GAINESVILLE, Fla. – As he lay on the lush turf last Saturday afternoon, fearing the worst, Kyle Trask wondered: Why now? The Florida quarterback’s knee had twisted. He’d heard a pop. His mind immediately went to what it might mean.

“Scary,” Trask calls it now, long after the diagnosis came back – a sprain – and after he’d come back into the game to help lead the Gators to a win against Auburn, which is the program’s most significant in years.

“I’m so grateful the way it turned out,” he says.

He’s referring to the injury, but the extrapolation fits, too. This weekend, Trask will lead the Gators in an even bigger opportunity, this one on the road against No. 6 LSU. A fourth-year junior, Trask will make his fourth start – since he was in ninth grade.

“Pretty surreal,” Trask says.

But it’s oh, so real. Which only makes the running joke among his former coaches at Manvel High School near Houston even funnier. They’ve long envisioned a “30 for 30”-style documentary about the guy who played at Florida and then in the NFL and, well, as Larry McRae puts it, laughing:

“We’re gonna be the bums that, ‘Why didn’t he start for his high school?’”

But there was good reason. Manvel had two superb quarterbacks in the same class. D’Eriq King, a dual-threat dynamo who’s now at Houston, was a better fit for the Mavericks’ offensive system.

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As King put up big numbers for Manvel, Trask played plenty. The game plan each week had Trask entering the game for the third series.

“We knew he was a special talented kid, as well,” says McRae, who was Manvel’s offensive coordinator and offensive line coach and is now head coach at Clear Lake High. “Throwing, arm strength and stuff like that, Kyle wasn’t lacking in (talent) at all.”

He also didn’t lack for other opportunities. To understand how Trask arrived as Florida’s unlikely starter, it’s instructive to know why he stayed at Manvel. Coaches at other high schools saw the big kid with the strong arm. In various ways, they made sure he knew he could start for their team. He says he considered the idea once or twice, but never seriously.

McRae says word would inevitably come back through the coaching grapevine: Trask had politely declined an opportunity, saying something like, “I’m born and raised in Manvel, Texas, and I’m a Manvel Maverick.”

Melissa Charba, Trask’s mother, recalls only one brief conversation with her son about the possibility of transferring.

“We just chatted about it,” she says. “We’re not moving for football. Plus, he’s not gonna run from competition just so he can play.”

Says Trask: “My mom really valued loyalty: ‘This is where you live. This is where you’re gonna stay and grind it out.’”

That held true even after high school. Even as quarterbacks transfer with increasing regularity in college football, Trask stayed at Florida. Last summer, with an August graduation date looming for Trask, meaning he’d have the opportunity to transfer with immediate eligibility, Gators coach Dan Mullen met with Trask, curious what he might be thinking.

“He said he’d support me whatever I did,” Trask recalls. “I told him, ‘I have no doubts, no thoughts of leaving. I’m all-in.’”

None of which surprised those who know Trask.

“I knew he wasn’t one of those guys who was gonna run off to the (transfer) portal,” McRae says. “Kids go to the portal for different reasons, but I knew Kyle wasn’t gonna run to the portal because of competition.”

Not leaving is one thing. But how he even got to Florida is the oddest part of all of this.

Trask’s big frame and strong arm drew attention from the college coaches who regularly watched Manvel’s practices. Several FCS-level schools offered scholarships. But plenty of those college assistants wondered aloud to Manvel’s coaches: “How do I tell my head coach we’re gonna offer a scholarship to a kid that’s a backup?”

“We told ‘em, ‘Special circumstances call for special decisions,’” McRae says. “‘Trust your eyes. What do you see out of him?’”

Doug Nussmeier, then Florida’s offensive coordinator, saw enough to invite Trask to attend camp in Gainesville the summer before his senior year, and then to a second camp for top recruits. Trask performed well, and got invited to then-coach Jim McElwain’s office when the camp was finished. They weren’t expecting what they got: a scholarship offer.

“We were blown away,” Charba says. “Just a moment of shock.”

Once at Florida, a broken right foot derailed his shot in 2017. Last season, it was a broken left foot. And then, after Trask’s conversation with Mullen last summer, Feleipe Franks won the competition to start this season. And at least outside the program, there wasn’t real clarity about which quarterback was No. 2. Emory Jones, a redshirt freshman with tremendous potential, is seen by many as the Gators’ future.

“He didn’t blink an eye,” Mullen says. “He stuck and (said), ‘Coach, this is what I told you I’m doing, this is what I’m doing.’ Now he’s getting his opportunity.”

The situation wasn’t new to Trask.

“I never settled for being the backup,” he says, referring to both high school and college football. “It’s something that pushed me every single day. There was always someone competing with me, every day, so I never backed down from the challenge.”

When Franks suffered a gruesome ankle injury at Kentucky, in the Gators’ third game, Trask was ready. Since taking over, his completion rate is 71.7 percent. He set a school record with 18 consecutive completions in games against Tennessee and Towson. Perhaps most important, he has provided a steady presence, helping Florida rise to 6-0 and into position for more.

“So many people have seen his potential,” says Charba, “and he’s been ready. We knew he had it in him. He’s very determined. This isn’t the way you want to become a starter – our hearts just stopped when we saw Feleipe get hurt – but (Trask) just continues to steadily work and improve himself. He has such inner drive, continuing to persist and perfect his game.”

Mullen says he’s learned Trask is the same competitor he’d seen in practices.

“You don’t always know how that’s gonna translate when now they can hit you,” Mullen says. “The speed of it picks up. I’ve seen him really continue to do what we expected him to do and what we knew he could do.”

It’s what those who knew Trask always figured he would do, if opportunity arose. That includes a new role as a team spokesman. Trask handles interviews like a veteran, understated and unemotional, and sees one of his tasks as trying to tamp down the “outside noise.”

“That just comes with the success we’re having,” he says. “In order to keep that success going, we have to stay focused on one goal at a time.”

Still, Trask describes his role in the Gators’ run as “really cool,” and says playing to a packed house at Florida Field – aka, the Swamp – is “pretty sweet.”

“This is what we dream about doing when we’re kids,” he says, “playing in big-time games like this.”