Hunt grows more comfortable in leadership role following lost season as he enters his final shot as Syracuse’s quarterback

Take away the fans. Take away the media. Take away the pressure. Terrel Hunt spent the summer on the Syracuse practice fields testing his teammates. The only eyes watching were his, trying to get everyone else to think the way he thought.

“Run a seam route,” he’d instruct, knowing the defense was positioned to ensure it wouldn’t work. He’d set his receivers up to fail, but hope they’d adjust their route and break off quicker so he could feed them the ball.

When Hunt lined up the offense, he told receiver Steve Ishmael to call out the type of defense they were opposing. Usually Ishmael was right, but when he was wrong, Hunt wouldn’t say a word, instead letting the failure breed success in the future.

Hunt knows how to get the most out of his teammates. He knows that if he wants to call out Ron Thompson, he better do it with no one else in earshot. He knows that with other players, being honest in front of everyone makes them motivated to work even harder.

“I always want them to think they can talk to me about anything, they can tell me, ’T-Hunt, you not doing well.’ But nobody ever has to tell me that, because I do my job,” Hunt said “…Nobody ever gets on my case because I don’t allow them to…If I’m doing more than you, you can’t say anything to me.”

In 2014, Hunt wasn’t the quarterback and leader he’s hoping to establish himself as in 2015. In the first half of the season’s first game, he was ejected for punching a Villanova defender in the helmet. Four games later, in the midst of a three-game losing streak, Hunt suffered a season-ending injury when he fractured the fibula in his right leg.

The expectations placed on him now are similar to the one’s he had entering last year’s lost season. But now he’s more equipped to handle them. After struggling to watch Syracuse lose six of its final seven games from the sideline, the Orange’s fifth-year senior quarterback has reinvented himself heading into his final season.

Every day after his injury Hunt would receive a call from his grandmother, Eunice Semple. Every time his message to her would be the same. “I’m OK. I’m OK.” Hunt didn’t want to open up, Semple said, but she knew he was hurting.

She knew that even when Hunt had the smallest of injuries, his late mother, Katrina, treated it like a catastrophe. A small paper cut would be bandaged up like he was seriously bleeding. As a child, Semple said, Hunt readily expressed his emotions. Now facing the first significant injury of his life, he closed himself off.

“Terrel never really showed his feelings ever since his mother passed,” Semple said. “Whatever happens, ‘It’s OK. I’m alright. I can do it.’ But he never talked about his feelings. I felt like he didn’t want me to worry.”

Spencer Bodian | Staff Photographer

When Hunt was a child and had a problem, he’d sit on Semple’s lap and put his head onto her shoulder and tell her what was wrong. The first time he came home following his injury, he saw his grandmother, sat down next to her and put his head onto her shoulder.

At home, the talk of Hunt’s injury — aside from routine physical therapy sessions — was few and far between. Valencia Hunt, his guardian since Hunt was 14, said since everyone else was asking him about his injury, she steered clear of the topic.

Ben Lewis, his roommate and teammate, didn’t want to say Hunt was disappointed by the circumstances. But he remembered Hunt fruitlessly hoping that if the team played well enough to make a bowl game, he’d make his triumphant return in December.

Hunt didn’t want to talk about what he’d been through. He wanted to move past it.

“That’s always the conversation with him,” Valenica Hunt said. “No matter what it is, it’s just, let’s move forward. Let’s move forward. Deal with where you are, what you have to do with it, let’s move forward.”

Now with a new season, and a new — albeit final — chance to prove himself as a quarterback, he intends to come back as a different one than he was before.

He tried losing weight in an effort to become more of a pocket passer. He doesn’t want to risk getting injured again. He’s always been a natural runner — 13 of his 24 career touchdowns have come using his legs — but taking that risk is what hurt him in the first place.

He spent a summer with renowned quarterback coach George Whitfield, who would take a broom and force Hunt to evade the bristles as he swept it back and forth near his feet. It was one of many drills to help him become more comfortable in his element, by taking him out of it.

During the few hours he didn’t spend working with teammates in Syracuse over the summer, he worked on his visuals. Hunt asked graduate assistant Joe Furco to test him on different coverages and fronts.

“He’s done a good job of just communicating in the huddle,” offensive coordinator Tim Lester said. “…All those guys, they need to be another coach out there. He’s done a good job of that.”

Hunt knows Lester won’t get upset at him as long as he has a reason for everything. It’s not always a good reason, Lester says, but at least having one can help correct the process.

Everything Hunt has done and continues to do leading up to the season has a purpose. It’s a type of leadership that even he admits he didn’t bring to the table as the starter last season.

“10 cent” he’ll yell at his receivers when they mess up on a route or drop a ball, taxing them for the mistake. “10 cent,” they’ll yell back at him for his own bad pass.

He’s holding them, and himself accountable. He’s showing just how much every penny and every step really matters to him, even when no one else is watching.

“I really don’t care what anybody says. The media can write what they write. The fans can say what they say,” Hunt said. “But my teammates believe in me. And they know that I believe in them. It really doesn’t matter what’s being said. I feel like I got way better. I got smarter.”