IU's Cam Camper was barely recruited out of high school, but he had a growth spurt and a solid stint at junior college since graduation.
Adam Henry Press conference courtesy of IU athleticsBLOOMINGTON -- If Indiana's coaching staff could assemble a wide receiver in a lab, he would look, play and act a lot like Cam Camper.
Parts of Camper's game actually developed very early, and so did his sense of discipline. His mother, Reeshia Newman, was a lab technician in the Army, and even though she got out when he was 2 years old, she held Cam to a high standard.Said Camper:"If you acted up at school or anything, it was straight, wall-sits and get into push-up position if you got in trouble, and I didn't want no parts of that.
Even then Camper always wanted to spend time talking to coaches and watching film with them. He was a fixture at the Lancaster coaches' offices even when the team wasn't practicing. And most of the other wide receivers on Lancaster's roster were much bigger. One of his teammates was 6-4, 225-pound Nebraska wide receiver Omar Manning, a four-star recruit who went to Texas Christian out of high school, then spent two years at Kilgore College and became the top-rated junior college receiver in the country before returning to the FBS.
"They kind of just had me as a special teams dummy," Camper said."I thought, 'I know what I can do on the field.' So I just went away for a while." The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic slowed things down and made training hard, especially at the junior college, level, but Camper kept working and putting on muscle. Trinity Valley didn't play in the fall of 2020, but played a truncated schedule in the spring of 2021 and then a full fall 2021 season.He caught 22 passes for 353 yards and a touchdown in the spring, then grabbed 28 for 505 yards and three touchdowns in the fall.