Jack Jullian will make his first varsity football start tonight when Hixson travels to Marion County.
The junior also will be playing in his first football game since the first game of his seventh-grade season.
"I remember my mom [Tricia] telling me she wasn't really happy that I was playing football and that I'd probably break my arm or something. I did," said Jullian, who has made his mark as a catcher for the Wildcats' baseball team.
He displayed his football skills at numerous punt, pass and kick competitions and quite often won or finished high. But more than trophies from those competitions, academics - specifically geometry - actually led to Jullian's reconnection with football.
His teacher was Gary Murray, now the Wildcats' head coach but at the time an assistant to Dan Duff.
"If it wasn't for Coach Murray's geometry class last year, I probably wouldn't be doing football," the 6-foot-3, 205-pound quarterback said.
Said Murray: "I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was a baseball player but then added that he'd played quarterback as a youngster. I asked if he'd come out and let me see him throw. Other kids told me, 'Oh, he can throw all right.' He came down and he was throwing ropes."
Though the Wildcats were halfway through the 2016 season, Murray encouraged him to join the team, "but to show you the kind of kid he is, he told me he didn't want to come in and make anybody mad at him for coming out late in the year," the coach recalled.
Yet here Jullian is, four years after breaking his arm, back as a quarterback.
"That broken arm way back kind of ended the football," he remembered. "I was going to play my freshman year but then decided to concentrate on baseball."
He talked with his dad, Ken, and the former quarterback for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga said he'd support his decision. Tricia might've fretted, perhaps even frowned, but relented.
"Knowing how my mom felt maybe held me out, but now she's OK with it - kind of," Jullian said. "She went to the Tyner scrimmage and was at the jamboree last week."
Said Murray: "I remember Jack coming by last spring. I was mowing the football field, and when he asked if he could pick up his equipment, I raced him back to the locker room."
When he began meeting in June with new offensive coordinator Josh Owensby, Jullian had the football IQ of a, well, seventh-grader.
"I started talking about cover-2 and cover-3, and he stopped me and said, 'I don't know what you mean,'" Owensby said. "But he's learned in three months what most kids have two or three years to learn. He's raw because he hasn't played, but he has a ton of potential - good arm; a smart kid who's figuring it out quickly; and his size is as good for a quarterback as I've been around.
"The sky's the limit, and once he understands a little more, the better he'll get."
In the jamboree last weekend, he went 5-for-8 for 92 yards and a touchdown.
"I had the receivers and running backs helping me out, and the guys have been great about staying an hour or so after practice so I can throw," Jullian said. "I like being with the team. I like the guys."
Said Murray: "The guys wanted him to come out last year. It's going to take him a little while to catch up, but he'll get there pretty quick because of the way he works and the fact that he's so intelligent."
Contact Ward Gossett at wgossett@timesfreepress.com or 423-886-4765. Follow him on Twitter @wardgossett.