After he turned COVID into 'transformative year,' Sudbury's Hill to play football at Harvard

After he turned COVID into ‘transformative year,’ Sudbury’s Hill to play football at Harvard

Posted by author February 18, 2025 Football

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He didn’t spend mornings in his pajamas taking Zoom classes. He was meditating and practicing yoga. Days were filled with advanced science and math classes. Mom was the teacher for class in a converted attic.

When COVID shut down schools in 2020, Salim Hill bristled at the homeschool structure his parents devised.

“I was kind of upset,” he said. “I was like ‘why are you making us do this?’”

But with his college plans now secured, the Sudbury resident remembers the structure he gained during that eighth-grade interruption and calls it a “transformative year.”

The transformation culminated on the morning of Feb. 7 inside the Groton School Athletic Center foyer, where Hill signed his national letter of intent to play football at Harvard University. His parents and two younger brothers attended the event and Salim joins his father, Karim, in playing Division I football.

The elder Hill played at Ohio University and served as Groton’s coach last season.

“It’s truly amazing,” Salim Hill said. “My goal for a long time was to play Division I football – my father played Division I football – that’s been my goal since I can remember, just to do as he did. And to do it like this, with Harvard? It’s the best of both worlds for me.”

Salim also considered Brown, Penn, Yale, Princeton, Vanderbilt, Middlebury and Wesleyan. But he attended a football camp at Harvard over the summer, where he met with team staff and felt a quick connection.

“My dad told me a long time ago: it’s hard to be a player and not feel like family with the coaches,” he said. “It feels very comfortable and familial.”

Salim has made the honor roll in all 10 of his semesters at Groton and is on track to graduate magna cum laude in the spring. He also plays the saxophone and captained the school’s football and track and field teams.

The self-proclaimed history buff – the Revolutionary War and US presidents are his favorite – may major in that subject at Harvard, though economics and philosophy are also possibilities.

His academic prowess comes from a supplemental curriculum his parents set up, well before COVID hit.

“Having built the skill to handle my own in the classroom opened a lot of doors – it opened this one for me,” Salim said. “I’ve come to love to learn. I can’t say I always have …”

Flag league helped Hill ‘fall in love’ with football

For football and academics, Salim’s parents have always set the trail. Vona and Karim Hill founded Red Zone Flag Football in Sudbury in 2015 and its camps and fundraisers included Matthew Slater, Devin and Jason McCourty of the Patriots and Ahman Green, the career rushing leader for the Green Bay Packers. (Vona and Karim also co-own the Framingham franchise of the Goddard School).

Red Zone went on hiatus during the pandemic, but Vona Hill is currently working on reviving the program.

“That’s where I fell in love with the sport,” Salim Hill said. “It’s where I learned the intricacies of the sport and stepped into tackle (football) in the eighth grade and have that muscle memory.”

COVID may have halted Red Zone, but not the family’s will to tackle schoolwork. When schools closed, Vona took Salim and his younger brother by a year Nasir and set up a daily class schedule to go with the meditation and yoga. They took online Spanish immersion classes, but also had recess: batting practice with a pitching machine in the front yard.

They also made caramel, sundials and participated in blood-type testing.

The idea was to keep them challenged. Vona Hill, a first-generation college student (she also attended Ohio University, where the couple met), said seeing Salim commit to Harvard polarized her thoughts.

“It’s surreal on some levels,” she said. “To have your son go to the most-esteemed Ivy League school is surreal. On the same token, it’s what we expected of him when he was 2 years old. If anybody was going to go to Harvard, it was Salim.”

Salim eventually grew to value the homeschooling.

“It was pretty much like school,” Salim said. “At the time I don’t think I appreciated it nearly enough. But it really kept us on point and kept us sharp.”

The work had him ready to attend Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High – where he played football – as a freshman before transferring to Groton the following year.

Salim started his career with the Zebras as a quarterback, then switched to running back and cornerback before returning to take snaps as a senior. Last spring, he helped inaugurate the new track at Groton by leading the school to win its first New England Preparatory School Track Association championship, winning the 100 and 200 dashes to earn Most Outstanding Male Athlete honors. He also placed third in the long jump.

At Harvard, Salim will primarily play defensive back. No more lining up at multiple spots. He’s never backed down from a challenge, however. Not even when yoga mats and the attic took the place of the classroom.

“Being able to focus on one position will narrow my scope and give me the opportunity to dive deep into the mastery of doing one thing,” he said. “But being able to play a lot of positions was a lot of fun for me and it also helped me get here. It served me well, and I’ll miss it.”

Tim Dumas is a multimedia journalist for the Daily News. He can be reached at tdumas@wickedlocal.com. Follow him on Twitter @TimDumas.