Through five games, the Georgia Tech football player who has had the most newspaper ink and smartphone pixels committed to him could be punter David Shanahan.
While his play as a freshman has drawn moderate attention in Atlanta, he has become something of a sportsman of minor note in his native Ireland. Multiple outlets in Ireland have written about him, as his journey from aspiring Gaelic football player to American college football scholarship recipient has been an intriguing novelty.
“This lad, he is kind of a trailblazer,” Malachy Clerkin, a veteran sportswriter with the Irish Times, told the AJC.
Clerkin was one of at least four Irish media members to speak with Shanahan last week on a videoconference to hear about his exploits with the Yellow Jackets for articles that followed others on his commitment to Tech in May 2020 and his debut against Northern Illinois. A subset of Irish sports fans pay attention to American sports such as the NBA or NFL, but interest in college football is scant, according to Clerkin. But, the unlikelihood of Shanahan’s Jackets playing against North Carolina, a team with another Irish punter (Ben Kiernan, who grew up in Dublin and moved to the U.S. when he was in high school) was a story worthy of note.
Clerkin called it “quirky, the idea of two Irish punters playing against each other. Like, this has never happened before.”
(An unrelated insight from Clerkin – the under-17 Gaelic football team that Shanahan played for, County Kerry, is a powerhouse in the sport, which has elements of soccer, basketball and rugby. “It’s like Alabama,” said Clerkin, tapping into the seeming universal standard for juggernauts. “Aren’t they the best, most storied team?”)
Shanahan has received the attention with healthy perspective.
“It’s been fun,” he said. “I’ve really enjoyed it. When I committed here, it was like last May. So one of the things, there was literally no sports on them. So when I committed, journalists were just looking for something to write about. I was just content. It was fun.”
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