Damarkus Milner was born to be a quarterback.
It’s the position he was handed on his youth team in sixth grade, and one he never vacated throughout his prep days at Lincoln High School.
Milner can toss a football 60 yards in a perfect spiral and at a trajectory a receiver can easily catch. He can twirl around with the same grace and ease of a Terrelle Pryor or Jake Locker and take off running to make something out of nothing.
The numbers in his final two seasons at Lincoln did not shout out, “Star in the Making.” He averaged 850 yards and eight touchdown passes. But ask Narrows League coaches, and they’ll tell you he was a threat to go off any night, in a variety of ways.
Knowing all this, the Puget Sound Loggers brought Milner on board last season to sit behind quarterbacks Kavin Williams and Spencer Crace.
And knowing this, those same Loggers asked him to switch positions at the outset of spring camp.
Why? The sophomore’s athleticism was too good to keep in a holding pattern.
So when UPS and crosstown Northwest Conference foe Pacific Lutheran square off Saturday at Sparks Stadium in their annual rivalry game, Milner will be trying to stop the other team’s quarterback – at safety.
“It just didn’t make sense to have him as the No. 3 quarterback this year,” Loggers coach Phil Willenbrock said.
Asking a player to switch positions is always a dicey proposition at the NCAA Division III level, where football isn’t so serious, where the college experience is always a priority.
But after recruiting his largest group of incoming freshmen in eight seasons, Willenbrock approached as many as 10 to ask if they would consider changing positions. Some scoffed at the offer, but not Milner.
“After the season … they mentioned it to me. They wanted me to get on the field because of my athletic ability,” Milner said. “I felt the same way.”
The Loggers were losing Demetri Huffman, a second-team All-NWC selection at safety last season. Like Milner, Huffman came in as a quarterback, from Meadowdale High School. Like Milner, he switched positions – except he never went back.
Fortunately, Huffman is doing graduate studies and stuck around as a volunteer assistant to tutor his replacement.
“Coaches can give you the Xs and Os, but having a player there fresh off the field not even a year ago to give me inside details about certain alignments, reading receivers’ hips – it’s been a different perspective,” Milner said.
In his debut, Milner registered a season-high 12 tackles against Pomona-Pitzer – and ranks No. 1 among NWC defensive backs in tackles per game (7.2).
The quarterback stuff still comes into play – when it’s time to figure out what the other guy is thinking.
“Last week (against Whitworth), they had a third-and-4 and tried a rollout play. Now I know a quarterback. He wants to pick up the first down,” Milner said. “They had two guys rolling out in the flat. I stayed on my guy, but I knew out of instinct he wanted to run it.”
Did he make the tackle?
“No. A linebacker did,” Milner said. “But I was there.”
The unknown is what happens after 2009. Williams and Crace graduate, but Duncan White, a transfer from Sacramento State, will be a senior. And Willenbrock will have four sophomores who could be quarterbacks – James Korn, Brian Marshall, Wade Rediger and Paul Sauvage.
“We haven’t discussed that. Toward the end of the season, the conversation I’m sure will happen,” Milner said. “That is where my heart is. I grew up playing it.”
Todd Milles: 253-597-8442
