His hands shaking, his eyes trying to avoid the dozens of coaches focused on him, Will Ross placed a holding stick on the tip of a football.
He took a deep breath. By then — on a Wednesday morning in January, in South Carolina football’s second-to-none indoor practice facility — Ross had launched so many 50-plus-yard field goals through weather beaten posts on the Catawba Christian field in Rock Hill that the routine was second nature to him. It was like he’d done it his whole life: Two steps back. Two steps to his left. Lunge. Plant. Boom.
He hadn’t kicked field goals his whole life, of course. At that point, Ross had only been a serious football player for 11 months. He hadn’t played in a football game since his final year at Dutchman Creek Middle School. He’d never owned a football, in fact, until February 2019, when his father, Bill, suggested that he try kicking on a nice day in the spring of his senior year of high school.
The coaches who watched him on that January morning — who evaluated whether he was good enough to earn one of the few walk-on spots on the 2020 South Carolina football roster — knew all that. Ross’ short time playing football only substantiated how good he could one day become.
But still, Ross had to deliver.
“He was shaking so hard,” his mother, Myra, later said with a laugh. “He thought he was having a seizure. That’s what he told me.”
Ross said he doesn’t remember every detail of the tryout. He just remembers his nerves. There were other Gamecock hopefuls in the tryout with him, he remembered, so Ross didn’t get any feedback on his way out of the facility.
“It was just so surreal,” Ross told The Herald.
Three months later, Ross is a Gamecock. He’s one of four placekickers on the South Carolina football team’s official spring roster — and will soon be one of three, after redshirt senior Alexander Woznick entered the transfer portal on Tuesday.
He’s a punter, too. With a big smile. Confident voice. Gracious. He’s another player in a rich lineage of Rock Hill natives and Northwestern High School alumni who have once represented USC football.
He stands out as different from most of his Football City, USA predecessors who played college ball, though. Perhaps he always will.
“Right after I started kicking, I photo-shopped a picture of me when I first started kicking with my Dad into Williams-Brice Stadium,” Ross said. “I taped it on my mirror. I put a Gamecocks sticker on my mirror. And yeah, it didn’t happen at first, but now it did.
“And I think that just proves the point that if you find a goal, and set yourself to it? Literally anything is possible.”
Will Ross, a Rock Hill native, takes a practice rep during his redshirt season on the Coastal Carolina football team. Courtesy of Will Ross
Ross and his parents said they heard that Ross was “in the wrong sport” all the time — that his strong leg in the goalie box was a missed opportunity to contribute on the football field.
And while there may have been merit to that argument, Ross and his parents said they just laughed the comments off. Ross never questioned his love for soccer: He started playing when he was 4 years old. He played soccer at the highest level starting in middle school, for a developmental academy based in Charlotte, and stopped playing other sports in high school to focus on soccer. He missed school dances and some football games for soccer tournaments in cities up and down the East Coast.
When he was 8, he attended a Northwestern High School soccer camp, which is where he met then-Trojan player, Alex Martinez. Martinez, who would play at N.C. State and eventually return to Rock Hill to coach Legion Collegiate soccer, and Ross would go on to have a strong friendship that lasts to this day.
“I think his family has put a lot into him and being successful, and they gave him every opportunity for him to be successful in soccer, and now in football,” Martinez said. “At the end of the day, the only thing you can ask when a parent sets a kid up, it’s up to the kid now to go out and put the work in.
“And he put the work in.”
Will Ross was put on the UofSC Gameock football spring roster in February. Chris Gillespie/Gamecock Central
From Rock Hill to Coastal Carolina
Dan Orner had heard this story before.
Orner, whose kicking instruction is in the DNA of several talents on NFL and FBS teams, met Ross when he was a second-semester senior in high school. By this point, Ross was enlisted at USC to be a regular student, excited to study business. His college athletic dreams had dried, in part because he was “burnt out” from soccer.
But that spring, as aforementioned, Ross discovered how his soccer skills could possibly apply to football, and he got the chance to be instructed by Orner. After his first kicking session, an inquisitive Ross walked up to Orner and asked a naive question: Do I have a chance to play D1?
“He looked me in the eye and said, ‘Well, what are my chances of making the Olympic soccer team and starting in the next World Cup?’ ” Ross said, laughing at the memory.
“And I was like, ‘You know what? I’m making it. I don’t care what people say. I’m going to stick with it. Never played football before, but I’m going to make it.’ ”
Orner remembers that moment, too, with Ross.
“It does nobody any justice for me not to be anything but transparent with these guys,” Orner told The Herald. “Ultimately, the thing for me is these guys get to live out their dream. And they gotta understand how much work it’s going to take to do that.”
Ross, though, was willing to put in the work. He traveled to kicking camps for exposure and took video of his kicks on his iPhone for recruiting film. He spent hours a day refining a craft he just learned he had a talent for.
Week after week, kick by kick, Ross continued to climb up on recruiting boards and into the radars of some mid-major college football programs, until one afternoon, Orner received a call. It was a member of the Coastal Carolina football staff, asking if Orner had any unsigned, late-blooming prospects worth taking a chance on. Orner vouched for a kid with a big leg and bigger potential.
Come May’s signing day at Northwestern, Ross wore a long-sleeved Coastal Carolina shirt and signed to be a Chanticleer.
“The things I can do is get guys opportunities,” Orner said. “But at the end of the day, the great thing that Will did was he executed.”
Will Ross, a redshirt freshman for UofSC, kicks for kids at a demo camp earlier this year. Photo courtesy of Will Ross
‘Pinnacle of college football’
After a season in which he redshirted, Ross entered the transfer portal, citing that CCU wasn’t the “right fit” for him. But it wasn’t a lost year: Ross saw how a football program was run. He wanted to continue his collegiate athletic career.
In the transfer portal, Ross said he received interest from many coaches and was regularly in contact with South Carolina’s special teams coach.
“He still really wanted to go to South Carolina. He was in contact with the special teams coach there,” Bill said. “The special teams coach basically said, ‘Let me know when you get in, and we’ll talk.’ ”
Ross was admitted to USC, again enlisting as a regular student. He was invited in for the tryout. And then came the dozens of judgmental eyes of coaches; his shaky hands; his chance to clinch a dream he didn’t have until a year ago. And yes, he delivered.
Today, Ross is at his home in Rock Hill, he said. Due to the coronavirus, he’s virtually meeting with Gamecock coaches every week once a week, working out every day and eating takeout when he can from Nishie G’s, his favorite local restaurant.
“Every day, at least once a day, either (my wife) or I will say, ‘Can you believe he’s at an SEC football program?’ ” Ross’s father said back in February. “Because that’s kind of the pinnacle of college football.”
When he first signed a letter of intent to Coastal Carolina, Ross said that the pressure that occupies the goalkeeper position prepared him for being a kicker. Ross seems to enjoy pressure. Crave it, even.
Maybe it’s a prerequisite among elite goalkeepers and kickers alike: They’re each the one non-interchangeable player on the field. The one who’s separate. The one who can rarely win games in the eye of the casual spectator, but can oftenlose them. The one who’s only needed when he’s uncomfortable.
“I love (the pressure),” Ross said. “The instincts of playing soccer, especially goalkeeping — of being the guy and having that feeling of, like I said, not being appreciated until you’re needed. It’s a weird feeling, but it feels like home.”
Perhaps Ross’s long soccer career — and thus his late start on his football dream — will always make him stand out as different on the college game’s biggest stage.
But then again, perhaps it’s why he’s there at all.
This story was originally published April 18, 2020 at 8:04 AM.
Alex Zietlow writes about sports and the ways in which they intersect with life in York, Chester and Lancaster counties for The Herald, where he has been an editor and reporter since August 2019. Zietlow has won nine S.C. Press Association awards in his career, including First Place finishes in Feature Writing, Sports Enterprise Writing and Education Beat Reporting. He also received two Top-10 awards in the 2021 APSE writing contest and was nominated for the 2022 U.S. Basketball Writers Association’s Rising Star award for his coverage of the Winthrop men’s basketball team.
.jpeg)