More than a month into his junior season, Luke Reimer had never talked to a college football coach about the possibility of continuing his playing career past high school.
It was quite a transition just getting to Lincoln from Ashland, Kansas, getting settled at North Star High and adjusting to life and also football.
September turned to October as the Class A football schedule marched on.
Suddenly the 6-foot-1, 200-pound athlete started turning heads on the gridiron.
Suddenly the phone calls started coming in.
Suddenly he had offers from North Dakota, South Dakota and South Dakota State.
Then came progress of a different sort: a January school visit from Nebraska inside linebackers coach Barrett Ruud and head coach Scott Frost.
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Suddenly, if you were to make a list of candidates for an additional Husker in-state scholarship offer in the class of 2019, Reimer just might top it.
He was part of the Huskers’ junior day last weekend, and both he and the NU coaches seemingly impressed each other.
“It was great just to meet the whole coaching staff,†Reimer said. “They were honest with me. They were like, ‘We’re looking at you, we just need to see you play more, get more film on you and watch you compete at one of our camps.'â€
The three 2019 in-state verbal commitments to date — Ethan Piper (Norfolk Catholic), Garrett Snodgrass (York) and Garrett Nelson (Scottsbluff) — have been on NU’s radar screen for a long time, as have four-star Omaha Burke targets Chris Hickman and Nick Henrich.
Not so for Reimer, who burst onto the scene in Class A here after jumping from eight-man football in Kansas. He accumulated 397 rushing yards (7.1 per carry), 167 receiving yards and nine touchdowns in seven games, according to MaxPreps, for the Navigators, all while making an in-season switch to quarterback after the injury bug bit the position.
Reimer said the Huskers see him as a strong safety or outside linebacker and eventually weighing somewhere around 225 to 230 pounds.
“He’s a three-sport athlete,†said Mark Waller, the longtime North Star coach who resigned in November. “He’s never lifted much in the weight room. He’s just got so much room to grow in terms of development.â€
Reimer is currently nursing a minor hamstring issue, but ran 7.18 seconds in the 60 meters and 23.14 in the 200 indoors earlier this spring and will be back running again.
He attended a Kansas State junior day last month and is visiting Iowa State on Saturday and Wyoming on April 21. That’s quite a change in 12 months. After all, it was around this time last spring when Waller first found out he was going to have a talented newcomer in his program.
“I never thought when I moved up here that I would be on that level,†Reimer said. “I thought maybe my senior year I’d have a couple of little schools talking to me.â€
Now, Reimer is gunning for Power Five scholarship offers and he thinks he can do it.
“I honestly do,†he said. “I’m going to be honest, I’ve never been to a football camp before. Coming from a small school, I never got a chance to, really. I think I can. This year in football, I felt like I could play with anybody.â€
Running backs highlight junior day visitors: The Huskers have had three four-star prospects on campus the past two days and have several more heralded high school players visiting Saturday, a second consecutive weekend to feature a junior day.
NU is expected to welcome three-star running backs Breece Hall (Wichita, Kansas) and Thomas Grayson (Tulsa, Oklahoma), and three-star verbal commitment Garrett Nelson (Scottsbluff). HuskerOnline also reports that four-star offensive lineman Danielson Ike (Kansas City, Missouri), among the earliest 2019 offers from the new staff, is expected to attend, as is three-star St. Louis defensive end M.J. Anderson.
Bellevue West 2020 four-star receiver Zavier Betts also is expected back on campus for the second straight week, and several other in-state and regional prospects will likely be on hand as well.