Young Creggs man showing plenty of steel in pursuing his gridiron dreams

In a multi-sport culture like there is in Ireland, the concept of taking the skills learned in one sport and building on them to develop a career somewhere else is not new.

The path from Gaelic games to rugby is well-worn, while the AFL (Australian Rules) hasn’t been shy to look towards these shores to find promising young talent either.

Kieran Donaghy was a talented basketballer who only pushed on in his Gaelic football career later than most; Katie Taylor changed the world of women’s boxing after playing international soccer; Pat O’Callaghan was a sportsman all his life but only took up hammer throwing less than two years before winning his first Olympic gold medal; and then there was Kevin Moran of Dublin and Manchester United.

In recent years however, some young athletes have started to look west, and Andy Quinn, a 19-year-old from Creggs is all set to be part of that gold rush.

Jude McAtamney made his debut as kicker for the New York Giants towards the latter end of last year. The former Derry footballer had two chances to show his worth, and he duly found the target with one extra point and one 31-yard field goal against the Washington Commanders.

McAtamney wasn’t the first Irish player to play in the NFL since 1985, he was the second, behind Daniel Whelan, punter for the Green Bay Packers.

Whelan is something of an anomaly, however, as he left Enniskerry in Wicklow to go back to America at the age of 13, so he went through the traditional high school and collegiate system on the other side of the Atlantic. McAtamney bypassed that system, as did Charlie Smyth, practice squad kicker with the New Orleans Saints.

Quinn aims to split the difference. He attended Blackrock College and played with Buccaneers and Connacht Rugby, while also dabbling in a host of other sports, but soon learned that his prodigious skill with the boot might open up other doors that he never could have imagined.

It certainly has, as this month (January), he plans to attend Boston College, part of the heavyweight Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) alongside storied colleges such as Notre Dame, Clemson, Florida State and Miami.

“Rugby was my sport, trying to go professional. I spent five or six hours a day during Covid here in Creggs, practising my kicking, and I didn’t realise at the time how much I was developing a skill for a completely different sport. Then I won a competition in the Aviva Stadium, where I kicked in front of the whole stadium at half-time in a college game,” Quinn explains.

“The NFL Academy saw me and they told me that they could give me a scholarship for while I was in sixth year. The scholarship was to bring me over to Loughborough University in the UK and kick, play for their academy, train every day.

“Looking back on it now, the opportunities that I’m getting from American football are so much bigger and better than anything rugby can give because of the amount of money that’s been pumped into athletics and athletic scholarships over in America.” It all sounds so simple, but it was anything but. Quinn had to complete his Leaving Cert while training twice a day, before and after his studies, as part of a unique hothouse environment.

“Half past six you go to the gym. Breakfast, back to the apartment to shower, and then at nine o’clock most of the lads start classes, but because I was doing my Leaving Cert, I was going into the academic office with an academic advisor until three. We’d all have a pitch session at around four to six, then half past seven till eight o’clock we’d go to the physios room for recovery. That’s five days a week.” The programme is funded by the NFL, whose aspirations to grow the gridiron game around the world are well documented. Quinn explains how players are brought to Loughborough from all around the world based on their unique physical attributes, but how what might seem like a simple thing to the Irish mind – the ability to kick the ball off the ground as well as out of the hand – has given him a unique edge in the competitive environment of looking for high-level college scholarships.

In a bid to ascertain which athletes are most likely to succeed, a series of camps take place that feature the best ‘High School’ athletes from across the country. Quinn travelled to the primary camp for kickers, and it was then that he realised quite how far up the pecking order he had come.

“I went to Kohl’s kicking camp during the summer out in Tennessee. I was ranked the fourth best punter and then the 12th best kicker in America, I’m the only person inside the top 25 for both. They really see it like quite weird that someone can do both. But coming from a rugby background, it seems much more natural.

“I had a bit of imposter syndrome when I went to the academy thinking, oh, I probably shouldn’t be at this. But after Kohl’s, the rankings came out and I was the fourth best punter and the 12th best kicker in America. This is when I really realised it was a possibility to go and do this, even though I had been (only?) pursuing it for a year before.” While Quinn’s ambitions are clear – he hopes to play for four years in college football and then make his way to the NFL – the scale of what lies ahead for him is gargantuan.

Boston College is similar to UCD in terms of the size of the enrolment, but their Alumni Stadium home takes just under 45,000 people. Last month, they travelled to Virginia Tech to play in Lane Stadium in front of 66,000, an arena that was ranked second by ESPN as the “scariest places to play” in US Sports.

“People don’t realise that the biggest sport in America is NFL, but the second biggest is college football. The media attention, the public interest, it’s off the charts. And it’s cut-throat, as a result. Even in college, if you miss twice, they’ll just throw in someone else. And it’s not always 100% your fault, you could be kicking into a wind, or have 100,000 Clemson or Penn State fans roaring at you. It’s tough mentally, for the coaches, it’s a figures game rather than thinking about the person,” he said.

“At the end of the day, whether I make or miss a kick, I go to bed just the same and it doesn’t really affect any other aspect. Maybe once I get into the NFL and it becomes my job it might affect me a little bit more, but I really enjoy kicking so I don’t see why I should be stressed about it.

“I have the self-belief and confidence that unless there’s a thunderstorm coming against me, I can kick a ball over the crossbar from 50 yards, nothing’s going to stop me from doing it, barring injury.

“And look, even if I don’t make it to the NFL and it doesn’t go well, then I’ll have had the experience of a lifetime, going to a wonderful city that has been really good to me and to my family.

“Hopefully I’ll have a degree in finance from a fantastic college, and I’ve had the chance to chase an incredible dream. And look – why not dream big, there’s no point dreaming too small?” Right now, like many before him, Andy Quinn’s ability to reshape and adjust his sporting ambitions means that his dreams are very much alive.