From Australia to Winnipeg, hopeful of punting for CFL’s Blue Bombers

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From the moment Jamieson Sheahan begins talking, you know he has travelled a long, long way to be at a training camp in the heart of the Canadian prairies.

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The distinct Australian accent hits you immediately, and a quick Google search of a city named Bendigo — Sheahan’s hometown of 100,000 or so situated roughly 150 kilometres northwest of Melbourne in the Australian state of Victoria — draws a 15,000-kilometre line between Southern Australia and Southern Manitoba.

So how does a 26-year-old former Australian Rules Football player find himself half a world away in Winnipeg trying to be the Blue Bombers’ next punter?

Oddly enough, it begins with a former Green Bay Packer, a fellow Aussie by the name of Nathan Chapman, who opened up an American football kicking school back home after spending some time in the NFL as a punter in the mid-2000s.

“The timing was perfect,” Sheahan said on Saturday after the Bombers wrapped up Day 7 of training camp.

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Sheahan’s first dream was to be a different kind of footballer — the Australian Rules kind. He also dabbled in soccer growing up. But his time with the Essendon Bombers, a second-division team in the Australian Football League, was coming to an end.

He didn’t see himself breaking into the senior team, which meant he wouldn’t be getting the contract he was hoping for. And with a significant shoulder operation that was going to cost him at least half of a season, Sheahan felt it was best to move on.

Luckily, he had recently received a call from Chapman of ProKick Australia.

“He said, ‘Come down and give punting a go,’ ” Sheahan said.

The first session went well, and subsequent ones only confirmed Sheahan had a talent with the American-sized pigskin, just as he did with the Australian iteration.

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Over the next 10 months, Sheahan would be offered a scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, arriving at the NCAA Division I school in 2020.

He finished his senior year in 2022 averaging 45.1 yards per punt, just a half yard off the single-season school record set by current Dallas Cowboys punter and Pro Bowler Bryan Anger. Sheahan would be named to the second-team All-Pac-12.

With two degrees under his belt, including his Master’s in education, Sheahan declared himself for the 2023 NFL draft, but went unselected. Teams were wary of his ability to put the spiral on his kicks.

That wasn’t an issue at Cal, where the end-over-end punts he became proficient at back home in the Aussie game were well-suited for his college career.

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So Sheahan cobbled together 20 minutes of film, clip after clip of him belting spiralled punts downfield.

That footage was enough for the Blue Bombers, who quickly snapped him up with the eighth overall pick in the first round of the CFL Global Draft earlier this month.

And now a week into training camp, Sheahan is locked into a battle with incumbent Mark Liegghio and fellow global punter Karl Schmitz.

“I’m rooming with Karl, who is one of the guys I’m competing with right now,” Sheahan said, chuckling.

Bombers head coach Mike O’Shea is still waiting to see his collection of punters in game action, which gets underway next week when Winnipeg’s two-game preseason schedule kicks off.

But having a strong mental game is something O’Shea said every kicker needs.

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“(Football is) a great team game, but when a punter stands out there, a kicker stands out there, all eyes are on one thing,” O’Shea said.

Sheahan has a leg up there, too.

His Master’s in education wasn’t achieved with the intention to be a teacher one day. Well, not in the traditional sense, at least.

“More of the administration side of things,” he said.

Sheahan said he has aspirations of being an athletic director at an American college. He’s in North America to stay, especially now he’s had a girlfriend of three years that he met back at Cal.

But part of what drives Sheahan is his own battle with mental health earlier in life, one he’s since overcome, and his desire to help others in the same position achieve an identical result.

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“I see (my mental health) as a strength,” he said. “I’m resilient. I can get through anything because of what I got through when I was younger. I use the same techniques now to deal with adversity and the pressures that come up. ”

Pressure such as being that punter with all eyes zeroed in on, as O’Shea referred, or just the everyday anxieties of life.

“We’ve got to stop this idea where (we) can’t talk about it,” Sheahan said. “By doing a Master’s in education, hopefully, I can change the policies in these schools to better support student-athletes.”

Until then, Sheahan has his sights set on Winnipeg’s punting job in 2023.

“I think I’m doing a good job right now,” he said. “We’ll see how it shakes out.”

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Twitter: @scottbilleck