Adams in multiple interviews over the years has said basketball was his first love. He said that when he broke his arm playing quarterback for a year in Pop Warner as a kid, he thought he was done with football. Basketball then became the focus.
Eventually, he picked up football again – during his junior year of high school. Since he was still raw at running routes, he leaned on what he knew the best.
"At that point, I was looking at basketball movements, because that was more what I saw fit my body and my movements, my biomechanics, was more of the basketball, the hoop movements," Adams said on Inside Rams Camp. "Even the way I release (off the line of scrimmage) now, it's more basketball than it is football, which I can attribute a lot of the reasons why DBs have issues, because it's more unconventional to what they've seen."
It didn't take long for him to learn how seamlessly some of those natural movements would translate from the hardwood to the gridiron.
"Really when I first started playing my junior year in high school, it was natural," Adams told theRams.com. "I had missed the 'Hell Week' portion of the training, went out there and started, like a week before the season, basically went up, and I remember vividly catching a post, and it was a little bit under-thrown. My quarterback was Chris Bono, (former UCLA quarterback and 15-year NFL veteran) Steve Bono's son. He threw a post to the middle of the field, and I just kind of slowed up for it, me and the DB just went up, and it just felt like going up and getting a board or dunking on somebody. So I just went up and caught it, and that was my first moment realizing, 'Damn, okay, this is kind of more natural than what I thought it'd be.' And just kept working on it, and didn't get as serious into my craft at that point, because it was a lot more just natural to the movements that I had in basketball and started to evolve."
How that evolution began to unfold: Off those natural movements, he went on to post 29 receptions for 484 yards and seven touchdowns in his junior season at Palo Alto High School. As a senior, he more than doubled his catches and yards and nearly doubled his touchdowns: 64 catches for 1,094 yards and 12 touchdowns. Palo Alto High won the state championship that year, and he went on to play college football at Fresno State.