Samson’s switch from soccer to football has paid off

Six years ago, Andrew Samson had never played in a football game.

That’s not to say the senior place kicker had never set foot onto a field ­— he had played soccer his entire life.

But right before Samson’s junior year of high school, the football coach at Andover High School asked him to kick on Friday nights.

“I had kind of just fooled around with my friends sometimes after soccer practice if we found a football and I kicked,” he said. “But I didn’t really think it would turn into anything.”

Now entering his senior year at Penn, he is poised to break nearly every kicking record for Penn and the Ivy League.

Yet his career almost didn’t get off the ground. In Samson’s home state of Michigan, football and soccer compete in the same season. As a result, he could only play with the football team during games.

“I never went to football practice in high school,” he said.

Samson relied on his natural abilities to get through his first season, and he received several offers to play in college.

“But I knew that Penn was always my number-one choice school to go to anyway, so I was fortunate enough to be recruited here,” he said.

After a successful senior season, during which he continued to juggle both sports, Samson attended national-level kicking camps and went into his freshman season at Penn with confidence.

But in order to earn the starting position, Samson had to put up a fight.

After the 2006-2007 season, where the Quakers lost three Ivy League games as a result of missed field goals and extra points in overtime, the coaching staff brought in three freshman kickers.

Trevor Charlston, Dave Kuncio and Samson entered their freshmen seasons ready to compete and replace existing kickers Derek Zoch and A.J. Nobile.

“There were a lot of injuries, and it was kind of back and forth, but I was fortunate enough to win the starting kicking job,” Samson explained. “Then I started, and played in every game since then.”

Now, thirty games and 176 points later, Samson is on track to break his own Penn and Ivy records for the most field goals in a season, and is well on his way to breaking the Ivy career points record.

But Samson is more concerned with helping his team win than rewriting the record books.

“You kind of have to plan every kick as an individual kick and not worry about the records or not worry about the numbers,” Samson explained during training camp. “So if it happens, it happens, and that’s great. But right now I’m just focusing on whether it’s going to be my first field goal or extra point [against] Lafayette on Sept. 18, and we’ll go from there.”

And should that first kick be for an extra point, the result won’t be much of a surprise. In his Penn career, Samson has yet to miss an extra point. He is a perfect 74-for-74, another team record.

Samson says his routine has not changed since he arrived at Franklin Field. After trying different footwork setups in high school at various camps, he settled into a pattern at Penn.

“That’s part of having the same rhythm, trying to remain consistent, so it’s the same exact thing every time,” he said.

If the stats say anything, consistency might just be Andrew Samson’s middle name.

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