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Oregon cornerback Troy Hill (13) heads to the locker room before playing the Virginia Cavaliers at Scott Stadium in Charlottesville, Va. Hill left Youngstown, Ohio, at 15 to move to California with an uncle, a move that installed structure into his life that he says brought him to where he is now with No. 2 Oregon.

(Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian)

EUGENE — As last Friday evening slipped into Saturday morning, and as a family caravan that began in Ohio went off its GPS course somewhere under the unfamiliar, pitch-black skies of Appalachia, Sandra Jennings got scared.

“We got lost,” she said, as a smile formed and her head shook. “Big time.”

Not arriving in Charlottesville, Va., was never an option, however, for the mother of Troy Hill. If a six-hour drive had to double in order for her to watch her son play for Oregon against Virginia, then so be it. After sending — forcing, really — a 15-year-old son 2,000 miles west from Youngstown “because I didn’t want him to be six feet under or locked up,” there is little precedent for turning around and cutting a journey short.

Jennings saw her son play in the 2012 Rose Bowl, but dislikes flying. An East Coast game, then, was a dream come true.

“I couldn’t miss this one,” she said.

Hill, a 5-foot-11, 170-pound redshirt junior who is the Ducks’ primary backup cornerback, is the latest family member whose journey has flowed outward, one-way by design, from Youngstown. An uncle, Jim Gilmer, brought Hill to Ventura County, Calif., by his sister’s request and his own conscience in 2006 to provide structure to the high school freshman.

“He has a pretty amazing success story,” said Gilmer, his eyes locked on his nephew’s warm-up. “We wish we could have brought 100 of the family.”

As it was, 13 members of Hill’s family sat in the afternoon sun, slightly bleary, five rows up from an end zone Saturday at Scott Stadium to watch the boy they used to call “Fast Track” suit up for the nation’s No. 2-ranked team. But the occasion was also a celebration marking the easily overlooked intersection of journeys -- Troy’s to Oregon, the family’s to Virginia -- that began as struggles and came to fruition only after taking a hard look at how lost they were.

And now, he is bringing it full-circle to provide those same chances for others.

“I did everything I could not to go,” Hill said. “My mom was telling me, you’re going, you’re going, you’re going and I was like, ‘I can’t do it.’

“I don’t regret it.”

YOUNGSTOWN

Gilmer found his escape from northeast Ohio’s Rust Belt in the form of the Navy. He traveled, discovered a calling in ministry, and settled in southern California. He had children, became involved at St. Bonaventure High and mentored athletes at Oxnard College, and then sat on its foundation’s board of directors, among other community posts.

Jim Gilmer, an uncle of Oregon redshirt junior cornerback Troy Hill, cheers during Saturday's game against Virginia. Gilmer shares legal guardianship of Hill after moving Hill, then a high school freshman, to live with him in California in 2006.

When he visited family in Youngstown, though, he found little had changed. The Brookings Institute in 2011 reported it had the highest percentage of its citizens living in poverty among the nation’s 100 largest cities. In June, data from the 2010 U.S. Census showed it was the only city in the U.S. to lose more than two percent of its population in two years.

Hill’s older brother, Taylor earned a ticket out via a football scholarship at Michigan. Gilmer wasn’t so sure Troy would make it far enough through high school to get a similar chance.

“I was concerned about him,” he said. “He was slipping through the cracks.”

He was stuck, and by his own choice. Gilmer and another uncle had paid for a flight to bring Hill to California in September 2005, but he bailed, which beguiled the family. In the time between his eventual move in January 2006, he’s skipped so many classes to hang out with friends that he had almost no credits to show for the semester, he says.

“I didn’t feel like I had anyone who could really control me because me and my dad we weren’t really getting along and my mom was always at work,” said Hill, whose mother and father have never been married. Jennings said Hill’s father is working to be part of Hill’s life again, but a leadership void remained, and was filled by whatever Hill chose.

“In the community alone you could see fighting and shooting,” Hill said. “That was a part of what I was going to end up becoming.”

It wasn’t a hypothetical situation.

As Hill practiced last December for the Fiesta Bowl, three men he describes as best childhood friends were sentenced in their roles in a Feb. 6, 2011, shooting at a house party near Youngstown State University that killed one man and wounded 11 others. Columbus Jones is now serving a 90-year sentence for the shooting. Demetrius Wright was given probation for tampering with evidence and possession of a concealed weapon. Mark Jones earned 10 years for involuntary manslaughter.

“He would have been right there with them,” said Jennings.

“Who knows what the situation would be like over the years,” Hill said of where he would have been that night, “but I feel like nine times out of 10, yeah.”

VENTURA

Oregon coaches John Neal and Scott Frost walked into the office of St. Bonaventure coach Todd Therrien senior year and wasted little time assessing Hill.

“They started testing him on formation recognition and playing and understanding the game,” Therrien said. “Neal’s words were, that was the best a kid has ever done in that situation — better than some players Oregon had that year.”

It wasn’t a surprise for those who witnessed Hill’s four-year transition from option quarterback to shutdown corner, from rudderless kid to a driven star who could take half the field away on defense. For two years he left practice early to take night classes to earn back credits he’d lost at Chaney High in Youngstown.

“He had the natural talent but his work ethic was ridiculous,” said A.J. Ahearn, a fellow all-league standout at Bonaventure.

Therrien loved the way his corner responded to stress. And at a program like St. Bonaventure, which was in the middle of a run of eight section titles in a decade, the pressure was considerable. At one no-pads spring passing tournament when he was an underclassman, Hill blew his assignment and Therrien drilled criticism into him. On the next play, he locked onto a 6-foot-5 tight end in the flat, “goes through him, upends him and puts the kid on his head,” Therrien said.

The change in scenery was not a magic fix. Hill and Gilmer say he was deeply unhappy for weeks. High school secondary coach Andy Gibson described that version of Hill as a “loose cannon” who sought confrontation on the field. But soon, that exterior melted. He found a new group of friends, the kind with adults who watched over Hill like “second parents.” On rare times he wasn’t on the field as a corner or wideout, he stood next to his coaches and diagrammed lessons for teammates.

“The next thing you know, he just totally changed,” Gilmer said. “It was a village that helped Troy. It was the school, it was parents, it was friends.”

In a February 2010 routine compliance check by Oregon, Hill was found to be a fifth-year senior whose eligibility clock should have ended in 2009. Two weeks after signing a letter of intent, the 11-2 senior season was vacated, his scholarship hinged on an eligibility waiver and he scrambled to look at junior colleges on Neal’s suggestion.

“I was looking at that NCAA Clearinghouse website every day,” he said.

The NCAA approved his waiver two weeks before school began in September. There was some anger in the community about the mix-up and its consequences, said Therrien, now an assistant at Thousand Oaks High, but none was directed at Hill from inside the program, his other family.

“Yeah we had to forfeit some games,” he said, “but when it saves a life, who cares?”

EUGENE

Given his share of second chances, Hill does not take opportunities as UO’s primary backup corner lightly.

He plays early and often given Oregon’s liberal defensive substitutions and its trust in a secondary that returned everyone from the unit that led the nation in interceptions in 2012. But when Hill replaced starter Terrance Mitchell after he was ejected against Nicholls State, Hill’s interference penalty and a 56-yard pass to a receiver he was covering gnawed at him.

Oregon cornerback Troy Hill breaks up a pass against Virginia. He had five tackles in the game.

“Just mental errors,” he said, even knowing Neal, UO’s secondary coach, absolved him of blame on the play because of a missed assignment elsewhere. “I was just out there playing lazy, up high on my cuts.”

It was an unusual post-mortem for a player who prides himself on a short memory, yet typical for someone current and former coaches and teammates say holds himself to a higher standard than simply efficient nickel coverage. Neal calls him an “ironman” after he battled back from leg injuries late in 2012 to record a tackle and pass break-up in the Fiesta Bowl.

“He is truly one of the top corners in the nation,” safety Erick Dargan said. “He deserves everything he gets.”

Hill calls his 29-yard interception that he returned for a touchdown against Arizona in 2012 his career highlight. The bolt to the end zone remains one of his swiftest journeys in a life defined by them.

Gilmer, who shares with Jennings legal guardianship of Hill, thought he knew his nephew better than almost anyone. After the 2011 spring game, though, Hill mentioned he’d changed his major to social sciences to focus on helping children because of his uncle’s influence.

“Man, I started crying,” Gilmer said.

“I want to try to give back and try to be that positive person,” Hill said. “Some of the people that I surrounded myself when I moved to California they helped me become, and grow up into, a man.

“… I feel like I grew up to show these kids that it’s not always about showing people that you’ve got to be hard, like, outside of football. You want to be someone for your family that they can look up to.”

CHARLOTTESVILLE

Hill was the final Duck to leave the field Saturday.

He scanned the pocket of Duck fans near the end zone, looking for Section 112, Row E and his family, who were now all standing and waving back. Hill approached the stadium wall, clasped his hands into an ‘O’ and darted into the tunnel to the locker room.

Among the green and yellow Jennings beamed, visibly proud of her son’s five tackles, his journey and how open-ended his possibilities now seem.

It is a happiness that hinges on one, unbreakable rule: Keep moving forward.

“Whatever he does after this I’m right behind him, as long as he doesn’t come back to Youngstown,” she said. “Don’t come back home, you’ve got better things out there than back here. You’ll come visit, I’ll come visit, but make your life somewhere else.”

They’ll meet him anywhere. No matter where the road takes them.