It is not unusual when graduate students suit up for a school’s athletic programs. In an era of college sports defined by the “COVID year,” multiple categories of redshirts and a seemingly bottomless void of eligibility at the disposal of NCAA players, graduate students are on rosters now more than ever.
This is especially true in a sport like football, where size and strength are king. After all, Virginia’s 2025 roster currently lists a whopping 32 graduate students. But in a sea of athletes of ages 23, 24 and 25, one man in Cavalier history stands out. Suiting up for the Cavaliers in 2023, kicker Matt Ganyard was a 34-year-old former Marine finishing up an MBA at the Darden School of Business while playing his first-ever season of organized football.
Before Ganyard was a Virginia graduate student, he was an undergraduate history major in the Class of 2011. Football played a limited role in that experience. A lifelong soccer player, Ganyard joined the club soccer team as a second-year student. He had kicked a football before and knew he did it well, but he had never kicked for a team. That did not stop him from practicing.
“‘What about this football thing?’ was always in the back of my mind,” Ganyard said. “So I kind of trained on the side down at Carr’s Hill [Field].”
Ganyard was not kicking to goalposts. Rather, he kicked over soccer goals, towards poles — any target would do the trick. He learned from a then-limited selection of kicking YouTube videos. In the spring of his second year, Ganyard tried out for the Cavalier football team. He did not make it, and that was that.
Before long, Ganyard made his commitment to the military — two years of flight school followed by eight years of service. There, kicking became all but an afterthought.
“Joining the military, going to flight school, [I was] very busy wanting to learn my craft,” Ganyard said. “... Then you start learning weapon systems on the aircraft. You’re putting all your energy and focus into that every flight you’re doing.”
About four years into his commitment, Ganyard started to think long-term. Thanks to his father’s 28 years of service, he had seen both the merits and the costs of a prolonged military career. But the Virginia alumnus wanted to keep his options open elsewhere — “start putting some irons in the fire,” as he deemed it, for alternative paths after his military service.
Such irons were not only professional, but also athletic. Ganyard’s kicking dream lived on.
At this time, around 2015 or 2016, he spoke to a coach who brought up a possible hiccup, one nearly every current NCAA staffer and athlete is well-attuned to — eligibility. Specifically, that Ganyard should make sure he had some remaining before committing significant time to on-field work.
“I think a lot of people assume you have five years to play four seasons,” Ganyard said. “That’s all I knew. I was like, ‘Well, I did four years as a student. I should have a fifth year. I never played. I was a soccer guy on the club team. I should have all my years.’ I didn’t know any better.”
Ganyard soon realized the process was more complicated. Per IMG Academy’s Next College Student Athlete resource, NCAA eligibility rules do allow student-athletes five years to compete athletically in four seasons, but the clock starts ticking as soon as one becomes a full-time student. Thus, Ganyard’s eligibility was on pace to expire in 2012. With his military service lasting through the early 2020s, the alumnus would have had his plans cut short right then.
The key words are “would have,” because there exists a special clause that pauses the eligibility clock for religious missions or military service. With this exception, Ganyard found himself without a clear answer. This should apply to him, he thought, but his situation was unique, and the regulations were largely unclear.
“Honestly, I didn’t know,” Ganyard said. “Nobody had ever really done this where they did four years, didn’t play, went military and came back as an old person.”
Ganyard spoke to the NCAA, got the green light and began to ramp up his training. With the administrative side figured out, he began to seek out local coaches and camps. Luckily, Ganyard found himself in San Diego, which, in his words, is a “kicking powerhouse.”
He began working with former NFL kickers Nick Novak and John Carney. He met high school students, college players and professional free agents — all training for the same things. The weather allowed for year-round practice, a feature Ganyard took full-advantage of.
This training came with pluses and minuses. On one hand, Ganyard had six years before joining the Cavaliers to hone his craft. On the other, he had a career as a Marine that took precedence. For the aspiring kicker, balancing the two was no easy task.
“There’s going to be ebbs and flows of doing a higher intensity training cycle for deployment or being on deployment, taking off six, seven months for kicking,” Ganyard said. “I'm working out on the boat, [doing] a lot of kicking whenever I can when we are in ports. But frankly, that's seven months lost of training.”
To keep pace, Ganyard created a PowerPoint slide for himself. It detailed four years of camps, GMATs, applications, windows to talk to coaches, dead periods and more.
The slide Ganyard created to plan out four years of important dates — both for academics and athletics.
The alumnus then had to sell himself to coaches, mostly via X direct message. He kept it short — after all, Ganyard had no game film, at any level, upon which to rely.
After messaging into the social media abyss, it was his alma mater that reached back. Drew Meyer, a special teams analyst for Virginia, got back to him.
“I still remember getting the first response from him,” Ganyard said. “Being ecstatic and running to tell my wife that I got a response from a D1 coach, let alone my alma mater.”
It is safe to say that Meyer was impressed, and almost a decade after doubling down on his aspiration to kick while pursuing his MBA, Ganyard took the field for the Cavaliers. He handled the kickoff duties for Virginia in 2023, doing so as the oldest player in college football at the time. Ganyard played in all 12 games.
Entering that season, the kicker had one year of eligibility remaining. After playing in those 12 games, earning a spot on the ACC All-Academic Team and finishing his MBA, Ganyard’s short-lived college football career had come to an end.
A father to three children, Ganyard now works as a consultant in the Raleigh-Durham area. And despite him spending only one year in a Cavalier football uniform, his path back to Virginia and onto the field is a testament to the perseverance and dedication required to pursue a long-standing dream.
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