In the lobby of the ultra-plush Four Seasons in Fort Lauderdale last Saturday night, Charlie Smyth wrapped Tadhg Leader in a hug and then the pair of them looked around and laughed. The cheapest rooms in the joint go for around a grand a night and this was where the New Orleans Saints were staying in advance of their game against the Miami Dolphins the following day. We’re not in Mayobridge any more, Toto.
“Tadhg, this is f**king mad. This is class.”
“It is, Charlie. It absolutely is.”
Leader was exhausted and he was starving. He’d basically been travelling non-stop since Smyth’s phone call 24 hours earlier telling him he’d be kicking for the Saints on Sunday. Smyth wouldn’t see him stuck – Ireland’s newest NFL player raided the team room, bringing down pizza and pasta for the man who had started him along the road.
READ MORE
They met for the first time 2½ years ago. Leader Kicking, the programme run by Leader to help young athletes gain scholarships to US colleges and play American sports, had only been up and running a few months and Tadhg was in Dublin running trials for GAA players to see if they could be converted into American Football kickers. Smyth turned up late at Suttonians rugby club that first night – he’d mixed up his days and gone to the wrong venue.
They were in the right place now, all right.
“We sat there in the lobby for the guts of two hours,” says Leader. “And actually, it was my favourite memory from the whole weekend, I think. We hardly talked about the next day at all. We spent far more time reflecting on the journey that had brought Charlie to this point than projecting forward on to what was going to happen on Sunday.
“It was lovely. Two Irish lads, one from Down and one from Galway, sitting in there in the Four Seasons. It was really nice just to be looking at him – he just looked the part and sounded the part. He was just confident and ready. And I was like, ‘This lad firmly belongs.’ Which was just really nice sitting there, as I was half falling asleep. But that kept me going.
“I didn’t want to let on that I was as tired as I was but it was three or four in the morning in my body by that stage. So we sat there talking shite basically until he said, ‘I should probably go up here.’ And I went to find a hotel for the night that wasn’t the Four Seasons. Some place for 150 bucks where I wouldn’t get my car stolen.”
Everything since then has been a tornado whipping through their lives. Smyth had one field goal attempt the next day, splitting the posts from 57 yards. It was the third-longest debut kick made in the history of the NFL. He followed it up with a successful onside kick – NFL jargon for the extremely rare event of a team recovering its own kick-off after a score. The league average is 4.7 per cent. The Charlie Smyth average is 100 per cent.
The numbers won’t last. They know that. Smyth has got the nod to play again this weekend when the Saints take on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and, with only four games left in the schedule, there’s every chance he’ll keep the job until the end of the season. But New Orleans have won just two games out of 12 so far and there will be plenty of changes coming in the off-season. Nothing about Charlie Smyth’s future is inevitable.
But in the here and now, it’s a golden time. In Miami last weekend, Leader met Smyth’s parents and sat with them for the game. He reminded Julie Smyth of a session he held in Carlow IT some time in the summer of 2023. She had driven her boy 200km down the country for this American football thing and wasn’t at all sure why she was doing it.
“This was maybe only a month into Charlie starting off,” Leader says. “And I remember she was asking me like, ‘What is this? Why are we in Carlow? What’s the plan?’ I said to her, ‘Look, I think your son has something. I have no clue where it’s going to take us, but I’m pretty sure there’s something there.’
“I said it to her on Sunday and we were laughing about it. I was saying, ‘I told you! It was worth the drive from Newry to Carlow!’ They’re great people. Normal, everyday people. Leo sells plumbing supplies. Julie’s a schoolteacher. Their lives have changed. Everyone’s lives have changed, including mine.”
In so many ways, Smyth is an outlier. Leader Kicking was set up to try to create a pathway for Irish kids into American Football but the direct route to the NFL is far from the typical one. Leader has around 20 players in his stable and the vast majority of them are in college football. They may one day make it to the NFL but the priority is to get them through university first.
Leader has spent the past three years building relationships with kicking coaches in colleges throughout the US. Making contacts, showing film, establishing a rep. Consequently, there are Irish players kicking in front of 100,000 people every weekend during the college football season, in some of the biggest conferences in the US.
Seán O’Haire from Kildare was working in a service station in Enfield a couple of years ago. Now he’s the top-ranked kicker in the Big Ten conference, slotting 21 out of 24 field goal attempts across the season. Lorcan Quinn has an All-Ireland medal as the Tyrone sub-goalie in 2021; now he’s the ninth-ranked kicker in the country and has just broken all-time records at his school, Marshall University in Huntington, Virginia.
“The big thing that has changed even in the short space of time since we started is that there’s opportunities now for the players to get paid. College football was always strictly amateur but that has changed now. So when I’m fielding calls now, I have colleges saying, ‘We’re interested in your guy, we can offer him the guts of six figures if he comes to our programme.’
“I had two of those calls last week. That’s a huge departure for me – I was just coaching lads. But now there’s a representation side of it, which wasn’t at all in the business plan at the start because it just didn’t exist to be in the business plan. So we are learning and adapting as we go.
“We closed a deal last week for a young fella who was committed to Penn State but then he flipped over to the University of North Carolina, which is Bill Belichick’s team. I had two other colleges trying to get him in the air to come and see their programme but we decided to go with UNC. I had schools calling to offer six figures for two other lads – this was all in the space of five hours while I was sitting here in my box room in Loughrea.”
[ From Mayobridge to New Orleans - Charlie Smyth’s journey to the NFLOpens in new window ]
The money pool can feel bottomless at times. The hard sell that comes from colleges when they are recruiting a player has to be seen to be believed. Chauffeur-driven to Dublin Airport from anywhere in the country, key cards with the lad’s face on it when he and his family reach their hotel on the other side, letters from 10 to 15 different heads of department at the university. It can feel too much at times.
“I’m always telling the colleges that it’s not necessary. Like, relax, you don’t need to do all this. It’s almost a bit uncomfortable for us. We kind of like strip it back and try to cut out the bullshit as much as possible. Which has definitely stood to us. People like dealing with us.
“They like the Irish lads. Really good athletes, really good kickers, just good lads to have in your college. And then we try to make it as straightforward as possible for it all to happen. Every coach I’ve come across loves the lads because none of them are high maintenance. They don’t want a high-maintenance fella in the building. Most of the guys don’t know enough to say much anyway. So they keep the head down and they just kick it straight.”
Leader’s role in it all expands and contracts depending on what day it is. He is partly a coach, partly a business manager, partly a surrogate parent. He got a panicked call from one of his players a few weeks back whose coach had seen him messing about at training, kicking an O’Neill’s ball with his weaker foot. Now he wanted to get him doing the same while punting an American football.
So Leader had to ring the coach and explain that while his guy was all right on his weaker foot using the ball he’d known all his life, you wouldn’t want the fate of a college season depending on it being transferable to the gridiron. Between them, they were able to save the coach from himself.
It’s a whole new world. Less than four years after he set up Leader Kicking, he has sent a few dozen players to colleges around the US and a couple more to the pros. The plan is to keep feeding players through the pipeline, albeit not so many that it becomes unmanageable. There is a duty of care involved in taking young men away from their homes and families and feeding them into a cut-throat world. He doesn’t sugar-coat the downsides.
But last Sunday on the pitch at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, Charlie Smyth kicked his 56-yarder and Tadhg Leader was there, sitting directly behind it, watching it sail between the posts.
Nothing is inevitable. But they’re finding that nothing is impossible either.
