Rhys Dakin with ‘big shoes to fill’ as Iowa’s next punter, works to chart his own path

IOWA CITY — Rhys Dakin was at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport when he saw firsthand how passionate Iowa football fans are about punting.

As Iowa’s newest Australian punter awaited his connecting flight to Cedar Rapids, the person next to him saw his Iowa hooded sweatshirt, heard his accent “and I guess he put two and two together.”

“People knew who I was,” Dakin said. “I’ve never experienced that. … I'm sure at other schools, it’s not like that with punters at the airport.”

Dakin’s experience before the American Airlines flight was an introduction to life as the first-team punter at what he believes to be the “best spot for a punter or a specialist.”

The success of Dakin’s predecessor, Tory Taylor, has shown how high the ceiling can be for punters at Iowa. Taylor was a unanimous All-American in 2023 and became the second Big Ten punter in the last 20 years to win the Ray Guy Award.

Dakin — who will wear No. 9, just like Taylor did — knows he has “big shoes to fill” at Iowa.

“He doesn’t see it; he doesn’t feel it,” kicker Drew Stevens said of the pressure facing Dakin. “And I think that’s honestly going to help him out in a lot of ways.”

The Dakin-Taylor comparisons are somewhat inevitable considering the similarities between the two punters from Melbourne, Australia, but Dakin has avoided them as much as possible.

“I don’t really think it’s a good thing to compare myself to Tory,” Dakin said. “He’s achieved a lot of success here. … I’m just going to be myself. I’m not really worried about what Tory is or any of that.”

Taylor is not one to “play the comparison game” either.

“The biggest thing for Rhys is he just needs to be himself and not worry about anything else,” Taylor said in December ahead of the Citrus Bowl.

Rhys Dakin’s path to Iowa

Dakin, who will turn 20 in December, stopped playing Australian rules football when he was 18. He was battling a toe injury at the time and “didn’t have a really good season.”

“I only played like half the season, so it wasn’t really what I had hoped to achieve, so I decided to quit that and focus on punting,” Dakin said.

He participated in a punting camp in Arizona and was told he had “a lot of potential.” He trained with ProKick Australia — the same organization that worked with Taylor — for a year and “then found out I was good enough to come to this level.”

Dakin’s recruitment functioned differently from how most college athletes are recruited. The ProKick staff essentially placed him at Iowa rather than him choosing between schools.

“They choose you the best fit for how you kick and what also the coach wants," Dakin said.

Dakin said he knew he was going to Iowa in July. Iowa special teams coordinator LeVar Woods visited him in Australia for a few days in December before he officially signed with the Hawkeyes.

“He sort of made it clear that he’s not just here to come and look at me punt,” Dakin said, looking back at Woods’ visit to Australia. “He wants to get to know me personally and learn how I grew up as well.”

Dakin “looked at YouTube” before arriving in the Hawkeye State, but his familiarity of where he was about to live was otherwise limited.

“But I wasn’t really worried about what it looked like or the facilities,” Dakin said. “I knew what I was walking into with Coach Woods and the specialists. Yeah, I was already stoked to be able to have an opportunity to come here.”

Dakin, whose mother was born in Arizona, has avoided the visa restrictions that kept his predecessor from profiting off his name, image and likeness.

“Being a citizen definitely helps with that department,” Dakin said. “But I don’t feel like that’s why I was brought here. I was brought here to punt.”

Speaking of the punting, Stevens said Dakin is “raw right now” — as expected for an incoming freshman — but “learning pretty quickly.”

“He’s a pretty confident individual, I’ll say, in the not-cocky way,” Stevens said.

If that confidence turns into Taylor-esque results in the fall, a few more fans might recognize him during his next Dallas layover.

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com

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