The mob that was the Brophy College Preparatory football team came to a near standstill as dozens of heads turned in sync watching a football sail 50 yards toward the uprights from the foot of an unknown figure at midfield.

The kick came from Casey Skowron, starting left back on the school’s soccer team. It was only his third-ever kick on a football field, and shortly after, he nailed a 55-yard attempt.

Soccer was a life-long passion for Skowron. In his senior season at Brophy, the Broncos finished 23-1-2.

“Soccer was my whole life,” said Skowron, who is now a kicker for Arizona. “I knew no matter where I ended up going I was going to play soccer.”

Brophy head football coach Scooter Molander approached Skowron on the left back’s soccer coach’s recommendation, looking to solve his team’s kicking woes. An innocent on-field tryout unearthed a new application of a talent Skowron had long known he’d had: kicking a ball.

That talent, coupled with an ability to forget his failures, has molded him into a physically and mentally ideal kicker on the Arizona football team in his second attempt of walking on. Now in his first season as starting kicker, the redshirt junior is tied for the third-most field goals for any Division I kicker.

“A soccer player has kicked thousands of balls in their life, so to them it’s just another kick,” said John Auran, director of football operations at Brophy. “For a football player, each kick is something that means so much that they get mentally blocked and put too much pressure on themselves.”

Skowron’s quick ascension seemingly came crashing down in only his third game, the 5A-I Arizona state quarterfinals, when he jogged onto the field to attempt a 46-yard field goal with less than 90 seconds left and Brophy down 13-12.

Six inches wide right.

“We all thought the kick was good,” Casey’s father, Ted Skowron said. “I was hugging one of the assistant principals on the field celebrating.”

His career has shifted toward overcoming adversity since.

After being seriously recruited by lower-level Division II and III soccer programs, he chose to forego those opportunities to follow in the footsteps of his older brother Matt, a club soccer player at Arizona. The younger Skowron attempted to walk onto the football team his freshman year, and despite believing he kicked well enough to make the team, he missed it.

He became the women’s soccer team manager the following year. There, he bonded with defender Autumn Lockwood, the daughter of cornerbacks coach David Lockwood. Skowron joked with Autumn Lockwood that she should talk to her dad about setting up a tryout, but Skowron said he quickly laughed off the idea.

She came to practice one day with all the tryout information for Skowron.

After a few days of going through a kicking routine at tryouts, Skowron was called into recruiting coordinator Matt Dudek’s office.

“Instead of giving me any kind of news he just started telling me all these different things we needed to do,” Skowron said. “Finally he stopped himself and said, ‘Oh, by the way, congratulations. You made the team.’”

Skowron wasn’t immediately thrust into the limelight like in high school; it was almost the complete opposite. He would redshirt his sophomore season, sidelined the entirety of 2013 with groin and oblique injuries.

This season, Skowron’s name was finally atop the kicking depth chart. He stepped between the white lines in Arizona’s first game against UNLV for his first-ever field-goal attempt and promptly missed a 38-yard shot.

But Skowron nailed his next three attempts, including a 49-yarder.

“Casey is all about the next kick,” Auran said. “No matter how good or how bad things turn out, it’s always about learning from this kick and moving onto the next.

“He always showed exemplary mental toughness.”

Parents on the Skowron’s old soccer team coined the name “Ice Man” for him, referring to his constantly flat-lined demeanor. His teammates and coaches heavily laud his work ethic and mental toughness.

The man who Skowron entrusts to perfectly place each long snap, holder Drew Riggleman, has seen how Skowron carries himself more than anyone else has. From the more relaxed practice setting to setting up for a game-winning kick like he did against Texas-San Antonio, he stays the same.

“He has this laid back quality that doesn’t allow him to just get consumed by kicking,” Riggleman said. “He likes to keep things pretty relaxed but has a great work ethic to go with that.”

Now, soccer has been placed on the backburner in his mind, something he’ll revisit when his football days are behind him.

Skowron is reveling in his new role this season, doing exactly what he planned on doing from the moment he walked on two seasons ago.

“It’s great to be in the position I am and to succeed,” Skowron said. “But it’s definitely something I’ve prepared for and I’m not surprised that I’ve been successful.”

Published on September 19, 2014 at 12:04 am

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