Saskatchewan Roughriders placekicker Ryan Meskell registered his first 13 CFL points on Friday the 13th.
The feat was especially impressive when you consider that he woke up in a different city on the day of the game.
Meskell was at home in Regina on Friday when he received an early-morning call from the Roughriders’ Director of Football Operations, Jordan Greenly, who had travelled to Calgary with the team the previous afternoon.
Veteran kicker Brett Lauther, who also made the trip, became ill on Friday and was therefore a late scratch for a looming matchup with the Stampeders.
The next man up — Meskell — was soon up, all right … at 38,000 feet.
“Jordan said, ‘We’ve got to fly you in,’ ” Meskell recalled from McMahon Stadium after making all five of his placement attempts — four field goals and a convert — in a 26-19 loss to Calgary.
“I just jumped on a commercial flight with our fans and flew out here. I got here just before the team bus left to come to the stadium.
“It was pretty crazy.”
Crazier still was the fact that three of the four kickers/punters in Friday’s game hailed from Australia.
Meskell and his holder — Roughriders punter Adam Korsak — are long-time friends. Stampeders punter Cody Grace is also Australian.
“The boys are doing well,” Meskell said of his compatriots. “They’re coming up here and doing their thing.
“I’m the first (Australian) kicker, I think, to play in this league, which is a pretty proud moment. I could be a pioneer of field-goal kicking, because nobody has really done it.
“I was super-proud to get out there tonight and do that. It was good to do it alongside Adam, who has been my mate since we started learning how to play this sport.”
That was in 2017, when they both attended Prokick Australia, a punting and kicking academy.
“We trained together for a few months before we both went over to college,” Meskell said. “We hadn’t seen each other since, so it was a long time between drinks. We’ve kept in contact throughout the years and it was good to play alongside him today. He did a good job holding as well.”
Korsak starred at Rutgers, winning the 2022 Ray Guy Award as the top punter in NCAA football. He was selected by Saskatchewan with the third overall pick in the 2023 Global Draft.
Meskell played at the University of Hawaii from 2017 to 2019. During the latter year, he made the Lou Groza Award Watch List and was therefore up for consideration as the premier placekicker in American college football.
Whereas Australian punters are hardly a novelty in North American football, Meskell is the rare placekicker to emanate from Down Under.
“I played soccer and I played rugby league as well,” he explained. “I didn’t play Australian Rules Football, which is what all the other guys who punt played, so they’re more natural at punting and I’m more natural at kicking the ball off the ground.”
Meskell’s professional football career got off the ground on Aug. 6 of last year, when he handled kickoffs in one game with the Edmonton Elks.
He was released by the Elks on May 13 and signed with Saskatchewan on Aug. 28. Seven weeks later, he came through on very short notice.
“I’m proud of my performance,” he said. “I just feel comfortable with this team and the snapper (Jorgen Hus) and the holder I have. I’ve been working with them the last couple of months, so I was confident that I just needed to do my job because everyone around me was going to do theirs.
“I just had to keep it straight, I guess, and that’s what I did.”
Meskell connected on field goals of 43, 38, 34 and 31 yards en route to quickly becoming the highest-scoring Australian in Roughriders history, leapfrogging Josh Bartel (who had 10 rouges on punts over three seasons) and Korsak (six singles).
“I was pretty nervous pre-game,” Meskell said. “I hadn’t played a game (as a placekicker) since 2019, so it had been a while since I had been in the arena. This was my first game since college kicking field goals.
“Once I got back out there, it felt like riding a bike in the sense that I’d done it so many times before.”
