A few summers ago, a few dozen Texas Tech football players made weekly trips to a Lubbock MMA gym as part of their regular off-season routine. They'd work on footwork and conditioning, do some grappling, and hit the boxing bags.
Cameron Dickey was one of the players who showed an affinity for it.
"One of the guys, the trainers, said if Cam Dickey ever wants to box and not play football, he would be a really legitimate boxer," Tech coach Joey McGuire said. "I would not want to get hit by Cam Dickey. I went and watched him, and you can tell there's a lot of power behind that punch."
Tech
The Red Raiders' 5-foot-10, 215-pound running back confirms the story. Yes, one of the trainers did tell Dickey to come find him if this football thing runs its course. But would Dickey take him up on it?
"I would love to do that," he said, "but that's a very brutal sport. I love watching it, so might just stick to watching it."
Dickey signed with Texas Tech as an unheralded recruit in 2024. Then, in only his second year of college football, he was a semifinalist for the Doak Walker Award, presented annually to the top running back in the country. That was last season, when he rushed for 1,124 yards and led the Big 12 in rushing touchdowns and total touchdowns, all while splitting time with Paul Hornung Award finalist J'Koby Williams.
This season, Dickey's scored touchdowns in each of the past two games for Tech (3-0), which hosts Sam Houston State (1-2) at 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 26.
Anyone who's known Cameron Dickey for any length of time, though, probably isn't surprised by the boxing story or that he showed talent for yet another sport. His parents, Stanley and Amanda, were college athletes in football and softball, respectively, at Ranger College, so sports genes run in the family.
"Cameron's always been the type of kid that no matter what sport he played, he excelled at it," said Amanda Dickey, his mother. "You gave him the ball, he made something happen."
In high school at Austin Crockett, Dickey was a two-time all-district honoree in baseball, a four-event regional qualifier in track and field, and part of back-to-back district champion basketball teams.
He hunts and fishes and plays disc golf. On a spring-break vacation in Mexico several months ago, he did a 4-mile run just because and took a hot-air balloon ride. He has his own bowling ball and his own golf clubs.
Ask him about a tee time, and he'll light up.
"Big time," Dickey said. "If anybody invites me, I'm like, throw my clothes on, put those clubs in the trunk and hit the road."
Dickey's being good at whatever he sets his mind to started way back. When he was 4, he taught himself to ride a bicycle without training wheels. In the front yard of his family's home, they had a really tall swing anchored in a tree, and young Cameron would pull himself up by the ropes all the way to the top.
"I just kind of let him," Amanda Dickey said, "because he was the biggest daredevil in the world. There was no stopping that kid. ... His dad, on the other hand, would freak out."
Explaining her viewpoint, Amanda said, "I was the type that, I always told my kids, 'If you want to figure it out, you've got to do it yourself.' Because that way, you can always figure something out."
Instilling an approach of self-reliance and determination would serve Dickey well, perhaps never more so than in his chosen sport. With not much in the way of hyperbole, Tech publicists in Dickey's biography describe him as "one of the most prolific athletes in Austin ISD history." In a four-year varsity football career at Austin Crockett, Dickey rushed for 4,065 yards and 61 touchdowns, passed for 2,963 yards and 33 TDs and racked up 247 tackles, 7 interceptions and 6 fumble recoveries.
Not that it did him a lot of good in recruiting circles. Being an Austin kid, he went to camps in Texas and even had his picture taken with then-UT coach Charlie Strong, but the Longhorns didn't really pursue him. Oh, Lamar offered Dickey a scholarship. Hardly any of the big schools did, though.
"It was kind of discouraging at first, seeing all my buddies I'd grown up with getting offers and whatnot," Dickey said. "Just like, man, that's what I've wanted to do my whole life."
Dickey's big break came when Texas Tech decided his skills would translate. Even so, he almost missed that chance when he didn't say yes quickly enough to an offer.
"Two weeks later," Dickey recalled, "they're like, 'Hey, somebody took your spot. We can get you on a PWO [preferred walk-on] if you commit today, and that's what happened. A few weeks later, they called me again, [saying], 'Hey, we can put you on a full scholarship.' So it was kind of like a back-and-forth thing."
In hindsight, Dickey said, being on scholarship from the start was nice, but he'd decided he was coming to Lubbock either way. "It's the place to be," he said.
The chance, as it turns out, is all Dickey needed. He played in 12 games as a true freshman, rushing for 225 yards, then established himself last year as one of the top ground gainers in the Big 12. In 29 games, he has 20 career touchdowns, 17 on the ground.
In Tech history, only James Hadnot, James Gray, Bam Morris, Byron Hanspard, DeAndre Washington and Tahj Brooks have rushed for 1,000 yards in more than one season. Dickey, if he's around for five years under the NCAA's new age-based eligibility model, has this year and two more to shoot for that. His 14 rushing touchdowns last year already put him tied for seventh in that single-season category.
And to think: He could've fallen through the cracks.
Quite a story.
"Just looking back on it," Dickey said, "it's amazing."
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Texas Tech football's Cameron Dickey has always been a natural
