Notre Dame football’s newest kicker graduated high school in 2012. He graduated college in 2015.
Eric Goins, a 2025 MBA candidate with Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, joins the Fighting Irish as a walk-on after serving seven years in the United States Army. This final year of college football comes more than eight years after what he thought would be his final game.
Prior to his time in South Bend, which began in August, Goins entered the military as a Second Lieutenant in September of 2016 after graduating from The Citadel. He later became a First Lieutenant, and after four years, was promoted to Captain and served as a Signal Corps Officer.
Eric Goins began his career as his team’s primary punter and kickoff specialist before taking over the placekicker role as a junior and senior. The 6-foot-2 Virginia-native still ranks third on The Citadel’s career field goals made list to this day and also ranks fifth all-time in career kicking points. His leg earned him Second-team All-Southern Conference honors in 2015 while being named as a Fred Mitchell Award finalist.
The two biggest kicks of Goins’ career came during the 2015 season. A 48-yard field goal during the fourth quarter helped propel the Bulldogs to a major upset win over South Carolina on the Gamecocks’ home field.
Goins later hit a 42-yarder as time expired to capture the first road playoff win in Citadel football history against Coastal Carolina. It was absolute scenes!
Now, at 30 years of age, Goins will return to the gridiron as a Golden Domer with one year of eligibility remaining from a redshirt season in 2012. He penned a letter to explain his decision to join the Notre Dame football program as a walk-on and it speaks loudly to his strong character.
Here is Eric Goins in his own words:
I will be playing football for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish for the 2024 football season in my final year of eligibility as an NCAA student-athlete.
On December 5th, 2015, I played what was supposed to be my last college football game. The Citadel Bulldogs lost in the second round of the NCAA FCS playoffs to a team that was later found to have committed multiple NCAA violations and fielded a team of ineligible players. This school vacated all their wins from that year, including this playoff game, which made a tough loss even more bitter. Before that game, I already knew I was going to forgo my final year of eligibility to graduate from The Citadel: The Military College of South Carolina and commission as an Infantry Officer in the United States Army. I did this even though the week before this game my team’s Defensive Coordinator and now current head coach of The Citadel, Maurice Drayton, told me that NFL scouts had started calling him about me after my team and I played well in our games in the two weeks prior. We had just won two of the biggest games in school history by beating The University of South Carolina to clinch a playoff spot and followed that by beating Coastal Carolina University on the last play of the game in the first round of the FCS Playoffs. It was awesome to be told that I had NFL interest, but I was ready to do something that I felt was more meaningful. I intended to follow through with what I had set out to do more than four years before that, which was to serve in the Army. I’m writing to explain why I am now playing my final season of football at The University of Notre Dame, what I want to achieve as a player and teammate for The Fighting Irish, and what I want to do in the next chapter of my life now that my service in the Army has concluded. I hope that what I share can inspire people to better think of where they should direct their focus in life. Additionally, this message also serves as a form of accountability for me. Now that I am saying these things on the very large platform that collegiate athletics provides, I am more likely to follow through with my goals.
So how did I get here? I served four years as an Infantry Officer and then three years as a Signal Corps Officer in the US Army. I had some of the best and worst experiences of my life during this time. I lost friends, classmates, and Soldiers that I previously served with or were currently serving alongside to suicide, homicide, and training accidents. I saw wounded Ukrainian Soldiers being offloaded from
ambulances, who were freshly bandaged with amputated arms and legs, and newly trained Ukrainian Soldiers preparing to return to the battlefield. The solemn determined look on their faces is something I will never forget. I deployed to defend the free flow of aid and equipment to a nation fighting for its right to be free and to uphold the order in Europe that the United States and its allies have sought to promote since the culmination of World War II. This was my only deployment, and it was to a non-combat zone. Before that, I supported the evacuation operation of our allies and their families from Afghanistan to Germany. I learned in Ranger School that it is possible to fall asleep while walking due to sleep deprivation and that hunger pains are an apt description of being so hungry that it hurts- it feels like your stomach is being stabbed. I made bonds throughout my experiences with guys and girls that I know have my back for the rest of my life. I parachuted out of airplanes thirteen times and a helicopter once. I was paid to shoot machine guns, rifles, shotguns, pistols, and throw grenades. I led Soldiers in training maneuvers and attacks in armored tracked vehicles, wheeled vehicles, and on foot and helped push them beyond their self-perceived limits. I made a lot of personal and professional mistakes while doing all these things, but I generally did a decent job and feel that the United States was better off than if I had chosen not to serve. I am not a hero, but I did serve alongside a lot of people and now go to school with people who did exemplary things in combat, in deployments around the world, and in training missions who should be rightfully regarded as heroes. I share what I did to show that I am not one of them and do not want any kind of speculation so that I am mistaken as one of them. I also share what I did to give a better idea of what so many men and women that serve in our military have experienced and are continuing to experience right now for our country. I never did any of these things that I just listed on my own. I had a typical Army experience, it is what I signed up to do and I am better off for it, and that’s it.
As I play football again, I will share with my teammates what I learned the first time I played in college and from the life lessons I sometimes had to relearn in the Army. One of the biggest things I will advocate for is that success in football (or your job) cannot be the ultimate objective of your life. Your playing career and working career will end. There must be a higher purpose in your life than playing a sport or doing your job well. I first learned this when I was benched as a junior from punting and field goal duties right before playing in the home opener against the reigning Heisman winner and FBS national champions, Florida State Seminoles, in 2014. I cried two times in college. One time was when my grandmother passed away and the other time was when I called to tell my parents I was only going to be kicking off in this game. That gives you an idea of how much I valued football.
I felt betrayed at the time since this was supposed to be my moment on the biggest stage of college football. Since then, I realized that football coaches (and just people in general) don’t owe you anything. They are trying to keep their jobs just as much as you are trying to keep yours and if they think someone else gives the team a better chance of winning then it doesn’t matter how good of a player you once were, if you are not performing at that level now. If you don’t add more value than the other guy, then you’ll get to watch him do it from the sideline. I felt close to worthless during that call to my parents. As an athlete for my entire life, I had always judged myself by my on-field success. If I wasn’t even on the field, then what did that make me? Over the next few months, what intelligent people like my parents and my kicking coach back home in Virginia, Paul Woodside, had told me, I finally understood. I internalized that my self-worth wasn’t determined by whether I kicked a ball between two yellow posts. Results still matter for the things that you do in your life, but they are not the only metric that you should judge yourself by. How and why you do something can be just as important.
This benching experience jolted me back into pursuing serving in the Army, which I had fallen away from doing even though that was why I had said I was going to The Citadel. I realized that I had dedicated so much time and effort to a sport but now questioned if that sport was really where I could best use my talents and was where I should be directing so much of my energy. I am not saying football is not meaningful, I would not be playing again if it wasn’t important. However, the meaning that I was deriving from my ability to play football was more than unhealthy since I was just doing it for my self-gratification. It is not a coincidence that this revelatory experience was occurring at a time in my life when my faith journey was also beginning to take shape more fully.
Growing up, I had always considered myself a religious person- meaning I would go to church every Sunday, believed what I was taught in Catholic elementary and middle school, prayed before meals and going to bed, and tried to be a good person. But at some point, when you go off to live on your own for the first time, you must take the steps to do all the things that you would normally do with your family on your own, like going to Mass every Sunday. You must answer, “Am I going to continue doing this?” Fortunately, the answer for me was yes, and not only that but I wanted to learn more deeply what it meant to be a Roman Catholic. I had friends in college who would ask me great questions and I didn’t always have good answers, so I started to read the Bible more and books detailing the lives of Saints, etc. to try to better answer their questions. I don’t know if I can say I improved that much in what I could share with them, but I did begin to wonder what God’s purpose for my life was as I did this reading. What did He want me to do, what did I want to do, and did those things match up? I ended up deciding that whatever work I was going to do needed to be important (for the greater good), I needed to be good at this work, and I needed to enjoy it. That’s how I ended up returning to the idea of serving in the Army. Before then, I don’t know if I could pinpoint why I thought I wanted to be in the Army other than the idea that I was patriotic and felt it was the right thing to do.
So how does that same philosophy of needing to enjoy doing important work well land me in South Bend, Indiana, and playing football? First, football is simply fun. I will do my best to enjoy playing a sport that has taught me so many life lessons and encourage my teammates to do the same. Next, football can be used to do great things in the world. The great media publicity that football commands can be used to call attention to causes that need our community’s and nation’s support. Additionally, modeling hard work, perseverance through adversity, and integrity in competition to the next generation of Americans is one of the most lasting impacts that we can have as NCAA student-athletes. There are challenges to our nation, both internally and externally, (which has been true since its founding), and they can only be overcome if we have a country that is able to first overcome the challenges of their everyday lives. The value of the life lessons that playing sports can instill in children and teenagers cannot be understated.
So that’s why I am here at Notre Dame. I am preparing myself for the next challenge that I think I can do my part in helping our nation work through. I feel that US foreign policy, global trade, and financial markets are what can be best leveraged to promote lasting peace in the world. I wish to continue serving our nation at the federal government level, just not in a military uniform. Whether I end up graduating from Notre Dame in two years or three years- which depends on if I complete a second Master’s of Global Affairs to compliment my in progress MBA- and gain long term employment in the federal government, I am honored to compete in the Blue and Gold of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish for the 2024 football season where I will share what I have learned from my experiences to the betterment of those around me.
Pray for Our Troops!
Pray for Our Country!
Pray for Peace!
Go Notre Dame!
Eric Goins #90