“They” say you can’t go home again.
Yeah, you can. And Georgia Tech punter David Shanahan is gonna do it this weekend.
And the whole world is gonna watch.
Shanahan is a native of Ireland, and – as ESPN’s Harry Lyles Jr. reports here (David Shanahan’s unconventional trip from Ireland to Atlanta and back) – he’s going to be lining up Saturday in Aviva Stadium in Dublin for the Aer Lingus Kickoff Classic against Florida State.
The game kicks off at noon Eastern on ESPN, and in fact, the network’s popular “College GameDay” show will be on site there, as well.
Of course, in addition to being the biggest game of just a handful of games on Saturday, the first week there’s actually major college football of the 2024 season, it’s an Atlantic Coast Conference game.
Shanahan likely will have big butterflies playing in his home country, but he is a senior, a former rugby player, who took an unconventional path to the Yellow Jackets, as most foreign players do to U.S. college football programs.
According to Lyles’ story, Shanahan played for Kerry’s Under-17 Gaelic football and won the 2017 Munster title, Gaelic football’s national championship.
He took up American football.
“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.”
He began to save up, working at – among other places – the family farm and his father’s pharmacy in an effort to raise money to go to Melbourne, Australia to get to Prokick Australia there. Prokick is known for its proficiency in producing elite NFL punters: six of the past seven Ray Guy Award winners were Prokick students.
COVID-19 hit, though, and de-railed those plans. Eventually, though, he not only became a Prokick student, but was contacted by a Prokick coach, John Smith, who helped connect him with Georgia Tech University through, oddly enough, a Zoom call.
Before long, he was a Yellow Jacket, suiting up for Tech in the fall of 2021.
Shanahan had 45 punts last season, his junior season, a long of 61 yards, and averaged 42.8 yards per punt.
This game Saturday will be the first that his family will have seen one of David’s games – each player, Lyles notes in his story, was given two tickets for family, but with not many players’ families able to make the trip, Shanahan was able to secure a few – 20 – and have about 40 seats for his own family.
Now, can they start the season off right and beat the Seminoles?
