Soccer and startups: Why Spencer Shrader will succeed at Notre Dame

It’s fitting for Spencer Shrader’s Notre Dame debut to occur in a continent that calls its most popular sport football. Yeah, Shrader is a football player. An American football player. Notre Dame’s graduate student kicker, to be specific. But until five years ago, he was a soccer player first and foremost. That flavor of football was his life. 

His self-proclaimed “number one passion.” 

Most people’s No. 1 passion is something that eludes them after high school. The memories never fade, but reality sets in. Life goes on. They leave it behind. 

Not Shrader. He chased it. All the way to Brazil. 

Shrader had a foreign exchange student from South America’s largest country on his high school soccer team in Florida. A dream to play soccer overseas was realized as a result of a simple conversation between Shrader and his buddy, Bruno. 

“He just looks at me and he’s like, ‘My family, we live in Brazil, my dad owns training academies, just come back with me and you can train and we’ll get you set up for some trials,’” Shrader said.

Shrader agreed to the offer. That night. 

Done deal. 

It’s ambition that tells the tale of Shrader’s story, which isn’t exactly one of success on the pitch. He fractured his ankle early in his three-month stay in Brazil. He got two weeks of training under his belt once the fracture healed, but his opportunity at the end of the 90 days was to stay and compete for a spot on a local U20 team. That was the equivalent of a collegiate athletic scholarship, as Shrader put it. All expenses paid for, but the future beyond that wasn’t certain. No guaranteed contract. 

“It was a little too risky for me at that point,” Shrader said. 

Saying thanks but no thanks wasn’t the end of the aforementioned ambition. It was really just the beginning. 

The injury took away some of the agility that allowed Shrader to set the Lithia (Fla.) Newsome High School record for goals in a single soccer season. He scored 33 of them. He was also a top-ranked tennis player in high school. That’s a sport that would have been difficult to get back into as well. 

So why not go back to football — the American kind. That was Shrader’s third sport in high school. He was the placekicker at Newsome for all of one season. That was still enough for the University of South Florida to give him a shot, and a shot was all he needed. 

Four years, 95 successful extra points and 28 made field goals later, Shrader — an Indiana native, no less — is the starting kicker for the University of Notre Dame. Shrader credits kicking coach Brandon Kornblue of Fort Myers, Fla., for helping get him there. 

The three most accurate kickers in the NCAA in 2017, including the nationals leader in accuracy, Eddy Pineiro, were all disciples of Kornblue Kicking. So was 2021 Lou Groza Award winner Jake Moody, the first kicker taken in the 2022 NFL Draft. Pineiro, meanwhile, made 33-of-35 attempts for the Carolina Panthers last season.

The kicker Kornblue has grown closest with through training is Kyle Brindza, Notre Dame’s record holder for single-season field goals with 23 in 2012. Kornblue, a Michigan grad, even sported Notre Dame jerseys on game days to support Brindza. Now he said he’ll do the same for Shrader. Relationships built through close one-on-one work lasts a lifetime. 

“I don’t bring in just anybody,” Kornblue told Blue & Gold Illustrated. “If I’m going to spend that amount of time and be that concentrated with a kicker, I want it to be somebody who legitimately has a chance. I want to be able to give everything I have to help make that possible.” 

Kornblue saw athleticism and explosion in Shrader’s leg the first time he saw him kick. Shrader said he can make a 63-yarder in good conditions. He only made 8 of his first 15 attempts at USF, though. He wasn’t accurate enough to win the starting job outright. The Bulls took a chance on him as a junior, though, and that’s when he took off. He made 11-of-13. Last year, he made 9-of-13. That’s a 76.9 connection percentage the last two seasons.

Kornblue always believed in his potential.

“If you can really focus and put your concentration on this, this is something that can open up some doors and take you to the next level,” Kornblue remembers telling Shrader. “I don’t think he was fully bought in that he could do that his first couple years at USF. It took a little time for him to realize that was a possibility.”

Notre Dame K Spencer Shrader said he can make kicks from 62-63 yards “any given day.”

At South Florida he made one from 75 in hurricane winds.

“I don’t know why we were practicing but we were out there hitting kicks in it.”

Give this man some South Bend wind and let him ride. pic.twitter.com/gPhfDnJBpX

— Tyler Horka (@tbhorka) August 10, 2023

It’s more than self-belief and athletic ability that has Shrader primed for a strong season at Notre Dame. It’s his personality. Who he is. He didn’t give up on himself as a football player, and he has never come close in his life outside of his sporting career.

Kornblue called him a “go-getter” and a “high-achieving type of kid.” He’s always been those things and more according to the people who know him best. 

“Was I surprised he moved to Brazil? No. Was I surprised he chose football? No,” said Sophie Shrader, Spencer’s younger sister and a four-year letter winner on the University of Tampa’s women’s soccer team. “He’s always been an entrepreneur doing super unique things.”

Spencer trained youth tennis players in the Tampa area in high school and college. That prompted Sophie to train aspiring soccer players. A client’s mother shared snippets from one of Sophie’s sessions on Facebook, and five clients turned into 50 seemingly overnight. Shrader Athletics, a joint venture of the Shrader siblings, was born.

Sophie holds 20 training outings per week in Tampa. Spencer handles marketing and client outreach from afar, but it really all started when he took on a handful of trainees as a 16-year-old. 

“It was just for fun and for a little bit of money,” he said. “But I was professional. I really did my best. It really quickly expanded into a legitimate business. I created PDF pamphlets of all my training. I followed up with the families through email explaining what we were doing and if the child was improving.” 

Spencer also founded Copper Fox Technologies, a brand design, web development and salesforce recognition company in addition to Liberty Villages, a Christian community providing resources for homeschooled students and families to achieve success and reach their potential. 

The Shraders said being homeschooled is a major reason for their proclivity to branch out and try new things. Their parents always encouraged it. When the two wanted to learn Spanish, they were sent on a four-week educational cruise through Central America. 

Spencer currently lives in a South Bend home he dubbed Clover Cottage. He’s fixing it up in his free time and intends to rent it out via AirBnb after he’s finished at Notre Dame. 

It’s always go, go, go for the Irish’s kicker, in a good way. 

“I try not to just be sitting around twiddling my thumbs,” Shrader said. “When I’m at football, I’m working 100 percent at football and doing the best I can. When I’m off the field talking with my teammates, I’m trying to learn about them. I’m trying to network with them because they’re going to be leaders on the football field or in the business field one day. 

“Then off the field, the resources we have here, they’re unrivaled. The connections that we have, the people that we have speaking to us after practice. I make sure to follow up with them and be a presence just so they know I’m here, that I’m interested in them, that I want to help them succeed even though they’re already at the highest level.” 

Shrader is on his way to being one of those post-practice guest speakers. He’s only been at Notre Dame for a few months, but he already understands what it means to bleed blue and gold. 

“He’s a really unique, mature individual who is thinking about life beyond the game of football,” Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman said. “And I think that’s part of what attracted him to Notre Dame. He could have gone to a lot of different places, but he understood this place.” 

A lot of different places, all right. Heck, he might still be in Brazil if he didn’t break his ankle. But it was always Notre Dame for Shrader once his time at USF was up. 

“In his recruitment he’d say Alabama called and I’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s really cool,’” Sophie said. “Georgia called. ‘That’s really cool.’ But nothing was as exciting as Notre Dame. Everybody in the family was on board with Notre Dame. That was our No. 1 pick.”