PICO RIVERA, Calif. — Nearly 10 years ago, Danny Hernandez found himself wearing ties more often than he liked.

He was working at a law firm, managing its records department. The job paid the bills and helped provide for his wife, Vanessa, and their children, but he came face to face with the reality of the situation.

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“I knew being locked up in an office with a tie was just not my scene,” the 41-year-old Hernandez said. “I knew I had to get out and be over here.”

Over here, on this Tuesday afternoon in December, was the turf field at Smith Park, joined by five-star 2021 quarterback and USC commit Jake Garcia. It wasn’t too long after Hernandez’s realization about his lot at the law firm that he made the move to the world of quarterback training.

Hernandez’s name was hardly known when he was sitting behind a desk back in those office days. Even now, as a private quarterback coach, his profile might not be as nationally recognizable as some of the more well-known quarterback gurus who came before him.

This week will illustrate why it should be.

There are two five-star quarterbacks in the 2020 recruiting cycle: Mater Dei’s Bryce Young (Alabama commit) and St. John Bosco’s D.J. Uiagalelei (Clemson commit). The two Southern California standouts will put pen to paper and sign with their respective schools of choice on Wednesday, but to get to this moment, both players spent years developing and training with Hernandez.

And he has more high-profile QBs heading for the top of signing classes to come, so get used to hearing their names, and his, more often in the very near future.

Kevin Pearson landed the head coaching job at Cathedral High School in Los Angeles back in 1995, taking over the football program without knowing a soul there. However, a senior Mexican quarterback who stood less than six feet tall caught his attention.

Although this quarterback was a good athlete, he certainly wouldn’t register as the best Pearson would go on to coach in his next 23 years at Cathedral, a list that includes Young and 2013 four-star Hayden Rettig.

”He had that ‘it’ factor,” Pearson said. “When he said something, people listened.

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“Something about his presence, the way the kids responded to him. He was positive, he was funny. He got his point across and the kids respected him.”

That quarterback was Hernandez, who graduated from Cathedral in 1996 and started for Pearson’s first team. There are a few things Hernandez remembers from those days. His family wasn’t able to afford private quarterback training, so it was mainly his dad who trained him, and because of his height, he didn’t give much thought to a post-high school playing career.

In the back of his mind, though, Hernandez knew he wanted to work with kids.

“I wanted to help kids be more confident, to be honest with you,” he said. “That was a big part of what I wanted to do.”

Immediately after Hernandez graduated, he became Cathedral’s quarterbacks coach. Then, he put coaching on hold and enrolled at Azusa Pacific, where he studied communications.

Hernandez was actually trying to be a firefighter. He took his fire science classes and passed all of the physical agility tests, but he was repeatedly placed on waiting lists.

“I was like, ‘Shit, this is not going to work out for me,’ ” Hernandez said. The aforementioned stint with the law firm followed.

“It was something he was doing because he needed to provide for his family,” his wife, Vanessa, said, “but it wasn’t something he was passionate about.”

Throughout the years, Hernandez tried to break into sports full-time. He created football, basketball and baseball scouting books in the early 2000s that, much to his surprise, were used by UCLA’s men’s and women’s basketball teams, along with some other programs. Hernandez also started a company, Five-Star Phenom, that put on recruiting events and things of that nature.

Hernandez knew he wanted to get deeper into that world, but the time and effort those things demanded didn’t match the income he was bringing in, so kept to his office jobs. He even reached out to Steve Clarkson, one of Southern California’s high-profile quarterback coaches, in an attempt to get his foot in the door.

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“(I) said, ‘Hey, man, I’m really trying to get involved in this game,’ ” Hernandez said. “ ‘I’d love to be an assistant, help you out and learn a little more.’

“I thank God he never got back to me.”

In the early part of this decade, Hernandez decided to become a full-time quarterback coach. Vanessa admits she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t nervous when he did so.

From there, Hernandez’s rise to prominence required a leap of faith, some persistence, and a few misfits.

Craig Young still has pretty good recall of that trip to Temple City, Calif. six years ago, accompanied by his son Bryce. Hernandez was coaching a Pop Warner team and looking for a quarterback.

So Craig took Bryce over to throw for him. Hernandez realized Bryce, a middle schooler, was throwing a high school ball. But that didn’t impact the advanced nature of the session.

“Danny was asking Bryce to do things that most other coaches didn’t,” Craig said. “As far as drops, throwing from this angle or this way. That’s when we kind of realized, Danny’s different. He’s got something special to offer.”

Hernandez had found his first high-profile quarterback. But as Craig would tell you, it’s not like Bryce was one of these prospects who was anointed the next big thing at a young age.

Craig Young and Hernandez would speak on the phone for hours about visions and aspirations they had, not only for Bryce as a player but for Hernandez as a coach. A goal was set for Bryce to be a top-three dual-threat quarterback in the country by the end of his high school career.

Entering the early signing period, Bryce is the No. 1 quarterback in the country and a five-star prospect, and he led Mater Dei to a national championship as a junior. At 5-foot-11 and 183 pounds, Young faces the same concerns about his size today as he did back when he and Hernandez started working together.

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The Young family was one of the first to jump in the boat with Hernandez, way before his credibility grew into what it is today. But Craig Young viewed it more like both parties had something to prove: Bryce was an undersized QB with a kind of wind-up delivery and Hernandez was a private quarterback coach in Southern California, where you can find a private coach on every block, without the name recognition of a Clarkson or a George Whitfield Jr.

“What’s pretty cool about our relationship with Danny is we both kind of ascended together,” Craig said. “We’re both kind of like, ‘Who are these people?’ And we both kind of disrupted the system. ‘Who’s this undersized quarterback running around doing this? And who is this Danny Hernandez guy?’ ”

Even though Bryce was still only in middle school, Hernandez figuratively stood on the table and shouted for his quarterback as loud as he could, making highlight tapes and sending them off to several college coaches. Of course, it drew some questions: “Why are you sending me this eighth grader’s tape?”

It only takes one though. Then-Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury was intrigued with what he saw on the highlight tape Hernandez had made and eventually offered Bryce, who had not even finished middle school yet. From there, Bryce’s recruiting took off, and he shined early in his career at Cathedral.

That generated some momentum for Hernandez.

“My phone just really started ringing off the hook,” said Hernandez, whose training company goes by the name Team Dime. “Because other people were thinking, ‘If he did it for Bryce, a 5-foot-10, 5-foot-11 guy, my 6-foot-2 kid who passes the eyeball test and checks these boxes, I think he could do the same thing for him.’ ”

Hernandez refers to these kind of moments as “waves.” Another pivotal moment was when J.T Shrout, another Hernandez client, collected more than 10 offers going into his senior year despite throwing less than 30 passes as a junior and never starting a game. Shrout signed with Tennessee during the 2018 recruiting cycle.

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Hernandez put in a lot of work training with Shrout, but he also worked hard behind the scenes in terms of recruiting and marketing him as a prospect. If Hernandez could facilitate Shrout’s recruitment and help get him offers even if he wasn’t a starter yet, what could he do for kids who were seeing the field?

Soon, Hernandez’s quarterback roster ballooned. He trained South Carolina starting quarterback Ryan Hilinski. He worked with Bryce and Uiagalelei. Among the 2021 quarterbacks, he trains Garcia, who is committed to USC, four-star prospect Tyler Buchner, who is committed to Notre Dame, and Miller Moss, a four star who is uncommitted at the moment. All three are top-10 quarterbacks nationally in that cycle.

In the 2022 class, Hernandez trains Serra (Gardena, Calif.) quarterback Maalik Murphy, who had offers from Ohio State, Michigan, Oregon, LSU, USC and others before he even started a varsity game. One of Hernandez’s 2023 quarterbacks, Los Alamitos’ Malachi Nelson, already has offers from Alabama, Ohio State, LSU and Georgia.

He’s now going on four consecutive years where one of his quarterbacks has gotten offers as an eighth grader: Bryce in 2016, Buchner in 2017, Murphy in 2018 and Nelson in 2019.

“One of the things I pride myself on was building guys from the ground up,” Hernandez said. “There are a lot of quarterback coaches who are out here, it happens all the time, you take a look at these guys and they’re like, ‘Hey, I’ve got an Adidas sponsorship backing me up.’ Or ‘I’m an Elite 11 coach.’ or whatever the case is, so that automatically makes them credible right? So they’re coming after these guys. If you take a look at all these kids I train, all of them I worked with before they had a Division I offer. There are not a lot of guys in this game that are doing this at a high level that are able to say that.”

Jake Maier started training with Hernandez when he was a sophomore in high school. He just finished his senior season at UC Davis, where he threw for 3,557 yards and 28 touchdowns. Maier’s yardage total ranked ninth among FCS quarterbacks after he finished third in that category as a junior and sixth as a sophomore.

Maier was there for what Hernandez dubbed the “true underdog days” of his quarterback training.

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“I’m telling you, this really just started with guys who had something going against them,” Maier said. “Whether it was height, mechanics, a lot of these guys weren’t big high-profile name guys until they were able to prove it on the field down the road.”

Maier’s path from St. Paul High School (Santa Fe Springs, Calif.) to UC Davis was anything but conventional. His high school team wasn’t very good, and he was lightly recruited. He ended up at Sacred Heart in Connecticut but got homesick, returned to Southern California and attended Long Beach City College for a year. He had a good season at LBCC but his recruitment was relatively quiet until he landed a call from UC Davis, where he went on to be named Big Sky Player of the Year in 2018.

There have been a lot of ups and downs in Maier’s journey. Hernandez, who is now training Maier for his pro day, has been one of the constants.

“He’s different than most of these ‘guru’ guys in the sense he cares about these kids,” Pearson said. “He’s not a money grabber, especially when he first started. I know of a lot of these quarterback gurus, and I started working these Nike camps years ago when there were only like five high school coaches who came up to Nike, but what sets Danny apart is Danny really, really cares about these kids’ development.”

Like Pearson noticed, connecting with people is a strength for Hernandez. It’s one of several things that have helped expedite his rise.

Most of the people you speak to about Hernandez bring up his honesty.

“He was honest to the point where he wasn’t always telling you what you wanted to hear but you knew you could rely on his assessment,” said Emily Kovner Moss, whose son Miller started training with Hernandez as a freshman in high school. “So that just started to really build the trust in the relationship.”

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“(He) really wants to connect with you, and is willing to be, at times, one of your harshest critics,” said Maier. “I think that’s when you can really make something out of that quarterback coach/player relationship. Because not a lot of guys are willing to do that. A lot of guys, in my opinion, are just going to tell you what you want to hear and are just trying to take your money.”

That trust is noticeable between Hernandez and his quarterbacks but also between him and the coaches he interacts with. He won’t bring up a quarterback to them who he knows wouldn’t be a good fit. There’s a reason why Kingsbury didn’t laugh off an eighth grader’s highlight film when Hernandez sent it to him.

There’s the training aspect too. Hernandez is constantly preparing his quarterbacks for the variables. Hernandez really emphasized off-platform throws with Young, and now he excels at them.

“That’s stuff a lot of people don’t teach,” Garcia said. “A lot of people just teach the cone work, shuffling through cones and stuff like that rather than game-like situations. And the game-like situations are actually what carry over.  If we were just shuffling through cones, I wouldn’t be as enthusiastic about it.”

All of those aspects have helped get Hernandez to where he is. And a quick look at the company he keeps today provides a pretty good picture of how far he’s come.

The QB Collective describes itself as a “pro-style development pipeline” for high school quarterbacks. Its general manager is two-time Super Bowl-winning coach Mike Shanahan. There are 19 names the QB Collective lists as coaches. Most involved have NFL ties, whether they’re head coaches — Sean McVay, Kyle Shanahan, Matt LaFleur — former and current assistants, or former players. One of the few without any NFL ties is Danny Hernandez. That’s quite the come-up from the law firm’s records department.

These days, Hernandez is training kids seven days a week. In a normal day, he might train five or six, he says. The weekends are busier, and sometimes he’ll train 30 kids or so in bigger group sessions.

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Hernandez has gained more notoriety within the past two years or so. Any rapid rise that extreme will draw its share of critics.

“There are a ton of haters,” Hernandez said. “I wasn’t this NFL quarterback or this superstar Division I quarterback. It helps me to have that chip on my shoulder and feel like I have to do more and outwork these guys. What ends up happening a lot of the time with these quarterback coaches is they have that background and they lead with that. That’s how they introduce themselves. … I think what happens a lot of times with those coaches now, when they have that success as a player, it makes them feel like they know everything already and they don’t have to go out there and learn more.”

In his short time in the spotlight, Hernandez’s work has spoken for itself. Bryce Young is one of many beneficiaries of that, and on Wednesday, Hernandez will be at Mater Dei to watch Young sign his national letter of intent.

“I usually don’t talk a lot of smack because that’s not my thing,” Craig Young said. “But that’s going to be a day me and Danny put our chest out.

“Because we proved a lot of people wrong.”

(Top photo of Hernandez with Bryce Young courtesy of Danny Hernandez)