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Harry Lyles Jr., ESPN Staff Writer
The Week 0 matchup between Georgia Tech and Florida State at Aviva Stadium in Dublin, Ireland, is a neutral site game for everybody on both teams — except for Yellow Jackets punter David Shanahan.
Shanahan is from Castleisland, County Kerry, Ireland, and is believed to be the first Ireland native ever awarded a full scholarship to play American college football. On Aug. 24, he’ll have the opportunity to play in his home country.
“I’m excited for the kid to have an opportunity to go home,” Georgia Tech head coach Brent Key said. “It’s exciting anytime any kid gets to go back to their home, especially when it’s far away from here.”
When he got to Georgia Tech, Shanahan — now a senior — thought there was a remote possibility that he’d be able to play a game in Ireland, but figured the odds would be slim given that Georgia Tech already played in Ireland in 2016. But during spring ball in 2022, Shanahan recalled Key calling him over during practice and asking him “cryptic” questions about Ireland.
“Usually he’s over the O-line shouting at them somewhere. He’s not really having a conversation midpractice,” he said. “I kind of caught on to it after a while because I knew the game was coming up and I knew they hadn’t announced a fixture for 2024. But eventually he told me, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty sick.'”
Shanahan walked a winding path to American college football. Growing up, rugby and Gaelic football were his main sports. He compared the passion that people in Ireland have for Gaelic football to the passion people have in the United States for American football.
“When you’re 15, you’re training really hard, you’re in the gym really hard,” he said. “I’m from Kerry, so every town in Kerry will have their own club, and then the best guys in their club will get to play for their county. So I was playing for the county underage squads.”
Shanahan was a member of the Kerry U17 Gaelic football “panel” that won the 2017 Munster championship (Gaelic football’s national title) at the U17 level. But as he approached adulthood, Shanahan’s passion for the game waned, and he began looking for a new challenge.
“There wasn’t a lot of adventure there, I thought. Because I say, ‘Alright, best-case scenario, I’ll just grow up and play for Kerry and never really leave my hometown’ or whatever. That’s something that didn’t really excite me that much.”
Instead, he got into American football. Enough of the mechanics he’d already learned were applicable to the American game that Shanahan believed that he could make the jump. “Obviously the skill set translated,” he said. “I tried my hand at kicking for a bit, but it just didn’t really come as naturally as punting did. But even saying that, punting was really hard, it took me a while to actually get good, get consistent at it.”
Shanahan realized there were steps he needed to take in order to reach his full potential. That’s where he gives a lot of credit to his parents, Jack and Eliza, for trusting him to take a leap of faith.
“I was 18 years old, and I was like, ‘Hey guys, I want to move to Australia, the other side of the world, go to this place in the suburbs of Melbourne, punt footballs for a year to try and get a scholarship to America.'”
In the past decade or so, Australia has emerged as the unlikely home for many of football’s best punters. That’s largely because of Prokick Australia in Melbourne, an academy founded in 2007 by Nathan Chapman, an Australian rules footballer who played in three preseason games for the Green Bay Packers in 2004. Prokick has produced six of the past seven Ray Guy Award winners and four current NFL punters. Shanahan felt that if he wanted to break into high-level American football, he had to go across the world in a different direction first.
“I worked, I saved up money and stuff. But for [my parents] to agree to that and fully support me is probably something that gets glossed over a little bit, just how much of a commitment that was from them — as much as me — to have their youngest son moving halfway across the world to some country they’ve never been before, doing something they know nothing about.”
Shanahan worked on his family’s farm, at his dad’s pharmacy, took money he had previously saved from past birthdays, his First Communion and his confirmation, and used it all to move to Melbourne at the end of August in 2019. But he was eventually forced to go back to Ireland to quarantine because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Shanahan, his brother Rob and his parents were together at their house for quarantine. They turned their shed into a gym, where the brothers would work out. Once they were done in the shed, David and Rob would walk 20 minutes behind their house to their farm, kick for 2.5 hours and go back home.
“Honestly, I had a great time during COVID,” he said.
While he was honing his skills on the farm, the team at Prokick was trying to find a landing spot for Shanahan. He compared the process to the ordering of a pizza.
“Coach rings them up, he tells them, ‘We want a guy that can do this, this and this.’ And then they take a look at their group of guys and [see] which guy would fit here. So they come up to you and say, ‘Hey, this school is interested in finding someone. Would you be interested in going here if they give you a scholarship?’ And if you say yes, and they give you a scholarship, that’s where you’re going. There’s no going back.”
Shanahan said they were talking to a couple of ACC schools, and then one Tuesday morning, he woke up to a text from Prokick coach John Smith.
“He’s like, ‘Hey we’re jumping on a Zoom with Georgia Tech tomorrow. I’m sure you’d be interested in going here?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’
“Then they sent them all of my film, and then I woke up to a text probably three or four days later, and it’s like, ‘You’re committed to Georgia Tech.’ It happened pretty quick.”
Shanahan announced his commitment to Tech on May 15, 2020. He was supposed to arrive in Atlanta in January of 2021, but because of the added COVID year, he was told there wouldn’t be any scholarships open until May.
He wanted to still continue to work at his craft in the meantime, but he couldn’t go back to Australia because of COVID restrictions. Shanahan’s coaches at Prokick recommended he go see Tom Hackett — a two-time Ray Guy Award winner and Prokick alum — in Utah to continue to grow. Shanahan made the journey to Utah, worked on his game and eventually ended up in Atlanta. He played his first American football game for the Yellow Jackets against Northern Illinois on Sept. 4, 2021.
It was an accomplishment just to make it onto the field, but Shanahan still had growing to do, especially when it came to understanding the game and situational punting.
“That was definitely an adjustment,” he said. “I can always sit back and boot a football, but it’s probably more situational stuff, knowing like when the rush is coming, when you just got to get it off, when you’re backed up in the end zone you got to shorten your steps, and the pooch punting.
“Obviously, a lot of that situational stuff, I definitely was not good at it as a freshman, and I would just go out there and kind of swing my leg and hope for the best. But that’s something that’s come out of experience, and coaches have been really good at helping me with all that. But I feel like I pretty much have it all down now. I’ve been doing it for long enough.”
The adjustments on the field are important, and Key emphasized that’s not something for anyone to gloss over in Shanahan’s journey. But Key also praised Shanahan for adjusting to everything off the field as well.
“To make the transition to live here, the transition academically, he never looked back, and it was never anything that was a struggle for him,” Key said. “Other than his accent, he plays right into everyone else.”
The Aer Lingus College Football Classic will be the first time that Shanahan’s family has been together for one of his games. Each player was given two tickets for family and friends, but Shanahan was able to get some from his teammates, and his dad purchased 20 additional tickets to give the family what Shanahan estimated to be at least 40 total seats.
Along with his excitement for having his family in attendance, Shanahan is hoping to introduce his teammates to local breakfast.
“It’s blood pudding,” he said. “You may mistake it for sausage, but it’s not really sausage. Coach Key hated it. I asked our nutritionist yesterday, ‘We’re having the pudding aren’t we?’ And she’s like, ‘Coach Key said he absolutely does not want to see that.’ I was like, ‘What are we doing here?’ But I’m going to sneak some blood pudding in.”
“He can introduce them all they want,” Key said. “I’m staying away from it. I’ll take my eggs and my grits.”
That’s fine. Shanahan has some less objectionable things he’d like to show his teammates and coaches, too: “There’s a couple of bars in Dublin that I’d love to take them to if we win.”