Thursday, April 29, 2004 | 9:09 a.m.
PANACA -- A dirt-ringed cowboy hat and a kind smile introduce Gino Chouquer, whose easy drawl offers an embrace into a forgotten part of Nevada.
Chouquer, 72, holds court with friends outside the post office across the street from Lincoln County High School on a dreary Thursday morning. Of course, every mother and grandfather who picks up the mail seems to be best of friends with the retired Nevada Test Site worker.
"People are only a stranger for about five minutes around here," Chouquer said.
When he arrived in neighboring Pioche as a middle schooler, Kyle Seevers was one of those semi-strangers. Six years later, everyone in town knew about their hometown hero quarterback, but even Seevers could not understand why his coach would send a highlight tape to a college football powerhouse like Nebraska.
What Lincoln County coach Rich Ottley saw is the raw potential of a mobile 6-foot-6 competitor who can throw a baseball 88 mph. Nebraska coaches saw the same skills and took just weeks to send Seevers a scholarship offer to play for the Cornhuskers in 2005, immediately vaulting him from a stranger to a king in football recruiting circles.
The Nebraska staff had never met Seevers -- still a junior -- or seen him play a down in person when they gave him an opportunity not seen in this former mining boomtown for decades.
"Coaches actually really thought I could be a quarterback at the D-I level," Seevers said. "I didn't really see it in me. I mean, I thought I was good, but I didn't think I was that good."
He is good enough that Nebraska made the offer knowing that Seevers had surgery on his throwing shoulder in early March. He hurt the shoulder during the 2A state basketball tournament and the surgery cost him a season of baseball -- the sport Seevers used to think was his future even after he started playing quarterback in seventh grade.
"When I got hurt, I was mainly thinking (about) baseball," Seevers said. "Am I going to be able to throw?"
Going to rehabilitation three times a week could have Seevers throwing again in June -- and there is little doubt that it will be a football in his hands.
We want you
Nebraska's surprise offer illustrates the unusual nature of Seevers' recruitment that is defying convention in both speed and logic. The combination of Seevers' untapped talent and untapped location dictated Nebraska's speed and set the tone for schools like Brigham Young to follow suit with offers to the well-kept secret tucked away in a town of about 700 people.
"They consider him a diamond in the rough," Ottley said of Nebraska's coaches. "They see the potential that's there and they can see he will pass up some kids who are top-ranked right now."
Ottley helped Seevers put together a highlight tape after the Lynx finished their most successful year in school history. Led by Seevers and running back Bobby Ho, Lincoln County went undefeated and rolled to a 43-0 victory against Battle Mountain in the 2A title game. Seevers threw for 1,222 yards in eight games, rarely playing beyond the first half as the Lynx built big leads and ran the ball after halftime.
The highlight tape shows how Seevers can make any coach salivate. He makes all the throws, firing long aerials and feathering touch passes. He stands in the pocket under a rush and slings darts while throwing off his back foot. Seevers also displays great speed and instincts, even outrunning his tailback to throw blocks 20 yards downfield in the option.
In his 13th year at Lincoln County, a school 175 miles northeast of Las Vegas, Ottley recognized an uncommon opportunity and sent Seevers' tape far and wide. Boise State was the first to show interest, but Ottley felt bigger chances awaited.
"I felt like he had big-time D-I potential, so I picked out big-time D-I schools," Ottley said.
Ottley sent film to Lincoln, Neb., on a Tuesday in early March. By Thursday, Nebraska assistant coach Dennis Wagner was on the phone -- only midway through watching the tape -- wanting to know where Seevers had been hiding. Phone calls and letters followed in the ensuing weeks, culminating with the March 29 letter from Huskers head coach Bill Callahan that offered a scholarship.
Callahan, the former Oakland Raiders coach, needed just about 10 minutes of film see a winner in Seevers.
"At his height and with his arm strength, it's really a no-brainer," Ottley said. "They know what they're looking for and instantly saw it on the tape."
Red and white
Two weeks ago, Seevers traveled to Lincoln for the Huskers' spring intrasquad scrimmage. More than 61,000 people showed up for the game. A Nebraska jersey with the number 7 and the name "Seevers" on the back awaited him in the locker room. A 10-year-old boy even approached Seevers for an autograph and when Seevers asked if he knew who he was, the kid replied that he was the quarterback from Nevada.
Small-town life suddenly got very big for a teenager whose most exciting weekend nights usually consist of movies and fast food with his friends some 80 miles east of Pioche in St. George, Utah.
"It's different," Seevers said. "I thought I'd go to Reno or something, but I never thought I'd have a chance to go to Nebraska and play for a bowl team, a national championship team. Coach Callahan and the coaching staff they have ... it's fun to think about it."
For a young man stuck in sewing class and staring out at a county with no street lights and repeating faces, dreaming of Saturdays in the Big XII Conference is easy. And sometimes, it's even a little scary.
"Sometimes, I start thinking about it too much and I start getting butterflies and sort of depressed with school almost done," Seevers said. "But then I realize, I mean, I have the rest of my senior year to go out and blow people away in football. Then I'll start worrying about going and playing for Nebraska."
Seevers' excitement spreads through the town, where friends peek through doors to spy on interviews and parents stop him to ask about the latest. About 35 to 40 percent of an average graduating class at Lincoln County goes on to either college or trade school, according to school counselor Daniel Hunt.
But never have letters from the nation's best college athletics programs rolled in on a daily basis.
"I can't remember anything like this in the time I've been here," said Dr. Craig Babcock, the principal of Lincoln County who has been at the school for 24 years.
Although more schools are entering his recruiting, Seevers is "85 percent" sure he will choose Nebraska, though he would still like to hear from Oregon. Seevers cannot sign a letter of intent for a few months and when he commits, Seevers will become just the second major Division I signee that most can remember in Lincoln County.
First and last
Many around the area consider Jim Rice, a 1956 graduate, to be the best athlete to come out of Lincoln County.
Now 65 and teaching at the Caliente Youth Center, Rice has seen many years of athletics in Lincoln County. And he ranks no one, not even himself, ahead of Seevers.
"He's the first one I've seen around our area that could go into the pros," Rice said.
Rice continued: "Kyle can throw that football. And he's fast and tall and thin, but he's strong. I saw him make a couple of throws when he was a freshman -- they don't make throws like that."
Yet Seevers' fire is what most impresses Rice.
"He throws meaningful blocks," Rice said.
An All-State player in both football and basketball, Rice signed with BYU to continue his basketball career. Rice eventually returned to the area and has followed the school's sports teams for years, as do most residents.
The Seevers family first came to Pioche in 1989 when Kyle's father, Jeff, was a young trooper in the Nevada Highway Patrol. They left in 1991 and lived in Reno for a few years, but missed the benefits of a small community. He moved his three children back to Pioche when Kyle was in the sixth grade.
"It's nice to be able to let the kids walk down the street," Jeff Seevers said.
It wasn't always that way. Pioche used to be the deadliest mining camp in the old West, a place where more than 70 people died in gunfights before a natural death occurred. The mines closed in the late 1950s, driving many from this predominantly Mormon three-town area of Panaca, Pioche and Caliente.
Some then worked at the Test Site, but the region mainly exists today as a ranching and farming community that is drawing attention as a pass-through point for nuclear waste transport to a potential Yucca Mountain repository.
The main event
The tight-knit atmosphere that attracted Jeff Seevers still remains, though. Lynx sporting events, especially football and girls' basketball, are big draws, and not just for parents.
"Some people have kids and grandkids that play and the rest of us just like going to the games," said Janice Adams, a bartender at the Overland Hotel in Pioche and an area native who raised five children here.
Panaca resident Tony Farrell, a retiree from Las Vegas, can hear football crowds cheering "clear up at my house when they play football." And they yell for the young man whom Adams said "doesn't seem like he should be old enough for (college) yet."
"He came from somewheres else, but he's one of our boys," Chouquer said.
For Seevers, reality in Lincoln County exists somewhere between utopia and gunfights.
"From here, I think sometimes you're kind of cut off from what real life is kind of like," Seevers said. "A lot of people don't know what it's like to live in Vegas, to have the stuff going on, to have the pressures and the worries that they do. I think a lot of kids have a disadvantage in some ways to the big-city kids."
That mature perspective helps Seevers keep the swirling recruiting hype in check. For all the thrill of Nebraska's interest, he understands that the Huskers are extending offers to a number of quarterbacks this year.
"If I go there, the worst thing that can happen is I get a diploma and I don't start a minute," Seevers said. "That's really not even that bad."
Not bad at all, especially in a place where it has never really happened before he came along.
"Not too many kids get this experience in life, not many at all," Seevers said.
archive
