BOULDER — Walk into the Leeds School of Business on any given day, and there’s a good chance you’ll find the most popular guy on the University of Colorado campus.

It’s not Shedeur Sanders or Travis Hunter, a pair of football stars destined for the NFL.

It’s not even Trevor Woods, a senior linebacker for the Buffaloes who’s also a business marketing major that finds himself in Leeds for a lot of his classwork.

Oftentimes, when Woods walks into that building, he’ll find teammate Camden Dempsey with a crowd of friends, all listening to what the Lakewood native has to say.

“He’s the coolest guy on campus,” Woods said.

How exactly did this happen to a walk-on long snapper who’s only made a couple of in-game appearances the last few years?

Well, it started at the team’s annual leadership retreat in the offseason.

It was late May and Deion Sanders took more than a dozen key figures in the locker room — with Dempsey as the only walk-on — into the mountains for a weekend. They bonded over archery, fishing, hiking and other outdoor activities. They also discussed the pertinent topics for the program and what could be improved.

There was a consensus opinion.

“We need to get our story out there better,” Dempsey told The Denver Gazette as he recalled the weekend. “We’ve got a lot of media around us, but we don’t exactly have people from our team who are able to talk about stuff on Twitter or get back on stuff. Coach (Prime) was like, ‘If I say something, that’s like launching a bazooka. It needs to be coming more from our team.’”

Dempsey had no idea Sanders was looking at him when he said, “You. You’re gonna be our guy. You’re gonna be the truth teller, the guy who keeps it straight.”

From there, ‘the Governor’ was no longer just a nickname. It was an unofficial position on the CU roster.

“Ever since, I’ve been lucky enough that my teammates kinda rallied around me,” Dempsey said. “The one thing I’ve been working on is trying to get more media out about our guys. There’s a lot of press conferences and a lot of regular media about me and, personally, I want to stop that because I hate talking about myself.

“I’m waiting on a camera right now. One’s coming in the mail. I’m gonna start filming some NIL stuff out on Pearl Street and talking with guys and getting them out in the community and finding their favorite restaurants or just getting to know them and more of their story.”

Unfortunately for Dempsey, this story is about him.

The ‘Governor’ nickname first surfaced last season, when Sanders became impressed with his conversations with Dempsey during practice. Their relationship has strengthened as Dempsey has become more of a fixture in the locker room, to the point where he is now the unofficial spokesperson for the team.

Dempsey even created his own YouTube page for his “State of the Program” addresses, where he updates what’s going on with the team.

“Coach and I kinda workshopped that together,” Dempsey said. “With this new role, we kinda needed something to start off with a bang and get some good views on it. It was insane. My phone blew up that night and I had to put it on ‘Do Not Disturb’ and throw it across the room.

“I got over 1,000 Instagram followers; the (YouTube) channel itself has over 4,500 subscribers which normally takes a long time to get. That was really fun, but what was more rewarding was just to see the positive response from the fans and how much they want to know about us.”

Part of his role is being the one to stand up for his teammates, particularly if they feel a report is untrue — as he did earlier this month.

“He’s been that way since I arrived,” Sanders said. “I noticed his countenance (and) just who he is on the field as well as off the field. He not only inspires me but encourages me to want to do more for him because I know what direction he’s going to go (in life) soon after football.

“I know the history of his family and how much CU means to them. You talk about a great young man — he is all of that. That’s why I wanted to create a special role for him and get him more involved in what I feel like his career path is gonna be. I don’t want him to wait until it’s over for him to get started. I love him to life. I really do.”

Being a Buff means a great deal to Dempsey.

His grandfather has been a football season-ticket holder since the 1960s. Dempsey grew up attending games at Folsom Field and has a photo of himself as an infant in a Ralphie onesie.

“That’s the definition of a die-hard Buff fan,” punter Mark Vassett said. “He’s living his dreams having a locker down there.”

To Dempsey, it’s a dream he doesn’t want to end. As an offensive lineman at Lakewood, he was a three-time all-Jefferson County honoree, but never expected to play college football. With COVID-19 restrictions at the end of his junior year and into his senior year, his family sent emails to coaches, mostly in the Ivy League, in the hopes of getting a response.

CU offered him a spot as a walk-on, but he still needed a way to pay for school. In came the Boettcher scholarship, which was created in the 1950s to keep Colorado’s top high school students in the state at its accredited universities. It was a perfect fit for Dempsey, a 4.0-GPA student in high school and now at CU.

“Boettcher pays for five years of school and (I have) five years of eligibility. It’s a perfect match,” Dempsey said. “This entire time, it’s just been (about) seeing the process through and trying to maximize the opportunity I have. Just being out on that field and being able to interact with Coach (Prime), it’s the opportunity of a lifetime. It’s insane.”

Whether or not Dempsey actually lives up to his “Governor” nickname and goes into politics one day, that’s to be seen. He has a wide variety of interests off the field that include international business, particularly due to his interest in Chinese culture. He sees himself as a businessperson and says he would prefer to take risks with his own money rather than that of Colorado taxpayers.

At this point, however, it’s a matter of time before he actually runs for office.

“But I also do feel like I’ve got an innate sense of leadership that I do owe it to the community to, at least at some point in my life, try out for something,” Dempsey said.

Sanders has never referred to Dempsey as “the president,” or a position above governor.

Coach Prime sees Dempsey is Colorado through and through.

“He always calls me ‘the mayor’ or ‘the governor’ and not ‘the president’ and I like that because I think ‘governor’ is a lot more local and it’s a lot more impactful than the president or anything,” Dempsey said. “Getting to be a part of this community, getting to make this football program more than just a football program, seeing how much impact it’s having on the community, seeing the fans show out, that’s my favorite part.”