Photo courtesy of BlueGoldNews.com Senior walk-on kicker Nate Flower kicks off during WVU’s game at Houston.

MORGANTOWN — Rich Rodriguez needed help. His West Virginia football team was having its problems winning games and it usually started right at kickoff.

He wanted his kicker to be carrying the ball into the end zone and it wasn’t happening, so he made a change and promoted former Fairmont Senior walk-on kicker Nate Flower to the job in the TCU game two weeks back.

His first kickoff in the role of starting kickoff specialist for WVU came early in the second quarter after Grayson Barnes had put the Mountaineers on the scoreboard with a 17-yard touchdown grab of a Scotty Fox pass.

The ball soared to the back of the end zone for the touchback that Rodriguez had been looking for and right after it occurred, he looked up at the scoreboard.

“I was super pumped up after that and when I looked up my dad and my sister were on the video board and dad was going absolutely crazy. That’s probably the proudest I’ve ever felt in my life. Just giving my family that happiness was awesome.”

The next week he was again the starting kickoff man and his family made the trip to Houston. He, of course, was now on the team charter for his first road trip to a Big 12 game, his parents flying commercial.

“Them going down there makes me feel a little bit better about myself. They had to buy their own plane ticket but I was able to get them a ticket for the game,” he said.

He kicked his kickoffs into the end zone.

But there is more to this story than a local walk-on getting his chance and succeeding in front of his family for his family has a special attachment to WVU athletics, his father, Brandon Flower, having been the Mountaineer mascot and as such the face of the program in 1998 and 1999, and his uncle Scott Moore, having served in that same capacity in the next two years.

Think of that for a moment. The family was both the face and the foot of the program.

“You can also throw in an uncle and an aunt who were varsity cheerleaders,” Brandon noted.

“I think that’s one of his highlights, being able to be the face of the university,” Nate said. “It carried a lot of pride for the school and my family … my grandparents, cousins, aunts. Everyone in my family has gone to the school,” Nate Flower said.

“It’s kind of a little fun fact. I don’t know if too many people know about it. I like to share it when I can. It was a cool thing he did. It was a big thing in my family and it’s kind of like a rite of passage in my family.”

But the fact that Nate Flower would become a WVU football player was hardly a likely happening.

“Me playing football is kind of unexpected,” he said. “I didn’t start playing until my senior year in high school.”

He had been a soccer player at Fairmont, a member of two state championship teams at Fairmont Senior.

“He fell in love with soccer when he was in the first grade and was really good at it,” his father, a former federal prosecutor now with his own law firm, said. “He played on those state championship high school teams and a really good travel team. We thought he’d go play college soccer.”

“My plan was to just play college soccer or something,” Nate admitted.

One day in his year, he and some buddies went over to East-West Stadium, brought some of the equipment his brother had used as a middle school kicker and began kicking a football around.

“I said, ‘Man, this is really fun’ so I decided to give it a try,” he said.

He went to Fairmont Senior coach Nick Bartic and began working with him and earned a spot on the team.

The conversion wasn’t easy but it wasn’t hard, either.

“In some ways it was hard, but you are kicking a ball and that helps. It’s a little different, but having a soccer background — a lot of NFL kickers have that and probably 90% of kickers in college have played soccer and that helps tremendously,” he said.

He made second team all-state, making all 29 of his extra points and five field goals, including a 34-yarder.

He really got into it and after working with kicking coach Matt McCullough in Bridgeport he felt he might be able to kick in college.

“He helped me with fine tuning my technique and giving me the confidence I needed to go kick in college. He told me I had the ability and inspired me to keep going with it,” Flower said.

“He decided he wanted to pursue football in college and we, his parents, had a tough time getting our heads wrapped around it because we’d focused on soccer so long,” Brandon said.

His uncle, Scott, had been friends with WVU linebacker Ben Collins and Collins had stayed in touch with Jeff Casteel, who had coached him and then had become an analyst with Brown.

That got the recruiting process started. Nate went to a kicking camp in Texas and won the kickoff competition there and got an offer from WVU, where he’d been attending games since he was a baby.

His first season as a walk-on freshman he didn’t do much but wound up winning the team’s “Juice Award” for going the extra step on the sidelines.

“I wasn’t doing much my freshman year so any way I could help with the team I felt was pretty valuable,” he said.

Last year he kicked off only once, in the Albany game, and got the kick to the end zone.

This year, though, he was coming into his own, beginning with the spring game when he saved his roster spot with some impressive kickoffs.

“The last few weeks I’ve been working with our special teams coach Tucker Donati and with the kicker Kade Hensley. I completely changed my approach to kickoffs. I changed my steps, how I was kicking the ball and found a lot of success,” he said.

“My coaches trusted me to go out there and showcase what I’d been doing.”

Now you may wonder what kind of practice a kicker goes through while the team if running plays. The specialists go off and work among themselves.

“A lot of it is behind the scenes. I’m not even sure some of the guys on the team understand what we’re doing. We’re dedicating all our time to just kicking the ball. It’s a lot like golf in some aspects. Kicking off is just you and the ball and 90% of it is a mental game. The other 10% is going out there and executing,” he said.

“Being mentally strong and having the confidence that comes with doing the reps over and during practice helps a lot.”

Now he’s the kickoff specialist but no, as a walk-on he doesn’t get either NIL money or revenue sharing, but he isn’t complaining because he’s, in his own way, carrying on a family tradition.

“You know, I grew up in West Virginia and been a Mountaineer fan my whole life but when I was a kid growing up my dream would have been to come out of that tunnel with my name on the back of the jersey and I got to see my son do that,” Brandon said.

“Now I get to see my son do that. It just gives you goosebumps; it’s awesome.”