Jets WR Stephen Hill has a good-sized scar on his left leg -- a reminder of his childhood summers on his grandparents’ farm in West Point, Miss. The scar is also a reminder of where and when Hill's work ethic started.
Starting at age two, Hill’s parents would send him and his sister from their home in Lithonia, Ga., to spend summers with his mother's parents.
“It feels like it’s in the middle of nowhere," Hill said of West Point. "It’s just open space. Acres and acres of land.”
Hill spent his time those summers working the farm. He'd gather eggs that his grandfather would sell, feed chickens, send sugar cubes down to the cows and cut plenty of wood. The farm also had pigs and Black Angus cows.
“I had to wake up early, maybe five or six o’clock in the morning,” Hill said. “But you could hear my grandmother and once you heard her, you could hear the roosters.”
One summer when Hill was about nine years old, he was tasked with moving a chicken from one coop to another. “You had to grab them and bring them over to the other side,” he recalled. “As I was chasing it, I jumped on a board and I slipped and I fell on a nail.
He suffered a serious cut to his left leg that required a visit to the hospital for some stitches. Hill’s parents were already in town when the accident happened, preparing to take him home for football camp. “I was supposed to go to a Little League training camp. My dad was like 'What happened?' He looked at me and he said, ‘You know you gotta go to football, right?’"
After resting for three or four days, Hill said he returned to action. His work ethic, which Hill credits to those days of hard labor on the farm, is what stood out to the Jets when they were scouting Hill, their second-round pick in the draft this year.
“We did a lot of homework on him," his position coach Sanjay Lal said. "We gave him an extremely detailed workout. We ran every exotic route known to man. Every blocking drill. Every release drill. We got our answer.”
After just a week in camp, Hill has met or exceeded expectations.
Right now, Hill, who was more of a blocker than receiver at Georgia Tech, is focused on improving his route running as well as his coverage recognition. Lal believes the rookie will continue to blossom and eventually become a key component to the offense.
“He’s on his way to fulfilling his full potential," Lal said.
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