Somewhere in the Miami area is a youth football coach who unknowingly fueled the rise of a record-breaking wide receiver.

This is the coach who told Jeremiah Smith he didn’t make the Miami Gardens Ravens after the 7-year-old tried out to play football for the first time.

Much like the high school basketball coach who cut Michael Jordan or the NFL executives who allowed Tom Brady to fall to the sixth round of the draft, the snub ignited a fierce determination to be great within Smith. As the Ohio State freshman told FOX’s Tom Rinaldi in November, “I was just a whole different type of person from that day forward. It just made a kid more hungry, that’s all I can say.”

The cut also inspired Smith’s father to do more to help his son maximize his talent and achieve his goals. Chris Smith spent endless hours alongside J.J. (as he’s known to family and friends) at the park, the field or the gym, instilling the work ethic that made his son an elite prospect before anyone knew he would grow to become a 6-foot-3, 215-pound genetic marvel.

The very next year, the younger Smith not only made the youth team he tried out for but claimed the league’s version of the Heisman Trophy. The way his uncle, Geno Smith Sr., puts it, “Something just clicked in J.J. at a young age after the cut and he has pretty much been an animal from that time on.”

Hailed as the next great Ohio State receiver when he arrived in Columbus, Smith has achieved feats that even Marvin Harrison Jr., Jaxson Smith-Njigba and Garrett Wilson could not. The cousin of Seattle Seahawks quarterback Geno Smith has smashed Cris Carter’s school records for receptions, yardage and touchdown catches by a freshman.

The hype hit a crescendo after Smith’s dazzling 187-yard, two-touchdown tour de force against previously undefeated Oregon in the Rose Bowl last week. Not only did Smith help Ohio State advance to face Texas in Friday’s College Football Playoff semifinals, the 19-year-old rekindled debate over whether he should have to wait two more years to play on Sundays.

ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky said Smith would “easily be the No. 1 pick in this year’s draft” if he were eligible for it. NFL Draft analyst Todd McShay has said the same. Former Ohio State quarterback Cardale Jones even suggested Smith should consider only playing one more season at Ohio State to prepare for the draft rather than risk injury.

“The guy is NFL-ready,” Oregon coach Dan Lanning said after the Rose Bowl. “He’s that talented, that special.”

Climbing the hill

Deep in the South Florida suburbs is a spacious public park built on the site of a former landfill. Where heaping mounds of trash once stood is now a towering, man-made hill. On a clear day, visitors can climb to the top and enjoy views of downtown Fort Lauderdale.

For Jeremiah Smith, this hill was a proving ground, the starting point of his journey to becoming college football’s most heralded receiver. He has been sprinting up its steep slopes since he was a wisp of a boy, the sting of getting cut still fresh.

Each Saturday morning, the kids in Pearson Sutton’s training group would gather at the bottom of the hill and then do sets of incline runs in the sticky Florida heat. Smith was always among the leaders during those runs, even when surrounded by older kids.

“I’d have kids going to the bushes and throwing up or crying and saying they didn’t want to do it,” said Sutton, a former Alabama State receiver and a childhood friend of Smith’s father. “Jeremiah ran every rep 150%. I never heard him complain. Never.”

At the same time that Smith began spending weekend mornings jumping rope, running hill sprints and doing plyometric and resistance training with Sutton, he also began working with another of his father’s lifelong friends.

Sly Johnson is a former Miami (Ohio) wide receiver who discovered in college that there was far more to mastering the position than just running and catching. Johnson had big games against the likes of North Carolina’s Dre Bly and Ohio State’s Nate Clements after learning how to use a defensive back’s responsibilities against him to gain leverage and create separation.

When Johnson finished playing, he returned to his native South Florida eager to teach the next generation of receivers the route-running nuances he once didn’t know existed. The renowned wide receiver skills trainer worked with the likes of Amari Cooper, Jerry Jeudy and Elijah Moore before getting the chance to help mold Smith every weekend.

Under Johnson, Smith learned more than just route running basics, proper technique to catch a ball and how to get a clean release against press coverage. Smith also soaked up advanced concepts at a young age, becoming proficient at reading coverages, recognizing what defenders were trying to take away and shaping the path of his route to use that against them.

Johnson recalls testing Smith during workouts by throwing scenarios at him. He might tell the young receiver, “Hey J.J., you have an in-breaking route against a two high safety look and the corner has inside leverage.”

Inevitably, Smith would tell Johnson the path he was going to take down to the step, where he was going to catch the ball and where he would try to score. Then J.J would go demonstrate what Johnson had just described, doing it again and again until he got it exactly right.

“Whatever concept I gave him, he was almost OCD about mastering it,” Johnson told Yahoo Sports. “I’ve worked with lots and lots of Division I kids, but no one has picked up concepts as quickly as him.”

Although Smith was an attentive pupil while working with Johnson, he also became known for occasionally disobeying his youth football coaches when they instructed him not to field a punt. Recalled his uncle, Geno Smith Sr., with a laugh, “They’d be yelling at him, ‘Get out the way, get out the way!’ He’d pick the ball up and take it to the house.”

Smith produced another stunning highlight in one of his first 7-on-7 tournaments as a member of the Miami Gardens Ravens. Head coach Rod Mack remembers the rail-thin 10-year-old rising above multiple defenders to snag a one-handed catch in the back of the end zone.

“We could not believe that someone so young could do that,” Mack told Yahoo Sports. “His skill level has always been beyond his years.”

In those days, the Miami Gardens Ravens were the rock stars of the youth football circuit. The juggernaut team featured well over a dozen future Division I football players, many of whom blossomed into four- and five-star recruits. Fans would pack local high school stadiums to watch the Ravens play and line up for photos and autographs after games. Content creators would post mix tapes and highlight reels to social media. Retired NFL players who lived in South Florida were regulars on the sidelines. So were high school coaches seeking to attract the area’s best middle-school talent.

Even amongst that group, Mack says Smith always stood out. It wasn’t even the speedy receiver’s sure hands, precise routes or elusiveness in the open field. More than anything, it was Smith’s quiet, businesslike determination at such a young age.

“He was never the type of little kid you had to tell to pay attention or stop playing around,” Mack said. “He was always out in front in sprints, always working hard. He always took football very, very, very seriously. It was always very important to him.”

The route to Ohio State

The first time Ohio State receivers coach Brian Hartline scouted him in person, Smith had just finished his freshman year of high school. The young receiver joined his South Florida Express 7-on-7 teammates at a camp in Columbus in June 2021.

The national perception of Smith at the time was that he was a very good prospect but not a generational talent. Miami, Florida State and Florida had all already offered scholarships to Smith over the previous few months, as had national powers Georgia and Penn State.

Before he left Columbus, Smith added an offer from Ohio State to his haul. Hartline told Geno Smith Sr. that he was as impressed with the younger Smith’s eagerness to learn as much as his skill set and physical tools.

“I think Hartline saw that J.J. was coachable,” said Geno Smith Sr., the coach of his nephew’s South Florida Express 7-on-7 team. “If he feels like someone can help him get better, he’s going to listen, he’s going to learn and he’s going to pick it up pretty quick.”

The intensity of Smith’s recruitment surged over the next few months as he sprouted from 6-0 to 6-3. All of a sudden, Smith became a bigger target with a wider catch radius yet he didn’t sacrifice any of his trademark skill or shiftiness.

The growth spurt transformed an already coveted prospect into one without obvious weaknesses. Smith led Florida powerhouse Chaminade-Madonna High to three straight state championships, piling up 146 catches for 2,449 yards and 39 touchdowns over the course of his junior and senior seasons.

“He’s generational,” Chaminade-Madonna coach Dameon Jones told Yahoo Sports. “I’ve been coaching for 20 years now, and. I haven’t seen a kid at the high school level that looks like him.”

It was no accident, according to Jones, that so many of Smith’s high school receptions were YouTube-worthy one-handed catches. Smith practiced those before and after practices, the Jugs machine whipping balls at him and him plucking them out of the air with a single hand.

“I’m one of those coaches who’s like, ‘Catch everything with two hands,’” Jones said. “But when he’s practicing one-handed catches and getting a bunch of reps, it’s like, OK, I can’t get mad at him like he’s trying something. He actually works on it.”

When a lingering hip flexor injury slowed Smith as a junior, Jones urged his star receiver to sit out a few practices to allow it to heal. The way Jones remembers it, Smith refused, telling his coach that he couldn’t afford to miss any reps.

Another time, Jones happened to check social media the morning after one of his program’s state title game victories. There was a new video of Smith, sweating his way through a workout in the Florida sun.

“We just won a state championship,” Jones said. “We just went through a long, grueling season. Even as a coach I didn’t want to see football for a couple days, but the next morning, not even 24 hours later, he’s out there trying to get better.”

Smith was so dominant during high school play and on the camp circuit that he became Rivals.com’s No. 1 ranked player in the Class of 2024. Ohio State landed a verbal commitment from Smith in 2022, then waited to see if he would get tempted by the chance to join some of his longtime friends at Miami or Florida State.

The intrigue escalated until Smith reaffirmed his commitment by signing with Ohio State on Dec. 20, 2023. That led to a moment of unmistakable relief from Buckeyes coach Ryan Day when he learned Smith’s decision while speaking with reporters during his annual national signing day news conference,

It didn’t take long to grasp why Day would feign fainting over the opportunity to coach Smith for the next three seasons. At the same time as he should have been picking out tuxedos for senior prom, the early enrollee wowed Ohio State players and coaches with his meticulous routes and circus catches on the practice field and with his quiet professionalism and workmanlike attitude away from it.

He was the first Ohio State newcomer to shed the black stripe on his helmet during the spring. He was the first-ever true freshman to earn “Iron Buckeye” honors thanks to his dedication to weight training and conditioning during fall camp. Seldom did a day go by without social media being set ablaze by a crudely shot video of Smith plucking a football out of the air during an Ohio State practice.

Said Day with a grin to reporters during spring practice: “I’m gonna be careful what I say, but he certainly has been a pleasure to watch.”

To those who have watched Smith since grade school, nothing that he has achieved in his first 14 games at Ohio State has come as a surprise.

The one-handed touchdown catches against Michigan State and Iowa? He’s been practicing those forever.

The key 3rd-and-9 out route against Penn State where he created space for himself and pinned a corner on the inside? That’s a concept he and Johnson first worked on when he was in 10th grade.

The pair of Rose Bowl touchdown catches against Oregon? Both plays he made in high school.

When asked how big an impact the infamous cut had in setting his son on a path to freshman stardom, Chris Smith credits J.J. for putting in the work.

“At the time I really didn’t think about it,” Chris Smith told Yahoo Sports. “I just used that time to get him in shape for the next season. Everything else was God and him.”