The 2024 Aer Lingus College Football Classic returns to Dublin this August as the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets are set to face the Florida State Seminoles at the Aviva Stadium.
This will be the fifth edition of the Aer Lingus College Football Classic, with the game bringing an authentic American sport to the Emerald Isle complete with large scale pre-game tailgates, cheer squads, marching bands, and for the 2024 edition, a visit from ESPN's iconic preview programme College Gameday.
The @AVIVAStadium will act as @GeorgiaTechFB’s new home this August! 🏟️
The Yellow Jackets are the 2024 designated home team, so we’ll be bringing those Atlanta vibes to Dublin! 📍🇮🇪#MuchMoreThanAGame | #TouchdownDublin pic.twitter.com/XjulJf0JZA— Aer Lingus College Football Classic (@cfbireland) June 23, 2024
The Yellow Jackets will be making their second appearance in Lansdowne Road, having beating Boston College 17-14 in the 2016 edition. But this time, there will be an Irish man travelling from Atlanta to play.
Georgia Tech's punter David Shanahan is a Kerry native, hailing from Castleisland and even represented the Kingdom at the under-17 level.
Ahead of the game in August, Shanahan gave us the story of how he found himself kicking in his garden in a small town in Kerry to end up playing for Georgia Tech, in collaboration with Clayton Hotels, the official hotel partner of the 2024 Aer Lingus College Football Classic.
David Shanahan: From Castleisland to Atlanta
The journey to becoming a punting star for the Yellow Jackets for Shanahan started by playing another popular North American sport, basketball, which opened up the world of US sports to the Kerry man.
Basketball is pretty big in Castleisland, I grew up playing a lot of basketball. So, I kind of started watching the NBA naturally, me and all of my friends would watch the NBA.
"And then when I was about 15 or 16, I saw college football and I just thought it was class from day one. Just the crowds and the culture and the passion around it. I used to stay up late to watch it on any stream I could find."
Eventually Shanahan would notice something about the kickers while watching the games. The thing being that many kickers in college football came from Australia through a programme called Prokick Australia, originally coming from rugby or AFL backgrounds, sports similar to Gaelic football.
From then on, Shanahan started practicing his kicking and started planning his path to Division 1 NCAA American football.
I noticed that a lot of the punters there were Australian lads and they all had AFL or rugby backgrounds, so kind of similar enough to my background, which I found they were coming from this one place in Melbourne, Australia called Prokick Australia.
So I basically just bought a couple of American footballs on Amazon and I started kicking those myself up at the local GAA field.
Then I got in touch with Prokick Australia, and luckily enough one of the coaches there was actually in Manchester at the time. He flew over to Dublin and I kicked with him at some random field out by the airport and he basically told me if I moved to Australia I could probably get a scholarship to an American college.
Six weeks later, I moved to Melbourne and I was there for about a year and got a scholarship to Georgia Tech."
It was tricky at first for Shanahan to explain the process to his parents, but after a while he says they understood and he began his freshman season at Georgia Tech in 2021.
Three years on and Shanahan's parents will be seeing him play at the Aviva Stadium for Georgia Tech against Florida State in the 2024 Aer Lingus College Football Classic on August 24th.
If you're considering a hotel stay for the 2024 Aer Lingus College Football Classic then look no further, as Clayton Hotels is the official hotel partner of the event.
The Official Aer Lingus College Football Classic App is now available for download! This is a must have for all fans, both domestic and international, joining us in Dublin for the 2024 College Football Season kick off. The Official Game App will provide users access to a rich resource of content at the touch of a button. Download Now!
Download the App HERE
