Staley Da Bear
Well-known member
- Mar 16, 2019
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Kicking it: For most Bears players, football was ingrained in their lives throughout their childhoods. But that wasn't the case with kicker Cairo Santos, who grew up in Brazil playing soccer.
"When I was 15 years old, I was playing really competitive in some youth divisions of professional teams, but didn't get to star a lot because of how competitive soccer is down there," Santos said.
Hoping to earn a college scholarship, Santos traveled to Florida as a foreign exchange student to play soccer in the United States. One day, he was tossing a football around with friends and they discovered his rare talent.
"We're throwing the football through the basketball [hoop] outside our house," Santos said. "I couldn't throw the football as a spiral. [A friend] said just kick it. They held it down and I kicked it four houses down. They said it went 60 yards, approximately. I was like, 'Was that good? He said, 'Kickers usually don't do that in high school.'
"The next day after school, there was a football practice and they talked to the coach and said, 'We have this Brazilian kid that plays soccer and he can kick a ball.' They backed me up to 50 yards and I made a 50-yarder that first day. They said, 'You're on the team. You're playing Friday.'"
Santos was excited—but didn't know anything about American football.
"I went out and got the Madden game, I think it was a 2007 Madden game for Xbox," he said. "That's how I started learning the rules. The first couple games, I had a coach that held me by his arm and said, 'If we don't go past the sticks right there, it's fourth down and you have to kick the ball.' That's kind of how I learned the game. The video game helped me a lot.
"And then it started. The light bulb just went off. I was trying to come here and play soccer and be an athlete on the collegiate level. Football was a path where the door just started to open, so I was really excited to attack both paths and see which one was going to turn out. Football played out better."