Ben Derby had never worn football pads before this time last year. He’d never kicked a football until a few months before that. Never played Pop Warner football, or kicked for the Okemos High School football team. Or even thought about it.
A week from Saturday, on Aug. 23, Derby will kick for the Vegas Knight Hawks in the Indoor Football League championship game, televised on the CBS Sports Network, capping his first season of professional football — about 16 months after he bought a kicking holder tee at Dick’s Sporting Goods and went to Okemos’ football stadium to see what would happen.
“Oh, my gosh, I’ve got a big leg. I’m pretty good at this,” he realized.
Derby spent his childhood and college years focused on soccer. That was his dream, one he lived out as a standout at Okemos High School and then collegiately at Western Michigan University and in the summers for Lansing City and Lansing Common FC, all the way through last summer with Lansing Common.
In hindsight, if he’d only started kicking a football a little earlier, who knows?
He wonders that.
“Do I regret it? No.” Derby said. “Soccer was the passion.”
But football has quickly — and improbably — become a huge part of his story.
Derby had an offer last year to play soccer professionally, but it was in the third division in Switzerland and for very little money. He realized then that he was reaching the end of the road with soccer. So he decided to get a master’s degree.
The idea of kicking a football only came along as he thought about ways to pay for graduate school and about his own athletic mortality.
“I watched so many friends and teammates just get sad when they’re done with their college sport,” Derby, 24, said. They get sad. They get down on themselves. … I was like, ‘Let me try kicking.’ ”
He began practicing at Okemos and Lansing Eastern — where Lansing Common plays. He used YouTube as his coach. He could make field goals from 60-plus yards and kick touchbacks on kickoffs. But his game film was just him alone on a field. He emailed that to coaches, trying to find a school that was interested. East Tennessee State’s coaches were. Then he realized he was out of NCAA eligibility, even though it was a different sport.
So he looked up the top 10 NAIA college football teams — “Literally a Google search,” he said — and began reaching out to them.
The defending national champion, Keiser University in Florida, responded.
“They’re like, ‘Listen, we’ve got a (kicker) here on scholarship, but we want to bring you on,’ ” Derby said. “ ‘And then we’ve got a punter who’s maybe or maybe not eligible, so you might also have to punt.’ And I was like, ‘Alright, let’s do it.’
He wound up punting, kicking off and being the team’s long-range field-goal kicker.
Problem was, “We never ran into that scenario,” Derby said. “Every drive was a touchdown.”
If he’d thought about it, he might have instead Googled “the worst 10 NAIA red zone offenses”.
It worked out, though. He made good friends — including with that scholarship kicker and the ineligible punter — and figured out how to put shoulder pads on.
“They really stuck their neck out for me,” Derby said. “And I really appreciate that coaching staff and those people over there that they did that, because I had never played the sport in my life. You should have seen me my first game day trying to put pads on.”
The friendship with the other kicker, Nico Cavanillas, led Derby to another important relationship, with Tony Bugeja, a private coach with Kohl’s Kicking Camps, who’s coached and coaches a number of college and professional kickers, including the Miami Dolphins’ Jason Sanders and Greg Joseph, most recently of the San Francisco 49ers.
Derby and Bugeja would meet two to three times a week to work out. Among the drills: Bugeja would sometimes require Derby hit a flag poll from 30, 40 and 50 yards away before he could go home.
“There are a lot of guys out there with good legs, but he has an exceptional leg,” Bugeja said of Derby. “On top of exceptional leg power, Ben, he just has a knack for accuracy, which is, you know — you’ve got to make kicks. And his accuracy showed that he could definitely play with 9-feet-wide uprights (of the Indoor Football League). He also has the leg power to put the kickoff through the uprights on kickoffs (in the IFL). That’s what separates those guys, that kind of leg power.”
At one of Bugeja’s training sessions with multiple kickers, a colleague and friend of his from California, Diego Marquez, happened to be there. Marquez is a guy coaches out west call when they need a kicker.
“He spotted Ben with me,” Bugeja said. “He was like, ‘Man, you’re right, this kid is impressive.’ He knew the coach of Vegas (in the IFL) and the coach of Vegas called up and said, ‘I’m looking for a guy.’ We both looked at each other like, ‘Ben’s perfect.’ So we shot Ben over there.”
It was almost that simple, other than Derby still had three weeks of in-person classes left in his semester at Keiser as he worked toward an MBA.
“The dean (at Keiser) said, ‘No way, Jose,’ ” Derby said. “ ‘You’re not missing three weeks.’ ”
The deal with the dean was that Derby could miss finals week, but he had to be on campus for his Monday and Tuesday classes those next two weeks.
No problem, the head coach of the Vegas Knight Hawks said.
Vegas needed a new kicker three weeks into the season. It was their bye week in late April. Vegas coach and general manager Mike Davis told Derby he’d fly him out to Las Vegas on Wednesdays and back to Palm Beach in time for his Monday classes for a couple weeks. So that’s what Derby did.
Life in pro football
Pro football in the IFL — the top indoor league in the country — has been an eye-opening experience. There are rules that are specific to the IFL and then other general football rules Derby didn’t know, either.
Last week, for example, he asked, “Do they kick or do we kick on a safety?”
“We kick to them, it turns out,” he said, laughing.
Also, if a kickoff goes through the uprights, it’s a “deuce,” worth two points. That’s a 60-yard kick and, if you miss, the other team gets the ball on the 20-yard line on a 50-yard field. Sometimes, Derby will squib kick the ball into the end zone. If his team tackles the returner in the end zone on that kick, it’s worth one point. At 6-foot-3 and 210 pounds, he’s forced a fumble and been in on a number of tackles this season. “But I miss (the tackle) a lot, probably over 80% of the time.”
The IFL plays with a composite ball that’s different than the traditional leather football and the uprights are one-third the width of the outdoor game.
His teammates are chasing dreams they’ve had a lot longer than he has and are trying to support families. Sometimes the business of the game rears its head. Most weeks this season, someone from the locker room has been cut, a reminder, Derby said, that this isn’t college ball.
Mostly, though, he likes it. He likes his coach. “He trusts me and has faith in me,” Derby said of Davis. “Being my first time playing in the league as a kicker, it’s something I appreciate.”
This, however, is not Derby’s plan for the next five years. It’s a league that pays well enough to make a living in season — and the team provides housing and meals — but it doesn’t pay well enough for it to be your year-round job.
“At this point, I’m happy to chase (the dream) at least another year,” said Derby, who will have his MBA no later than after the first term of next semester.
The hope, Bugeja said, is to get Derby in front of the right people and to get a tryout with an NFL team. That tryout alone would raise his profile.
“He has ice in his veins when it comes to pressure,” Bugeja said. “He loves it. He absolutely eats it up. I’ve been blessed. I’ve trained some of the better NFL guys right down here. … Those guys, they all have something special to them. And everybody’s a little bit different, special in their own way. And Ben, Ben has what it takes.”
Everyone will get to see it at 10:30 p.m. (ET), Aug. 23, when Vegas takes on Green Bay in Tucson, Arizona, for the IFL National Championship.
“To have kicked my first football last spring and to be prepping for IFL championship next week is crazy to me,” Derby said. “I’m overly blessed.
“What’s the next 15 months like?”
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on X @Graham_Couch and BlueSky @GrahamCouch.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Okemos’ Ben Derby had never kicked a football until last year. Now he’s getting paid to do it and chasing bigger dreams
Reporting by Graham Couch, Lansing State Journal / Lansing State Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
