‘A massive adrenaline rush’: From Aussie rules to US college stardom

This story is part of the May 3 edition of Good Weekend.See all 14 stories.

The press was waiting on the tarmac at Atlanta’s airport in Georgia when a private jet carrying the University of Notre Dame’s football team touched down from Indiana on January 17. First off the flight was Marcus Freeman, one of the highest-paid college football coaches in the US, breezing down the stairs in dark glasses and a navy bomber jacket. Behind him came the university’s renowned team, the Fighting Irish, a legion of gladiator-sized men spilling off the plane in matching white tracksuits.

Among them was James Rendell, the team’s rookie punter, a specialist kicker, from Melbourne. Until last year, Rendell had never played a game of American football. The son of Matt Rendell, the late Fitzroy captain and AFL recruiter, Rendell had grown up in the thrall of Australian rules. Once a talented ruckman in the VFL (the semi-professional competition below the AFL), his career had taken a different turn.

Parked on the tarmac below was Notre Dame’s rock-star motorcade, four huge tour buses plastered with the team’s destination: 2025 NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP.

Three days later, the convoy was escorted by police to Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium for the game against Ohio State University’s Buckeyes. More than 77,000 fans were in the stands, including celebrity basketballer LeBron James, a Buckeyes fan. The teams’ raucous marching bands entertained the crowds, with rapper Travis Scott performing in the half-time show. More than 26 million viewers would tune in.

Joe McGuire with his dad, Eddie, and mum, Carla.Credit: Courtesy of Joe McGuire

Running onto the field in pads and a helmet with Ohio State that night was another Australian punter, Joe McGuire, the son of media megastar and former Collingwood president Eddie McGuire. “It was unreal,” says Joe breathlessly of the electric atmosphere at Atlanta’s stadium, a sci-fi arena with a telescopic roof that was inspired by the Pantheon in Rome.

The championship marks a whirlwind journey for Rendell and McGuire, both 24, who first met as lanky teenagers playing U14s Australian rules at Melbourne’s Toorak Park. The two are the latest in a crop of local talent that is coming to dominate punting in US college football, bringing a unique, Aussie twist to the game.

For players like Rendell who did not make it to the AFL, it’s a wild, second-chance story and “becoming more and more even first chance”, enthuses Eddie McGuire. He points to the million-dollar fortunes to be made for Aussie players if they can stick the ultimate punt: a contract after college in the National Football League (NFL), the biggest and wealthiest sporting league on the planet.

Best foot forward

If you asked an NFL scout to pick out the punter in the horde of Notre Dame players arriving off the plane in Atlanta, they probably wouldn’t have chosen Rendell. Six foot six (198 centimetres) and 100 kilograms, Rendell is built like a linebacker, big and tough enough to get past a 140-kilogram bruiser, but agile enough to chase down a wily running back sprinting with the ball.

Until now, American punters have typically been skinnier and shorter, often ex-soccer players. Called upon when a team must return possession of the ball, punters play the critical job of booting the ball downfield as far as possible. As in rugby league, the goal is to pin the opposing team deep in their territory.

Rendell needs ‘to prove he’s more than just a pretty face’, crowed an Indiana hometown newspaper at the start of last season.

Had the square-jawed, blue-eyed Rendell grown up in the US, he might have ended up a linebacker. As it stands, with his AFL pedigree Notre Dame has landed a punter with superpowers. Nicknamed Thor, after the hammer-wielding Norse god played by Chris Hemsworth in the Marvel movies, Rendell’s weapon is his leg. Rendell can boot the ball more than 60 yards (55 metres), keeping it in the air for more than five seconds – the precious “hang time” that allows the team to move downfield. Although standard in AFL, this is a stunning distance in American football, where players are not as fluent in kicking. Rendell also has the dexterity that has made Australian punters so valuable to US coaches, such as the ability to do a drop punt and spin the ball with his foot, making it harder for the other team to clock where it will land.

James Rendell showing early kicking skills.Credit: Courtesy of James Rendell

For many armchair critics, Rendell was nonetheless considered a gamble. Flying in from a world away, he was not a traditional punter who kicked the ball in a straightforward spiral. Rendell needs “to prove he’s more than just a pretty face”, crowed the South Bend Tribune, a hometown newspaper, at the start of last season.

Rendell had a lot to prove, not only to his coaches, who had given him a full scholarship at Notre Dame, but ultimately to himself – that hanging up his Aussie rules footy boots would be worth it.

In his father’s footsteps

Five years ago, Rendell was treading water. A ruckman like his late father, Matt Rendell – a much-loved player who captained Fitzroy in the 1980s and later played for the Brisbane Bears – Rendell had hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps. Representing Vic Metro in the U18 National Championships in 2018, Rendell was tipped as a solid prospect for the AFL draft that year. When he didn’t hear his name called out that November, the disappointment in the family was palpable. “We were all surprised,” says James’ mum, Leonie, who still prefers not to talk about it. If Rendell was gutted, the unassuming teenager didn’t let on and got on with it, she says.

James Rendell with his mum, Leonie.Credit: Courtesy of James Rendell

The role of ruckman demands intense physicality – both height and brawn – and some are picked up later. At 18, Rendell was already a gentle giant but still had growing to do.

A stepping stone appeared for Rendell with the opportunity to play in the VFL for the Frankston Dolphins in 2019. A good season followed, yet ground to a halt when COVID-19 hit in 2020 and again the following year, emptying stands for more than two years, a crucial window for Rendell: most ruckmen are drafted as teens.

Speaking by video from Indiana in a green and cream Notre Dame sweatshirt, Rendell remembers the prophetic advice from his father that stayed with him. Watching a chance game of US college football together at their Bayside home in 2017, Rendell snr chewed over an idea: “You know, if you wanted to, I think you have a big enough and good enough kick to be a punter.”

James Rendell fronts up for the second-tier VFL’s Frankston in April 2023.Credit: via Getty Images

There was a punting school in Melbourne, Prokick Australia, founded by former Brisbane Lion Nathan Chapman. “Chappy” had gone on to sign an NFL contract with the Green Bay Packers in Wisconsin as a punter in 2004 and later set up Prokick to feed Aussie talent into the US college football system.

Rendell was interested. Yet it wasn’t until tragedy hit that he reached a jumping-off point. On June 28, 2023, Rendell’s father passed away after suffering a massive heart attack while out walking the dog. He was 64. “It gives you a lot of perspective when something like that happens,” says Rendell thoughtfully.

Less than 12 months later, he was looking out the window of a plane flying over the Pacific en route to South Bend, a small rust-belt city in Indiana.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

Five years ago, Joe McGuire was also looking for a break, hauling a tripod and camera bags to games for Fox Footy and working as an assistant for his dad on the The Footy Show. Growing up playing amateur footy, he was never draft material, but he did have a good kick. It took his friend Lachlan Swaney, who went on to co-captain Carlton’s VFL team, to point that out.

“I’d kicked the footy with [Swaney] a little bit,” says the chipper McGuire, who bears a strong resemblance to his father. “He knew about Prokick and said to me, ‘Mate, you know, you’ve got a solid leg. Why don’t you give this a crack?’ ”

McGuire arranged to meet Prokick’s Chapman at a local park and was mildly intimidated to see three talented men training there who would be recruited to top football programs: Cam Peasley, who went to Utah, James Burnip, to Alabama, and Brett Thorson, who won a college national championship with the University of Georgia in 2022. “They kicked it well over my head that day,” notes a laughing McGuire, who thought he’d bombed. Chapman didn’t think so. At the end of the tryout he said he had enough to work with.

Joe McGuire’s “solid leg” took him to college football.Credit: Courtesy of Joe McGuire

An opportunity came knocking for McGuire that day, and he seized it. Eddie McGuire recalls thinking, “Right, this is serious”, when he saw his son getting up at 4.30am every day to work out. Training included double sessions at Conquest Athletic Performance, a gym run by Dave Tuinauvai, who has trained Tonga’s rugby league and rugby union teams.

Eddie McGuire describes how some of the rugby boys laughed at his son’s skinny frame when he first stepped into the boxing ring. It only made him more determined. “I ate everything I saw,” says Joe, grinning by video from Ohio. “I bulked right up.”

Eddie McGuire says his son got “stuck in” because he understood the level of competition he would face in the US. “These guys are bigger than rugby players,” says Joe, of the sumo-sized linemen. “I get in the gym and see some of them doing 20 chin-ups, and I’m like, ‘How are you doing that?’ ”

Joe McGuire credits Tuinauvai and Chapman for getting him mentally prepared for US college football. He says they were quick to point out “you’ll get killed over there for that” if he did something wrong. Chapman in turn credits McGuire for his tenacity: “He wanted to earn his stripes.”

More than a million American boys play football in high school annually, yet very few get the chance to go pro. In 2023, there were just over 77,000 playing football in college, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Competition for scholarships is fierce, and the odds of getting recruited to an elite Division 1 school such as Ohio State or Notre Dame are even more
remote. For every position on a team, there is someone waiting in the wings to snatch it away.

“It’s very much an attitude of, ‘Go out, do your job, get off,’ ” says McGuire of the pressure. He had to best other players – including fellow Australian Nick McLarty – to be Ohio’s starting punter before clinching the role with the consistency of his kick. There is a lot riding on the success of a team: college football is a multibillion-dollar business. Colleges not only earn money from ticket sales and TV rights, but enrolments frequently surge when a team wins.

‘I’ve been to a lot of games at the MCG where it’s a full house, but this was just different.’

James Rendell

The whole identity and community spirit of US college schools pivots around football. James Rendell recalls walking onto Kyle Field at Texas A&M University for his first-ever game and being hit with the roar of more than 100,000 mostly hostile Texas fans twirling white towels to distract his team.

The field is smaller than an AFL oval, making it feel as if the fans are on top of you. “I’ve been to a lot of games at the MCG where it’s a full house, but this was just different,” says Rendell. “It was just a massive adrenaline rush.”

There are also rivalries between colleges. McGuire describes how, in the lead-up to a home game against its nemesis Michigan last November, every letter M on Ohio State’s signage was crossed out with red tape. A brawl broke out on the field when Michigan won and a player tried to plant their flag, a giant yellow M, into Ohio’s field. Police had to use pepper spray to break up the fight. An Ohio lawmaker then tried to make flag-planting a felony.

While Notre Dame is located in a small town, it boasts a hardcore, nationwide fan base. The college has long been the team of choice for Irish-Americans and working-class Catholics, many of whom show up before games, drinking beer and grilling sausages as early as 8am. The team mascot is a leprechaun with his fists up.

Football at Notre Dame also verges on the religious. A 41-metre-high mosaic of Christ on the library’s façade, visible from Notre Dame’s stadium, is known as the “Touchdown Jesus”. Seen from a distance, the apparition of Jesus with his arms outstretched looks like a referee declaring a touchdown. Around the stadium there are also the immortals who delivered Notre Dame victory in ages past: huge bronze statues of coaches such as Ara Parseghian and Lou Holtz. Football coaches are godlike: Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman is on a contract worth $US9 million ($14 million) a year. Ohio State’s head coach Ryan Day got a pay rise after the championship, taking him to $US12.5 million ($20 million) a year.

Cutting-edge facilities

No expense is spared on student athletes, either. “We’ve got cryotherapy saunas, float tanks, obviously a massive weight room,” says McGuire. He rattles off a list of expensive machines available to the team at the university medical school.

Yet with every advantage comes expectation. There is no room for failure, particularly for the punter, who must execute flawlessly, in rain, hail or shine. Leonie Rendell recalls a freezing game in South Bend when it was snowing and her fingers were frozen inside her gloves. She felt for her son. “He’s standing around, everyone else is running around. He said his fingers were frozen; he said the ball was frozen, like a dead weight.”

Rendell admits that his biggest challenge was staying mentally and physically ready to perform: “With punting, you might sit on the bench for three hours, and then you’re out in the field for 30 seconds.”

Preseason football training starts in the winter in Ohio, where temperatures can dip below minus 5 degrees. Rising in the dark, McGuire crunches across ice-covered streets to arrive at the athletics centre well ahead of time. If he’s one minute late, he’ll be on “dawn patrol”: a punishment that involves cleaning the gym on a Saturday morning followed by community service.

His teammates will also be furious at him. The team is broken up into sub-groups that are accountable to each other. If one player is late, the entire sub-group has to do dawn patrol: sweeping the gym floor, wiping down the weights and stocking the fridges with Gatorade. “Big team-punishment culture,” explains McGuire.

A warm breakfast is waiting for the athletes, a steaming buffet of pancakes, waffles, eggs, bacon and cinnamon toast. There is also an ice-cream machine, but “it’s pretty brave to have an ice-cream before you train”, quips McGuire.

Training starts with sprints. Then the coaches dial it up. The athletes might push heavy sleds or boxes across the ground for 100 yards. “That’s normally when people start vomiting,” says McGuire. After this is 1½ hours of heavy lifting. Finally, there is a daily contest between the groups, such as doing the maximum number of chin-ups on a rope. “If you lose, they’ll really make a big point of saying … LOSER!” says McGuire, as if yelling through a bullhorn. He recounts a day when his legs gave out. “I got screamed at for it, but I just had to sit down. I just couldn’t stand up anymore.”

For all the abuse, McGuire says there is also great camaraderie on the team, and he has met people from all walks of life. The team is also infused with a culture of Christianity, something you don’t see in Australia. Throughout last season, the team would take a knee on the field before games.

The prayers paid off. Despite the early upset with Michigan, Ohio State made it through to the championship and the students went berserk. McGuire recalls walking into a bar on campus straight into a victory “champagne shower”. The highlights reel continued last month, when the winning team met President Donald Trump at the White House as per tradition.

Kicking goals

Prokick Australia has produced its fair share of winners. Eight of the last 11 Ray Guy Awards, honouring the college punter of the year, went to alums. Since 2007, it has sent more than 270 Australian punters to the US on scholarships.

In 2004 – when Nathan Chapman was trying to break through to the NFL – Australian punters weren’t even on the radar. He had to hustle, mailing VHS tapes of his kicking to a Green Bay Packers coach. The move worked, and he landed a contract.

Nathan Chapman founded Prokick Australia to place local talent in the US college football system.Credit: Getty Images

While Chapman was by all reports insanely gifted, he was ultimately not selected as the Green Bay Packers’ starting punter. “I was let go,” he explains in a gravelly voice. “We were expecting Green Bay to gamble on a person who could kick a football but had never played the game before.”

Chapman feels he suffered from being an unknown. NFL recruits from college teams and he’d flown in over the top of the pipeline. In 2007, he founded Prokick Australia to teach punting and to help place Aussie talent into US schools. Since then, Prokick punters have only become more sought after.

‘The Americans don’t like it when we say “the Aussie takeover”.’

Joe McGuire

Notre Dame’s special teams co-ordinator Marty Biagi – who flew to Melbourne to recruit Rendell – reportedly only wanted an Australian punter. Speaking to InsideNDSports last year, he recalled an exchange with coach Freeman that went: “You’re going to get an Australian, aren’t you?” Punting has changed and coach Biagi stressed that teams had to “adapt or die”.

While ex-AFL players have an advantage for now, Chapman is not resting on his laurels. He says the Americans could very well catch up. McGuire, however, is more bullish on the Australian invasion. “They don’t like it when we say ‘the Aussie takeover’,” he says, laughing. “But there are significantly more Australians each year who join the college and NFL programs.”

For those who eventually make it to the NFL, the payoff can be huge. In March, Geelong-born Cameron Johnston signed a three-year, $US9 million contract with the Pittsburgh Steelers. While punters earn much less than other players, the contract exceeds that of the best-paid stars in the AFL.

Other Aussie punters in the NFL include Michael Dickson (Seattle Seahawks), Mitch Wishnowsky (San Francisco 49ers) and Tory Taylor (Chicago Bears), all Prokick Australia alums.

Uphill climb

When Rendell moved to Notre Dame last year, he shared a place off campus with quarterback Riley Leonard. Living on his own now, he walks to campus year-round through the winter snow and the gentle greens of spring. Studying for a master’s degree in the business school, Rendell has another year of eligibility at Notre Dame.

While his first season started out a little wobbly, he soon hit his stride. At a game against Virginia in November, he muzzled his critics, booming the ball 64 yards (58 metres).

Rendell expresses gratitude for the opportunity at Notre Dame. He describes his first game at Texas A&M as one of the best nights of his life. In November, he got to high-five the rock star Jon Bon Jovi, who was on the sidelines of a home game. Notre Dame’s 380-piece marching band honoured the ageing rocker with a rendition of his band’s 2000 hit It’s My Life – with rows of tubas honking along to the lyrics: “It’s now or never, I ain’t gonna live forever. I just want to live while I’m alive.”

The last year has also been a rollercoaster for James’ mum Leonie, who has swept through countless airports. A long-time TV make-up artist, she has known Eddie McGuire for decades. The two traded text messages all season, with one from McGuire declaring, “We’re both going to end up in Atlanta together, I’m sure of it!”

While the ultimate goal for both Rendell and McGuire is the NFL, there are no guarantees. Only a handful of punting spots open up each year; you need not only freakish talent but luck on your side.

If it all ended tomorrow, “it’s been a wonderful, wonderful ride”, says Eddie McGuire, who has spent months in the US on the sidelines of games wearing his son’s red No. 42 Ohio State jersey. How the tables have turned, he adds. His son was recently asked by Fox Sports to co-anchor its NRL coverage from Las Vegas. “As a football star,” he adds, chuckling.

While he jokes, he is clearly proud of his son. “He’s done all this on his own,” he emphasises. “No one at Ohio State gives a rats that his father was the
president at Collingwood or hosted Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

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