9/28 Indy star. Brents/Gay articles
How Matt Gay went from a college soccer star to the Colts’ record-setting kicker
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INDIANAPOLIS — The soccer star walked into a store, bought a couple of footballs and some kicking stix, headed back to his car and drove away, the dreams he’d harbored since he was a kid changing with every step, every turn of the steering wheel.
He’d already made his decision.
Now, Matt Gay needed to make it count.
Gay headed home, pulled up a few videos of NFL kickers, enough to get the gist of the technique.
From what he could tell, just about every kicker used the same setup.
Three steps back. Two to the side.
Kick.
The way he’d been kicking his entire life. For the next several months, through the long, cold Utah winter, Gay picked up his football a couple of times a week, made sure he had his stix and headed to a local field to kick, as long as it wasn’t snowing too heavily.
All he needed was an opportunity.
A chance to make his modified dream come true.
The results were nearly disastrous
Playing professional soccer was the goal for so long.
Gay’s only goal.
A sizable central forward with plenty of power and a knack for free kicks, Gay’s heroes growing up were Cristiano Ronaldo, Dimitar Berbatov, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Fernando Torres — international superstars who played the same position.
Gay got closer to reaching the top of the mountain than most people ever do.
“He was something of a prodigy here in Utah,” Greg Maas, Gay’s coach at Utah Valley, told The Deseret News in 2017. “He’s a very strong, powerful player that can strike the ball like no other player I’ve had a chance to coach.”
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Gay was good enough that he was a part of Real Salt Lake’s U.S. Soccer Development Academy, spent four seasons in the Utah Olympic Development Program, two in the same program for USA Region IV. Gay is the first player from Utah to go to the USA Men’s National Team’s residency program in Bradenton, Fla., although he was 15 at the time, and after a couple of months he decided to leave the program and head home to Utah, in part to be with his family.
The sport was the first time Gay ever remembers going into “blackout mode,” the state of football zen he reaches when he’s kicking well.
“Yeah, there’s definitely games where you’re feeling it, and you’re not really thinking, you’re just reacting,” Gay said. “Defenders are moving, but you’re moving a little bit quicker, and you’re just finding the right spaces, finding the ball on your foot and you’re scoring goals.”
He had only tried football once.
When Gay started attending Orem High School, he was willing to be the team’s kicker, but he refused to compromise his soccer career by missing training to go to practice and kick field goals during the week. Orem’s football coach had a policy that no one could play on Fridays if they hadn’t practiced during the week.
Gay played soccer year-round.
He wasn’t about to miss any soccer development because he was at football practice, and the story could have ended there, except that Orem hired a new football coach right before Gay’s senior year, and the new coach had no issues with waiving Gay’s practice obligation if it meant he could get the kid with the big leg kicking on Friday nights.
The results were nearly disastrous.
Gay had just finished a kick and set his kicking foot back on the ground when an opponent slammed into the his knee, tearing Gay’s meniscus and partially tearing his ACL and MCL, to boot. Gay spent six months rehabilitating, returning just in time to help his high school reach the semifinals.
A scare, but one he overcame quickly. Gay led the Utah Valley soccer team with seven goals and 18 points as a freshman in college.
Then his faith took him to Houston. Gay, who is Mormon, went on an LDS mission and, although he struggled being that far way from his family, he looks back on that trip as “good hardship,” hardship that ultimately put him on the path he’s walking now, even if it was difficult at the time.
“When I came back, I just wasn’t in soccer shape,” Gay said. “I gained weight on my mission. I was just having a hard time getting back to soccer fitness, and so that year I came back (to Utah Valley), I struggled. I wasn’t playing as much. I wasn’t scoring as much. Things were frustrating.”
Gay had never seriously considered the possibility that he might not be a professional athlete someday, and although he still believed he could make it to MLS, preferably with Real Salt Lake, the disappointment of the season left him wondering about his future.
“There just wasn’t a Plan B for me,” Gay said. “I just didn’t have a fallback.”
A friend mentioned the nearby University of Utah was looking for a kicker.
“That’s when the thought stirred with me,” Gay said. “I thought: ‘Even if I do make it pro in MLS, you know, it doesn’t pay that great. Might as well do this and go for it, make some money.’”
He headed to the store to buy some footballs.
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How Matt Gay became a kicker
The first thing Kyle Whittingham noticed about his walk-on kicker was the athleticism.
“He’s a kicker that could play other positions,” the long-time Utah football coach said. “He’s an exceptional athlete.”
Gay landed a spot on Utah’s roster in the Utes’ annual kicking camp despite going up against freshman Chayden Johnston, a scholarship kicker who’d been ranked the ninth in the country by Kohl’s Kicking Academy, the premier kicking academy in the country.
When Utah broke camp, Johnston was the team’s kicker, even though the Utes coaching staff liked Gay.
The scholarship freshman held the job for one kick.
When Johnston missed the first Utah kick of the 2017 season, Whittingham told Gay to start getting ready, because he was about to handle the next one.
“He had not yet fully developed, but we could tell he was on his way,” Whittingham said of Gay. “He ended up taking that position over and never looked back.”
Gay made 30 of 34 field goals for Utah in his first football season — fellow Ute Julian Blackmon says the team nicknamed its new weapon “Automatic Matt” — and won the Lou Groza Award, annually given to the nation’s best kicker.
When he left soccer behind, Gay had told himself that he wouldn’t make the move unless he could make it count, a measuring stick set at reaching the NFL.
But when Utah punter Mitch Wishnowsky told Gay that he might win the Lou Groza Award — an award Gay had never heard about before — the realization of his goal seemed closer than he’d ever imagined.
“I was thinking, ‘Holy cow, this might be a thing,’” Gay said. “I could actually get there. I set out like, ‘Hey, I’m going to do this, I’m going to the NFL.’”
Blackout mode
The Buccaneers used a fifth-round pick to make sure they landed Gay, and the more he missed, the more he felt the pressure of his draft position. He kept trying to make adjustments, kept trying to figure out the perfect formula.
Answers never came.
Only three years into his football career, he was an NFL team’s primary kicker, a rookie under a microscope. Even on days Gay didn’t miss, he was wondering about his approach, trying desperately to figure out if some technical piece of the job had gone awry.
“In college, you miss a kick, but you still win by 20,” Gay said. “When you get to the NFL, the games are so close, you miss an extra point in the first quarter and you lose by one. … I think I had to go through that learning curve.”
Gay made 27 of 38 field goals (77.1%) and 43 of 48 extra points as a Bucs rookie.
He didn’t get it another season in Tampa. The Buccaneers cut him at the end of training camp in 2020, and he ended up signing with the Colts practice squad, where he spent the first two months of his second NFL season.
Where he found blackout mode again.
“I think there was a lot of stuff on my mind in Tampa, a lot of stuff going through,” Gay said. “When I finally got here, it was like: ‘Aaaaaah, I can let go of all the feelings and stress.’”
Gay spent two months on the Indianapolis practice squad, found the city where he wanted to live in the offseason then emerged as one of the NFL’s best kickers in another city.
The Rams signed Gay off the Indianapolis practice squad in mid-November.
“We saw it in practice,” Colts general manager Chris Ballard said. “We saw it back in ’20, but (Rodrigo Blankenship) had gotten hot: What are you going to do? And then the Rams came along, what are you going to do?”
Los Angeles reaped the benefits initially.
Gay made 92.5% of his field goals with the Rams, missed just two extra points in 97 attempts and got a little revenge on the team that cut him, knocking the Buccaneers out of the playoffs with a 30-yard field goal to win it.
He never felt the same pressure in Los Angeles that he felt in Tampa.
Two months on the Indianapolis practice squad put Gay back in blackout mode.
“I was thinking too much,” Gay said. “For me, the simpler, the better. The less I think, the better.”
‘Smooth operator’
Frustrated by their inability to permanently fix a kicking position that has been uncertain for half a decade, the Colts forked over a four-year, $22.5 million contract in free agency to bring Gay back to Indianapolis on a full-time basis.
Gay, the soccer player turned kicker, now enjoys the sort of job security that would have seemed unthinkable when he left Utah Valley soccer in order to pursue a walk-on job with the Utes. He has the job security he’s envisioned since he was a kid, even if it ended up coming in a different sport.
“My whole goal: I was going to be a professional athlete,” Gay said. “If it wasn’t football, I would have tried to be a professional bowler or something.”
Gay loves the competition, the work that goes into making each kick, the pursuit of “blackout mode.”
His new Colts teammates got their first glimpse of blackout mode last week. Gay made five field goals, including four kicks of 50 yards or more, including the game-tying 53-yarder at the end of regulation and a game-winning 53-yard kick in overtime.
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“He’s a smooth operator,” Indianapolis head coach Shane Steichen said.
A few of his teammates already knew.
Blackmon was playing at Utah when the Utes first handed the job to the big walk-on kicker. Another former Ute, Zack Moss, had a front-row seat to Gay’s emergence in the NFL.
“If you go back and watch, I wasn’t sweating the game-winning kick,” Moss said. “That’s why he is who he is, why he’s been in this league for so long.”
The rest of Gay’s new Colts teammates do not know him as well as Moss or Blackmon.
All they have is three games, and arguably one of the greatest games ever produced by an NFL kicker.
“Being able to come here in free agency, and being able to be blessed enough to get the contract I did,” Gay said. “To be able to go out there and show that’s kind of what I think of myself, being able to show that and being able to prove that, is something cool.”
Three steps back. Two to the side.
Snap. Kick.
Raise the head and watch the ball fly through the uprights.
All because Gay saw an opportunity on a football field.
And chased after it.
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09-28-2023, 11:30 AM
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