CASTLEISLAND, Ireland — Eliza Shanahan didn’t quite understand her youngest son’s preoccupation with American football. David was a talented multi-sport athlete and appeared to have a future in two of them, Gaelic football (a sport combining elements of soccer, rugby and basketball that is hugely popular in Ireland) and rugby.
But as early as 6 a.m. as a 17-year-old, the schoolteacher’s son left the house on a near-daily basis to walk to the nearby Gaelic football field to work on his American football punting despite the fact that he had never played the game. On the other hand, at least, he was devoted to the show “Friday Night Lights.”
“David would come home here every evening and he’d get a scone and milk and he’d sit out there (watching),” Eliza Shanahan said of the youngest of four children.
He booted footballs purchased on Amazon, used YouTube videos to learn technique and then checked it by recording himself. When the weather was inclement, Eliza gave David a ride to the field.
Said Eliza Shanahan, “Even some mornings I would get up to take him up there in the pouring rain or something, I just sat there, like, ‘What does he keep doing?’”
Her confusion has given way to clarity and a moment the family will remember for a long time. Shanahan’s perseverance and ambition to play college football in the U.S. turned into a scholarship to Georgia Tech, a three-year run as the Yellow Jackets’ starting punter, a business degree and – perhaps most unthinkably – the opportunity to play before his fellow Irish on one of the nation’s grandest stages. Tech plays Florida State on Saturday at sold-out Aviva Stadium in Dublin (noon, ESPN).
“It’ll be great and it’ll be nerve-wracking,” said Shanahan’s father Jack, a pharmacist.
On Wednesday, with a visitor from Atlanta in town, Shanahan’s parents and others who know Shanahan well shared their wonder at his unlikely and uncharted journey to become what is believed to be the first Ireland native to earn a full scholarship to play college football in the U.S.
“The whole thing is surreal,” said Steve Murphy, a veterinarian who coached Shanahan in Gaelic football.
Adam Manley has been close friends with Shanahan since he was 12. He visited Shanahan in Atlanta in May 2022 and got a tour of campus and the football team’s facilities.
It was a lot to take in for someone who grew up (with Shanahan) in Castleisland, a town of about 2,500 with a one-street downtown.
“It’s incredible to see what he’s been able to achieve,” said Manley, sitting at the kitchen table in the Shanahans’ Castleisland home. “It’s just worlds apart from what we’re used to here.”
In defense of Castleisland, Shanahan is also a product of a sports-mad community. Castleisland sits in southwest Ireland, a train ride of almost four hours from Dublin on the eastern coast. They are separated by a seemingly endless landscape of pastures for cows and sheep to graze hedged by bushes and trees.
It’s a delightful trip, from the employee at Dublin’s Heuston Station asking “How can I help you, lad?” to the charming stonework railway stations along the way to Farranfore, the stop closest to Castleisland.
As for Castleisland’s sporting credentials, the only running track in County Kerry is in Castleisland, Jack Shanahan said. Kerry is a Gaelic football powerhouse – its men’s and women’s teams have both won the most All-Ireland championships, something akin to the country’s Super Bowl – and Castleisland regularly feeds the Kerry rosters.
Shanahan himself was part of the Kerry U17 team that won that age group’s national championship in 2017.
The town feeds a basketball passion that Indiana farming communities would appreciate. Castleisland hosts a tournament between Christmas and New Year’s that has been held annually for more than 50 years and draws dozens of teams from youth to adults.
“If you didn’t play a sport (as a youth), it was kind of unusual,” said Manley, Shanahan’s close friend.
This also was the nesting grounds for Shanahan, whose family on his father’s side traces back its roots in Castleisland 300 years.
At the least, that grounding didn’t prevent him from pursuing something literally foreign in American football punting.
Said Paul Walsh, another close friend, “We all knew he was interested in American football. It was always his thing.”
In 2019, Shanahan connected with Prokick Australia, an academy dedicated to teaching the fine arts of punting and kicking to athletes (mostly Australians) with a goal of earning U.S. college football scholarships. He got the invitation to Australia after an evaluation in Dublin with a coach (John Smith) who happened to be in England when Shanahan connected with him.
“I didn’t want him to go (to Australia), but you know you wanted him to get it,” Eliza Shanahan said. “Because he wanted it. So I found myself hoping to God he got it because he wanted it so badly.”
Such was his interest in college football that he had arranged to travel to the U.S. to attend a Clemson home game in 2019 with his parents (Jack Shanahan’s sister Anne-Marie Canty lives in Roswell with her husband). But Shanahan had to cut short the visit to the States to start his training in Australia, meaning he missed out on Clemson’s season opener against … Georgia Tech.
Said Jack Shanahan, “We didn’t even know what Georgia Tech was.”
Shanahan trained in Australia in 2019, and then was back home during the COVID-19 outbreak. He spent some of his time punting in the pasture of his family’s dairy farm. His elder brother Robert snapped to him.
When he enrolled at Tech in 2021, he played in the first football game he ever attended. He has been the starter ever since, and his success has opened impressionable eyes back in his home country.
“I get phone calls regularly enough from parents of kids that are looking at going to Australia,” Jack Shanahan said.
The young man from the small southwest Ireland town can make an even bigger influence Saturday. Murphy, Shanahan’s Gaelic football coach, suspects that many Castleisland residents don’t fully appreciate Shanahan’s American accomplishment because the game is unfamiliar to them. But playing at the Aviva – the country’s second-most revered stadium after Croke Park – likely will speak to virtually all of them. Two in particular.
“We’re very proud, obviously,” Jack Shanahan said. “It’s going to be two very proud parents. This is something that would have been beyond our wildest dreams, for David to be playing American football in the Aviva in front of a sell-out crowd.”
Credit: Ken Sugiura
Credit: Ken Sugiura
Credit: John Reidy
Credit: John Reidy
Credit: Photo contributed by Jack Shanahan
Credit: Photo contributed by Jack Shanahan
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