QB Magazine Athlete Feature

Somebody said it out loud before it was true.

“Coach Tony Holmes had the biggest impact on my football career. He was my first football coach and the first person who believed I could be a quarterback,” Sammy LoBue III said. “Even though I didn’t look like a quarterback and didn’t have any experience, he still put me at that position.”

Then Holmes turned to Sammy’s dad and said the sentence that started everything.

“He’s a quarterback — just keep working with him.”

Four years later, the Class of 2032 prospect out of Hollister Prep in Hollister, California is still working on it, and still circling back to what that moment meant. “He believed in me before I believed in myself.”

The game found him at home first. Sammy got into football watching San Francisco 49ers games with his dad and throwing the ball around the living room during commercial breaks — the kind of origin story that sounds small until you notice how many quarterbacks have some version of it. That’s what made him want to play. What made him stay is simpler.

“It’s fun. I get to lead the team and make plays. It feels good when we work together and score.”

His first real payoff came at eight years old, and he can still recite the situation. Fourth down. Twenty-six seconds on the clock. He threw a 20-yard touchdown to take the lead and win the game — his first touchdown pass, delivered under about as much pressure as a third-grader can be handed.

Since then he’s built one of the deeper training résumés you’ll find on a middle schooler. Multiple First Down Training camps with Grant Caraway in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. The You Are Athlete exposure camp in LA. Multiple Get Better or Get Beat camps with Maurice Mann III around Monterey and Salinas. Jeff Garcia’s youth camps in Gilroy. The Bulldog’s Back Home camp at Folsom High School. Four quarterback coaches shape his week — Paul Doherty at Norcal Passing Academy, Miles Kendrick, Tommy McMahon at G4G Skills Academy, and Jaxen Robinson.

Ask what makes a great quarterback and the answer sounds like someone who has been in a lot of gyms.

“Leadership, confidence, and hard work. You have to stay calm, make smart decisions, and always put the team first. You also have to practice every day and never stop working.”

The quarterback he watches is a small act of rebellion in a 49ers household. His favorite is Matt Stafford — “even though he’s on the Rams,” he notes — and the reason has nothing to do with the uniform. “He stays calm and makes big plays in the big moments.”

Calm is a recurring word with Sammy, and there’s a reason for it. Asked to name the biggest challenge he faces, he doesn’t reach for a defense or a depth chart. He names something harder and more honest.

“The biggest challenge I face is believing in myself. Sometimes I get nervous. I overcome it by practicing, listening to my coaches, and staying calm.”

Not many young athletes will say that on the record. Fewer still have a working answer for it. Sammy’s answer is preparation — the belief that if you’ve done it enough times in an empty gym, your hands will know what to do when the gym is full.

The goals follow from that. Over the next six months he wants to get better at reading defenses and making faster, smarter throws. Over the next year: get stronger, sharpen his accuracy, improve his mobility, and become a leader his team can count on.

And underneath all of it, a destination he’s already named.

“My dream is to play football at BYU like my Papa Sam.”

Three generations of the name, and a school to aim at. Coach Holmes called it years ago, before there was any evidence at all. The evidence is starting to pile up now.

Follow Sammy: @qb_one_two on Instagram

Why a Membership Matters

Sammy’s family has been building this for years, and most of it is invisible.

Count what’s already been spent. First Down Training in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. A You Are Athlete exposure camp in LA. Get Better or Get Beat camps around Monterey and Salinas. Jeff Garcia’s camps in Gilroy. Folsom High School. Four quarterback coaches working with him on a regular basis. That’s years of weekends, gas money, hotel nights, and camp fees — a genuine family investment in a kid Coach Tony Holmes said was a quarterback before anyone had proof.

And right now, someone searching for Class of 2032 quarterbacks in Northern California would find none of it.

That’s what this fall changes, or doesn’t. The season starting in a few weeks is Sammy’s next block of real football — the games where his stated goal of becoming a leader his team can count on either happens on tape or happens where nobody records it. Every throw, every win, every moment like that fourth-down touchdown he still talks about becomes part of a record, or becomes a story his family tells each other and nobody else.

A quarterback whose profile goes live in August has a season that builds in public, week by week. A quarterback who sets one up next spring is handing over a finished season to people who had no reason to watch it happen.

The floor costs nothing, and it should be done before his first game. A free QB Magazine profile gives him a recruiting page, performance and academic stats, film links, and photos — one permanent place where the camps, the coaches, and this fall all live together instead of scattered across a camera roll.

What a membership adds is the part a profile can’t do alone: it makes people look. A monthly custom graphic turns a name buried in a list of California quarterbacks into something a thumb actually slows down for. Feature articles give the name a story instead of a stat line — one a year on Practice Squad, two on Starter, one every quarter on All-Pro. And weekly Instagram and X reposts carry all of it into a room his own account will never reach. Sammy’s followers are family, teammates, and people from Hollister; they were already in the stands. The magazine’s audience is camp directors, trainers, and evaluators who follow it specifically because that’s where they go looking for quarterbacks.

California is the hardest place in the country to be a quarterback nobody has heard of. The evaluators are there, but so are hundreds of other arms with camp résumés just as long as his. Being trained is the entry fee in Northern California. Being findable is the separator.

The Starter tier is built for a family already doing what this one is doing. It includes consideration for the Top 50 QB Mag Watchlist and priority for the College Bus + Camps TOUR — the trip that puts athletes on college campuses, in front of college staffs, throwing. It also cuts camp costs in half, and All-Pro covers them entirely. Sammy is going to five camp programs already. Those checks are being written no matter what.

Then there’s the runway, which is his single largest advantage. He’s Class of 2032 — six years before anyone signs anything. Nobody gets found through one post. It happens when a name keeps surfacing, month after month, season after season, until “some 2032 out of Hollister” becomes that kid from Hollister Prep, said by people who have never met him. Six years of that compounding is a different thing entirely from a junior trying to make noise in eighteen months.

And one last piece, which has nothing to do with recruiting at all.

Sammy wanted Coach Tony Holmes in this article — the man who looked at a kid with no experience and said he’s a quarterback, just keep working with him. He wanted his dad and the 49ers games in it. He wanted Papa Sam and BYU in it. Every article and every graphic becomes a permanent piece of that record, not a clip that disappears down a feed by Friday. Proof of what a kid was building, and who he thanked while he was building it.

He said the hardest thing he deals with is believing in himself.

Coach Holmes solved that once, with one sentence, in front of his dad. This is how the rest of the world gets to hear it.

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