YouTube trickshot videos help Dartmouth teen land football scholarship
A Dartmouth, N.S., teen’s YouTube videos of him performing kicking and punting trickshots has helped him land an athletic scholarship to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.
Nick Liberatore, 17, with help from friends and a relative, created YouTube videos showing off Liberatore’s fancy footwork. The videos show him kicking balls into basketball hoops, over rivers and even knocking a bottle off of someone’s head.
“I thought if football was something I was going to take seriously and try to to play it at the next level, then I was going to have to go out on my own and be a little creative,” he said.
At the beginning of the year, Liberatore sent his first video to the head coach of the Queen’s University football team, Pat Sheahan.
“His little advertisement there worked very well [at] getting my attention,” said Sheahan.
While the videos don’t feature a lot of game footage, Sheahan says they show a lot about Liberatore’s talents.
“It was … very indicative of his athletic ability. I mean, he’s got good hand-eye, foot-eye coordination. He’s got some special talents manipulating the football,” said Sheahan.
As a result of seeing the video, he got in touch with Liberatore to invite him to a combine in February so he could see Liberatore's skills in person.
What makes Liberatore’s story all the more interesting is he’s only been playing football for two years. While he played soccer his entire life, he only started playing football in his Grade 11 year at Prince Andrew High School at the urging of a friend.
While he was set to be the team’s kicker for the season, when its punter went down due to an injury in the second game, the job became Liberatore’s and he never relinquished it.
Liberatore says the tricks usually take about a dozen tries before he’s successful, but says he sometimes nails them on the first effort.
At five-feet 11-inches, Liberatore says the longest field goal he’s hit in a game is 47 yards, although he figures that he could hit from as far away as 55 yards in a closed dome. Any longer than that and he’d need to be outdoors with a tailwind.
Liberatore hopes to become a triple threat for his university team.
“We’re always looking for a guy that can do it all, a guy who does the punting, kicking and can do the kickoffs. He looks like he has potential to do all of them,” said Sheahan.
