best college football coaches in America didn’t know about a 6-foot-3, red-headed kid from Gilroy who had thrown all of one pass in varsity football.
Fast-forward to the present and Jensen is considered one of the top high school quarterback prospects in the state of California. That’s what 4,205 yards and 41 touchdowns in one season can do for a kid.
Handed the reigns last summer to an offense that went on to become the most prolific passing attack in the history of Central Coast Section football, as well as the best overall team in Gilroy High history with a 10-3 record, Jensen entered the season an unknown and exited as a likely candidate to play big-time college ball. He would be the first quarterback from Gilroy High to do so since current NFL player and Tampa Bay Buccaneer Jeff Garcia, who pitched pigskins at San Jose State after attending Gavilan College in Gilroy.
Jensen seems just as surprised as everyone else on how well things have gone.
“I didn’t even know what I was doing two years ago,” he admits. “The two plays that I played (sophomore year), I rolled out the wrong way and rolled out the right way for a pass for two yards.”
The first play he ended up getting hammered for no gain.
But Rich Hammond, Gilroy’s first-year head coach at the time, saw potential and brought Jensen up to varsity as a sophomore to learn a playbook the coach envisioned installing in his second year – a high-tempo, hurry-up offense that operates strictly out of the shotgun formation.
The following summer, as Hammond screamed his lungs out at his new starting quarterback making one mistake after another, the coach questioned if Jensen was his guy. The kid seemed to be too quiet, as if he didn’t care.
It turns out that Jensen was fine with the criticism, but wasn’t about to be rattled. He digested his coach’s pointers and started thinking about the next play.
“If I have a bad [repetition], I just move on to the next one,” Jensen said. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”
Having such mental maturity on the field could come from good coaching – Jensen was tutored by quarterback “guru” Roger Theder for over a year before moving on to current private instructor Steve Goodson, a former assistant with Palma High School in Salinas – but it seems more likely that the credit should go to Jensen’s makeup.
A self-described “family guy,” Jensen could be seen after every home game last season playing with his little brother and sister, Joshua and Jenessa.
Jensen is also the first to admit his stellar numbers, such as 486 yards and eight touchdowns passes in a 57-27 victory over rival San Benito, did not come as a one-man band. A stout, unified offensive line combined with playmakers galore at the running back and receiver positions made a well-designed offensive system explosive, threatening to score on any snap.
All of this has caused some of the top football factories in America (BYU, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Washington, Utah, Stanford and San Diego State amongst others) to send him letters explaining their interest in him, and why he should be interested in them.
The most obvious example that Jensen has arrived as a top-notch recruit was when Washington head coach Tyrone Willingham – former coach of Stanford and Notre Dame – came on to the GHS campus this winter to meet with Hammond about the junior signal-caller. PAC-10 head coaches don’t just drop by for tea unless there is genuine interest.
Jensen’s rise hasn’t come without detractors, though. After Gilroy lost the CCS championship game to Oak Grove, Jensen got off the team bus only to find that his car had been written on with paint, blaming him for the defeat. Since that time his car has been vandalized twice – keyed once and spray-painted another time.
The quarterback’s cool demeanor hasn’t been shaken.
“I guess it comes with who I am, making mistakes in games,” he said. “It’s just another thing I have to deal with.”
Jensen is currently in Provo, Utah to visit the BYU campus and attend the program’s spring football game. The attraction to BYU is strong considering Jensen is Mormon, his grandfather played for BYU years ago and the team’s offense is similar to Gilroy’s spread attack.
He will return to the campus in May for an official workout for coaches, making an already busy spring schedule even more hectic as Jensen will be attending several prestigious passing camps. Most notably, Jensen was recently invited to the EA Sports Elite 11 Regional Camp taking place May 16 on Cal’s campus in Berkeley. Invites are limited to what many of football’s experts believe are the 11 best soon-to-be senior quarterbacks in the region.
Jensen hopes to impress after putting in numerous hours of work with Gilroy’s coaches as well as Goodson. Since last season, Jensen has fine-tuned his mechanics, developing more accuracy and better velocity. He has added 10 yards to his deep ball – now 60 yards – through using his hips and core muscle groups to throw rather than just his arm, which he admitted to relying on too heavily last season.
His goal for the fall of 2008 is to bump his completion percentage over 70 percent, which was a solid 62.5 percent last season, and drop his interceptions below eight after being picked off 20 times in 2007. The number of interceptions is high but made more reasonable when considering how aggresssive Gilroy’s playcalling was (only 10 NFL quarterbacks threw more regular season passes than Jensen despite having three more games on the schedule) and he was facing a different defense for the first time every week as opposing coaches tried to avoid making the mistakes they had seen on tape.
With BYU, UCLA and Washington currently on the top of his list, and him possibly on the top of theirs, Jensen looks to have an excellent future ahead of him.
Now it’s just a matter of reading his options.
