Armagh will have another bugg win to celebrate after a former county goalkeeper secured a place in a top-flight American football school in Alabama.
Paddy McAteer, from Mullaghbawn Cúchulainns GFC, will jet off to Alabama and tog out for Troy University, a division one college team, as their kicker next season.
The Orchard goalkeeper’s life changed after a kicking camp at the John Carroll University campus in University Heights, Ohio, where he went with Leader Kicking to showcase his talents.
He is one of the latest crop of Irish athletes to try to make the transition from the GAA pitch to the gridiron, joining Jack Scullion of Lavey in taking up scholarships in America for next season.
He will join the revolution of Irish athletes going over to try and make their mark in America and showcase the Irish kicking talent to the gridiron football world.
This caps off a very successful summer for Armagh GAA after McAteer’s former teammates on the senior football panel were crowned All-Ireland champions for the first time in 22 years.
Last year saw the first-ever crop of Irish athletes be selected for the NFL’s International Player Pathway program, including Down, Mayobridge and St Mary’s goalkeeper, Charlie Smyth, who secured a pro contract with the New Orleans Saints NFL team in Louisiana.
2023 also saw two Irish athletes make the same jump that McAteer is making, in the shape of Ross Bolger from Laois and Rónan Patterson of Cavan, who are currently playing at Idaho State and Monmouth University respectively.
Fellow St Colman’s alumni Charlie Smyth’s accomplishments in the last 12 months have had a huge impact on his career and the careers of lots of young men up and down the country.
The Down, Mayobridge and St Mary’s Keeper has broken down a barrier that most Irish athletes wouldn’t even know was there in the first place.
This is certainly the case for fellow St Mary’s pupil and player Paddy McAteer, who attracted the interest of the Troy University American football team after trying to follow in Charlie Smyth’s footsteps.
“It was about December last year that I started thinking about it, at that stage Charlie was only really starting off at it, so I heard of all these different opportunities he was getting out of it”, said McAteer, who had already shown interest in the sport from a tactical viewpoint for a couple of years.
“In Gaelic Football goalkeeping, the way it has went recently, kickouts would be similar to the quarterback role in American football, you’re kind of playing as a playmaker now.
“When I first started watching it, I was trying to take snippets of different plays, different routes that the wide receivers might run and wondering if there were boys in our team that could try them and kick it long into their path the way that quarterbacks would throw it into their path.”
After a couple of years of practising these methods and developing his kicking style of the back of trying these tactics out with his dad and teammates in Mullaghbawn, he, after seeing his fellow Ranch teammate Smyth, eventually decided to give the kicking side of America’s game a go.
McAteer, who had been in and around McGeeney’s Armagh set-up for a couple of years before stepping back, said: “Watching him [Charlie Smyth] in action in a couple of games at St Mary’s, he was there with me, you were like, “This is obviously working for him because some of the kickouts he was hitting were just phenomenal.”
The Cúchulainns clubman did suffer a setback that, had it not happened, could have been taking kicks alongside his fellow St Mary’s Alumni.
“I wanted to go [to Leader Kicking] earlier than I did, I want to go sort of after Christmas, but then I sustained an injury in my foot so then I had to push it back.
“Whilst I was pushing it back I was, like the rest of sports fans in Ireland who had an interest in it, started looking at Leader Kicking’s Instagram page and all the opportunities Charlie was getting out of it.”
Leader Kicking is the leading American football kicking clinic in Ireland, led by Tadhg Leader, a former professional American football kicker who wants to bring more opportunities to Irish athletes looking to maximise their potential in American football.
He is the coach behind getting Charlie Smyth his pro contract and getting Monaghan’s Rory Beggan and Wicklow’s Mark Jackson trials with the Carolina Panthers and Pittsburgh Steelers respectively.
McAteer went into the trial with a clear goal in mind and that he needed to showcase the very best of his ability to make it.
He said: “Obviously you have to go in with the mindset that it is possible for you if you’re going down to try and make it work on obviously that takes a lot of commitment.
“I knew the work I had to do myself, to make this dream a reality, behind the scenes and that’s not just in terms of physical skills but mental preparation as well.
“You have to prepare to put yourself in high-pressure situations, that was the mentality I had so I knew to myself kicking a ball over the bar wouldn’t be good enough, you’d need to be able to do it under pressure and thrive under pressure because that’s through watching American football over the last couple of years I understood that myself.”
After his trip to the American midwest, Ryan has had to get to grips with stepping back from the sport he has grown up loving and swapping south Armagh for the deep south of the USA, a country that he has grown to love over the years.
“Mum’s obviously going to be sad because I’m the youngest in my family and I’m the last one in the house now so I don’t know how she’s going to cope”, he laughed.
“They [his parents] told me they’re extremely proud of me, which is a big thing for me but I’ve said to them before, we’ll be staying in contact and going out there to do something I love and make the family proud.”
For the time being, the goalkeeper has stepped back from his Cúchulainns but he knows that he will have the full backing of his teammates when he makes the jump across the pond.
“They were very understanding, and very happy for me which is good and it’s something that they’ve seen on social media themselves, so they’ve been very supportive in fairness, sending me well wishes and all. It means a lot [to have] the support back home for definite,” said McAteer.
“Obviously I love Mullaghbawn but this is a life-changing opportunity to get so I want to grasp it with both hands.
“They’ve been very understanding, in fairness, any time I’d go up to the clubhouse after the game for a bit of food they’d be congratulating me, it means a lot to have the community’s backing going into such unknowns in the future.”
Kicking in American football is one of the most high-pressure positions in professional sports, with little room for error and little to no room for passing the buck on to other teammates.
NFL kickers have been known to be dropped for having a bad two or three-game spell, such is the need for a reliable kicker that a team can call on to seal out a game.
However, kickers must also be able to perform regularly and, if needed, produce results on the biggest stages, as Kansas City Cheifs kicker Harrison Butker demonstrated, kicking the winning field goal in the dying seconds to win the Vince Lombardi trophy for the Chiefs kingdom.
“It wasn’t a very hard distance but the mental pressure on you at that stage, you can’t even think of it so you have to mentally and physically put yourself in the best condition possible to make this dream a reality”, said McAteer.
“Thankfully, with Tadhg’s dedication to help me with that, I’ve been able to do it over in Ohio so hopefully I’m able to continue with that.”
In the coming weeks, McAteer will head out to Alabama, where he will start preparing for Troy’s college season, which gets underway with an away trip to Nevada on September 1.
