NEWBURY PARK, Calif. — On the first day of October, the smoke wafting out of the quad and into the evening air is not an emergency. It’s a beacon. The Rock n Roll Burger tent has its flattop grills going, turning dozens and dozens of fresh beef patties into a catered dinner. There is a Newbury Park High School football game the following night. The program eats together today. No seconds until everyone has firsts, one of the moms announces.
Varsity players queue up. Coaches apparently get to cut the line, which explains why Cam Rising is near the front.
It does not begin to explain why he is here.
One year prior, Rising was a two-time Rose Bowl quarterback for the University of Utah who’d been given better preseason odds to win the Heisman Trophy than Travis Hunter, the ultimate winner of the award. He was a freewheeler with shoulder-length flow and a Creedence Clearwater Revival tune soundtracking his appearances at home games. He was 6 feet 2 and 220 pounds, staring down a shot at an NFL roster spot while preparing for a Week 7 matchup with Arizona State.
It was the last college football game Rising would play. He is now, at 26 years old, the offensive coordinator for his high school alma mater. A severe hand injury switched the tracks.
Rising is not the first to face this plight. High-performing athletes who can’t perform anymore fall into a differently shaped world and have to do … something. Reality eventually expects answers. “One of the biggest changes for an athlete is going from being an athlete to not being an athlete and having a purpose while you’re doing it,” says Newbury Park head coach Joe Smigiel. “Because people can get lost and end up doing things that aren’t productive.”
While Rising waits to be served a burger and fries on a disposable plate, Brady Smigiel walks toward the quad. He is the head coach’s son, and once upon a time Cam Rising’s ballboy at Newbury Park. He is also the reigning California Mr. Football, a 6-foot-5 four-star recruit who committed to the University of Michigan in April. He’s wearing a plain white T-shirt and his hat on backward but nevertheless looks the part of a headliner. As Smigiel passes by a coach, he gets a how-are-things and reports all positives. Good week of practice, the Panthers quarterback says. Excited for the game.
Rising didn’t expect to be back here. At least not so soon. But here he surely is, part of this evolved partnership between Newbury Park signal-callers past and present. He works to add layers of polish to Smigiel’s game and to supercharge Smigiel’s football intelligence before an uncompromising life at a Big Ten blueblood. To tap into the compounding effect of a team’s best player being its most positive leader.
But the sport has a way of demanding more. Rising knows this better than most. He’ll have to show Brady Smigiel the way when it happens to him, too.
The team dinner winds down after about an hour, as the coaches and players scatter. There’s not a lot of artificial light around here. Things get dark in a snap.
Utah quarterback Cam Rising leaves the 109th Rose Bowl game against Penn State in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 2, 2023. (Keith Birmingham / MediaNews Group / Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)
Before the college football universe knew who Cam Rising was, he’d already transferred from the University of Texas, redshirted twice and suffered two season-ending injuries — the first as a Newbury Park junior, the second at Utah. Some deliverance followed: Rising accounted for 6,421 total yards and 58 total touchdowns across the 2021 and 2022 college football campaigns, leading the Utes to consecutive Rose Bowl appearances. In the second, he tore three knee ligaments and his meniscus. A grueling 19-month recovery followed. But there he was in the fall of 2024, leading the offense on to the field as the Rice-Eccles Stadium speaker system blared “Bad Moon Rising.”
He was in his mid-20s and on his feet; a mashup of California chill and Hemingway fisherman. Destroyed, but, dude, never defeated. “There’s beauty in the struggle,” was how Rising put it to his father, Nicko, back then.
The complication with tragic heroes is the fall. Rising played three times in 2024. He injured his throwing hand in the second game as he released a throw and then collided with a sideline hydration table. He came back four weeks later and injured his knee on the first drive. A couple days later, Utah ruled him out for the season. A few months later, Rising declared himself out, period, after consulting a pair of orthopedic surgeons who determined there was no way back from the hand issue. It compelled him to medically retire from football.
Cam Rising was slow to get up after this collision with the water coolers on the sideline 😬 pic.twitter.com/drn8EeAdoE
— FOX College Football (@CFBONFOX) September 7, 2024
“I mean, never an ideal situation when you get hurt, especially when you think you got a lot more football in you,” Rising says now. “But sometimes it’s how the cookie crumbles and you gotta just keep pushing, pretty much.”
At these intersections, pity and fear collide. Everyone is sorry about a life’s work dissolving through uncontrollable circumstances. Which is nice. But there’s a lifetime to account for. That’s daunting, and empathy alone doesn’t draw the map.
Coaching is a natural refuge. Not the same, but only a few steps to the side of the derailment. “That’s where people have the most (trouble) adjusting, is when they get out of it, and it just goes from 100 to nothing really quickly,” Clint Trickett says. The Jacksonville State offensive coordinator threw for 5,897 yards across four seasons at Florida State and West Virginia before five concussions in 14 months precipitated the end of his playing career. Because his father, Rick, had been a football coach since 1976, the next thing was self-evident: Clint retired from playing in December 2014 and was the quarterbacks coach at East Mississippi Community College — the school of “Last Chance U” fame on Netflix — in 2015.
Grayson McCall mulled some sort of career in the sport whenever his playing days ended. His 10,000-plus passing yards at Coastal Carolina suggested that day was not imminent. But two significant head injuries — one at Coastal Carolina, the next after a transfer to N.C. State — altered the timeline. “It kind of threw me for a whirlwind there for two months,” McCall says. “My life almost felt like it froze up.” Left to his own devices, he concedes, he might have opted for isolation. An invitation from Wolfpack quarterbacks coach Kurt Roper to sit in on film sessions and game-planning meetings tugged McCall out of a potentially debilitating spiral.
“People can say whatever they want to you, to motivate you to try to get you out of that slump that you’re in,” says McCall, now an offensive analyst at Coastal Carolina. “But for me, no words really did it. It was ultimately living with the truth and knowing that that was ‘it’ for me.”
Still, Cam Rising’s view of the bottom was something else.
A couple Rose Bowls and legitimate Heisman Trophy chances thinned the air with expectation. The injuries, along with Utah’s varying descriptions and handling of them, left even less room to breathe amid growing fan frustration. (“Is Cam Rising a FRAUD?” one Big 12 podcast asked in an episode title.) By the time Rising felt compelled to make a local radio appearance to explain the extent of his leg injury, it only underlined how tight everyone’s collars had gotten. “Cam, I think, was starting to feel that because of how cold it got at Utah because of his injuries — and I don’t mean ‘cold’ by weather,” Joe Smigiel says. When Rising’s hand hit that hydration table, though, all of it was moot. Nothing left but to make something out of bad luck, whatever the something was.
For Rising, his misfortune and some good timing dovetailed to put him here. Newbury Park lost its offensive coordinator to a head coaching job following a Division 2 state championship run in 2024. Smigiel had two names on his list for replacements: Another high school coach he’d eyed for a while, and Cam Rising. The former withdrew from consideration because he couldn’t make the family logistics work. “I got to kind of sit there and think about what I want to do,” Rising says. “Definitely wasn’t interested in going to insurance or anything like that.”
High school coaching was never the plan. It was a quick recruitment to Newbury Park, but a recruitment nonetheless. Joe Smigiel worked his relationship with Nicko Rising to ensure Cam knew the opportunity might present itself. Smigiel also enlisted Lorenzo Booker – Newbury Park alum and assistant coach, formerly of Florida State and three NFL teams – to reach out.
His message was simple. Idle hands are the devil’s playground.
“That’s what really resonated with me,” Rising says. “It kind of hit home. Might as well do something, be productive with the time.”
And the company he keeps. On any weekday evening in the late summer and fall, the Newbury Park Steelers might linger on the sidelines and wait for the high schoolers to finish practice. Then the town’s youth football feeder program gets to work. Sometimes, an older kid might hang around to provide help and motivation and good vibes for the preadolescents. Which is how you draw the line between Brady Smigiel, former Newbury Park Steeler turned Newbury Park Panther turned future University of Michigan quarterback, and Cam Rising. “I still do a drill that he taught me over there,” Smigiel says, nodding toward practice fields adjacent to the stadium.
The presence of a Division I prospect was not determinative in this arrangement. The presence of this Division I prospect might have been. Smigiel grew up watching Cam Rising play. He wears No. 7 because that’s what Rising wore here. He worked with Rising from a time before his voice dropped, absorbing pointers and getting free lessons whenever Rising came home on breaks from Utah. “He’s somebody I want to see succeed,” Rising says. But what was good for Brady Smigiel in 2025 was not altogether evident until he got the 2025 version of Cam Rising, officially deputized as a coach and therefore not strictly a friend.
Smigiel’s right shoulder and elbow ached? Well, Rising told him, that’s because his mechanics were a disaster. As Smigiel turned to create momentum, there wasn’t any separation between his upper and lower body. So he wound up overcompensating. “He’s huge on using your feet and developing your throw from the ground up – using the ground as your teammate, almost,” Smigiel says. The offensive mastery Smigiel thought he had after throwing for 3,521 yards and 49 touchdowns as a junior? Rising trashed Newbury Park’s playbook in favor of his own college-style attack heavy on presnap analysis from the quarterback. “Stuff I’ve never seen before,” Smigiel says. Mr. Football indeed fell so far out of his comfort zone that he’d have his girlfriend quiz him on formations and reads when she came over to the house for dinner.
“I watched a lot of film last year, and there were times I didn’t feel like I was getting a lot out of it because I didn’t really know how to watch it,” Smigiel says. “And to see how (Rising) literally watches every single person and if they give tendencies, everybody’s eyes and how you can manipulate them – it’s like watching art.”
The other stuff, the Tilt-A-Whirl powered on injury and drama that Rising couldn’t jump off for a few years there, they didn’t get into much.
They also didn’t really have to. Rising endured because he has rainbows for blood. He glides more than he walks. His pregame playlists purposefully lowered his blood pressure instead of spiking his adrenaline. His laugh is a staccato chuckle straight out of beachside bonfires, and he dispenses it generously. He is a believer, above all, in removing negativity from the process.
“He was always the most positive guy on the field,” Brady Smigiel says. “And I think it correlates to what he’s been teaching me this year. It’s so much more than just throwing a football.”
Rising has explained to his second- and third-string quarterbacks how a defender following a receiver in motion – or not – signals man-to-man or zone coverage. He has explained to a misaligned Newbury Park receiver that he could find the hash mark by, you know, looking down. This is high school. He does not have dozens of advanced placement football students. It can be painstaking. But nerding out on the game with former Utah offensive coordinator Andy Ludwig turned on the bulb. Dissecting film and scheming up plays went from duty to obsession. Rising uses an old Andy Reid quote to explain it: Some people watch movies. Some people watch football.
“I just enjoy ball,” Rising says. “It’s a fun sport. Especially when you get to execute some good plays and you dial it up for a certain look. And then you finally get the look, and you call it, and it goes the way you want to.”
How long this can last is a point at issue. Bills come due, eventually, in every sense, though reported name, image and likeness earnings nearing $2 million at Utah are a nice buffer. Maybe that’s why it’s perceived to be a matter for a day somewhere out of sight.
“In all honesty,” Rising says, “I just feel like right now the world’s my oyster.” Fair to think so. It’s only been a few months since the trap door opened.
And he landed comfortably. He made a call. It’s going well.
If only real life stopped asking questions there.
Newbury Park quarterback Brady Smigiel, offensive coordinator Cam Rising and receivers coach Whitney Lewis chat during an August 2025 practice. (Joe Curley / The Star / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)
Ten minutes before kickoff on the first Friday in October, the giant inflatable tunnel sags and the giant inflatable panther perched atop it is just about snout-to-turf.
The sun ducks down and sets Conejo Mountain against warm pinks and purples, transforming the ridgeline into an epic silhouette. Lines form at the Snack Shack, with two grills manned by volunteers outside it. And, yes, the flesh-and-bone Panthers get to run through a properly inflated tunnel, accompanied by blasts of smoke and the marching band playing the fight song. By this point, there’s not a seat to be had in the Newbury Park bleachers.
A lot to come home to, for sure. Staying is different. That’s a choice you don’t fall into. But Cam Rising doesn’t have to decide anything after five games as a high school coach. Right now, he only has to figure out how to score on the Santa Barbara Dons.
He and the job suit each other. Rising is steady and intentional on the sideline. He barely flinches when Newbury Park scores on its first drive. Nor is he flustered when the offense stalls. After each possession, it’s a two-man brain trust on the bench: Rising and his quarterback, shoulder-to-shoulder, reviewing video on an iPad. Talking through problems and solutions. Trying to figure everything out.
There are 21 seconds left in the second quarter when Brady Smigiel rolls to his left, sees no available receivers and decides to run for a touchdown himself. He hurdles a defender. He lands in the end zone.
He does not get up. There’s suddenly no sound in the valley. Trainers and coaches, Rising included, surround the team’s star quarterback. Smigiel’s face is red when he insists on being helped up so he can limp to the bench. It’s his left knee. After Smigiel sits down for further inspection, his father asks if it hurts. Brady nods.
Everyone spends halftime with bowling balls in their stomachs. With a minute left before play resumes, Newbury Park’s offensive coordinator stands alone with a player wearing a No. 31 jersey. Tyler Mayer is the 5-foot-11, 175-pound backup quarterback to the reigning California Mr. Football. Along the way these past few months, Rising has told him what every coach tells every QB2: Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready.
Ready or not arrives at 8:39 p.m.
After bracing up his knee and attempting to continue, Brady Smigiel plants to throw midway through the third quarter. He collapses. Another convoy helps him to the sideline. He is on his back, in pain and in tears, when Rising visits following a successful field goal attempt. The offensive coordinator calling his sixth-ever game taps the future Big Ten quarterback on the chest twice.
And then Rising walks away, grabs the iPad and motions for Mayer to join him. They need to talk.
“My heart was broken in that moment, for sure,” Rising says. “But sh– happens. You gotta keep pushing.”
On this night, everyone finds a branch in the mudslide. Newbury Park wins 31-21. When Rising deploys promising sophomore receiver Darrien Johnson as a wildcat quarterback in the fourth quarter, it is a pivot that turns into a masterstroke: Johnson’s 47-yard touchdown burst is the gut-punch that doubles over Santa Barbara for good. This gets Newbury Park’s offensive coordinator excited. “That’s what I’m talking about!” Rising screams at Johnson on the sideline, delivering a stiff bro-hug with a smile.
With the postgame handshakes delivered and the field gradually clearing, Rising and Brady Smigiel meet near the 45-yard line and embrace. It’s been less than an hour since Smigiel left the last high school game he’ll ever play; a scan the following day will reveal he tore his left ACL. It likely will be years before he throws another pass that counts, given both the recovery timeline and the presence of five-star freshman Bryce Underwood as Michigan’s starting quarterback.
That’s not as dire as never again. No one can confirm this quicker than Cam Rising.
“It’s just something you hate to see,” Rising says. “It’s an unfortunate part of sports. … Tough situation. But we’re here for the challenge.”
Maybe this will be too intoxicating to leave behind. Maybe this is all way more than he cares to bargain for. In the end, Cam Rising has had a few months to consider a life he didn’t expect to live. He’s only had a few minutes to consider what his job looks like without the primary draw to do it in the first place. And as he walks off the field while Brady Smigiel is consoled by his parents, there are four more games, minimum, on the Newbury Park schedule.
Back to the drawing board. Nothing stops. Time to figure things out.