Meet the Tim Tebow of kicking.
A modest preacher's son who lifts weights with linebackers, UF's Caleb Sturgis is cut from the same cloth as the quarterback, albeit with a different skill set. Instead of tossing touchdown passes, he booms 60-yard field goals.
Raised as a Gators fan and home-schooled until he enrolled at St. Augustine High, the biggest rival to Tebow's Nease High, Sturgis has the quiet confidence and manic work ethic to match the Heisman Trophy winner.
"He's like Tebow-light, I guess," said Dan Mowrey, Sturgis' kicking coach at SAHS. "As good as Timmy is, nobody outworks the guy. Caleb is from the same mold. He's going to try harder than everybody else. He wants to be the best there is, not for notoriety or anything else, just that internal drive that he has."
Sturgis enrolled at UF in January, and along with his mythical right leg, he is poised to take over the Gators' kicking game.
'He's got a bomb'
It's hard to pin down an exact number, but one thing is for sure - Sturgis can kick the ball a long way.
He says his longest field goal since arriving in Gainesville is 57 yards, but Mowrey, who kicked at Florida State, claims Sturgis hit one from 71 yards off of a 1-inch block in high school.
Another story is that Sturgis placed the ball at midfield during a St. Augustine High spring game, nailed a 60-yarder, then turned around and did the same thing in the other direction.
"This sounds ridiculous, but he made it pretty easy," Mowrey said.
UF coach Urban Meyer was skeptical of the stories at first but has come around after a few weeks of spring practice.
"Oh my gosh, does he have a hose," Meyer said. "He's got a bomb. It sounds the way it's supposed to when it hits his foot."
That leg power - ranked best in the country for high schoolers by Rivals.com - should come in pretty handy for Meyer, whose kickers have attempted just one field goal from 50 or more yards in the last two seasons, with the longest make being a 43-yarder.
Chris Hetland and Joey Ijjas, who handled the placekicking during that time, tallied nine misses on field goals from 39 yards or closer.
"It hurt a little bit, but I also felt their pain," Sturgis said. "Hetland's balls would miss by a foot. It also gave me that incentive to go in there and change things around."
At first glance, Sturgis' high school numbers aren't that impressive, either: 13 for 25 his senior year and 8 of 16 as a junior. But most of those misses were from 50 yards or longer.
Sturgis had his worst statistical game against Matanzas High last season, going 0 for 3.
"That sounds bad for field goals, but his misses were from 62, 60 and 65," Mowrey said. "They were all long enough, which is scary. By pure numbers it doesn't look good, but when you see the distances - he's a freak."
Mowrey and Sturgis made a deal that he wasn't allowed to miss any kicks inside of 40 yards. He faltered once, on a 38-yarder that spills out of Mowrey like a rare, bad memory.
"It was a bad hold, but it doesn't matter," Mowrey said. "The ball could be flat on the ground, but you can make it if you're as strong as he is. That's the whole mentality."
The Big Easy
Much of Sturgis' success comes from his fluid form. Mowrey compares his pupil's kicking motion to PGA golfer Ernie Els' swing, but it wasn't always so effortless.
The first time he came to a football practice, before the 2005 season, St. Augustine's kicker had just quit and the Yellow Jackets were desperate for a replacement. Mowrey had just promised his wife that he would stop coaching to focus on his daughters and law firm, but then Sturgis showed up.
"He took four or five funny little steps and kicked the ball off the ground from 40 yards, and it went really high and far," Mowrey said. "I remember specifically going home that day and saying, 'Babe, I'm locked in for three more years.'"
It didn't take long for Sturgis to earn a varsity locker or a starting role, but he still wasn't focused on the sport.
Sturgis started as a soccer player, following the legacy of older siblings Lydia, Luke and Nathan, all of whom advanced to the college level in the sport. Nathan is on the U.S. under-23 team that qualified for the 2008 Summer Olympics, and he also plays for Real Salt Lake of the MLS.
Sturgis tried out for the football team "just to get a ring," as he says.
He missed practices throughout the season for soccer, even skipping a football game, but in the end, he got his state championship ring as the Yellow Jackets beat Sarasota Booker High in the 3-A finals. In that game, Sturgis hit a 49-yard field goal and knocked the ensuing kickoff through the uprights.
"That's when I decided to start working on football," he said. "I didn't take it seriously until my junior year."
Soon, the 5-foot-10, 182-pounder was climbing over locked fences to kick on the school field and outworking bigger players in the weight room.
The change translated to the field, too, where Sturgis routinely pinned opposing teams at or inside the 20-yard line on kickoffs and punts. Head coach Joey Wiles estimated that his team won the field position battle 95 percent of the time with Sturgis kicking.
On the first kickoff of his senior year, Sturgis booted the ball over the end zone and onto the second lane of the track surrounding the field, and it's those moments that drive Wiles to compare Sturgis to current NFL kicker Sebastian Janikowski.
"If he continues to do the things that got him there, and I don't know why he wouldn't, I can't see how he wouldn't be kicking in the NFL one day," Wiles said. "He can be as good as there has ever been."
Before he can start thinking about the professional level, Sturgis has to earn the starting job at UF. He's still locked in competition with Jonathan Phillips for the spot, but it's a safe bet that Sturgis will at least make an impact in the field position game this season along with high school teammate and kick returner Brandon James.
"If he can knock the ball out of the end zone on kickoffs, that's worth two scholarships," Meyer said.
Sturgis said he feels like he's one kick away from starting, but Mowrey puts it in different terms.
"Let me think of how to say this without being pompous," he said. "I would put up most all of my savings to bet that he will be starting the first game."
