The Australia Letter is a weekly e-newsletter from our Australia bureau. Join to get it by e mail. This week’s difficulty is written by Natasha Frost, a reporter based mostly in Melbourne.

At the very least one, and probably two, Australians will take the sector in Arizona for the Tremendous Bowl on Sunday evening, earlier than a tv viewers of lots of of hundreds of thousands of individuals. With the sport beginning at 10:30 a.m. Monday Sydney time, comparatively few Australians will probably be watching.

Neither Arryn Siposs, the punter for the Philadelphia Eagles, nor his teammate Jordan Mailata, an offensive lineman, comes from an American soccer background. And, regardless of Australia’s sports-loving repute, neither is precisely a family title at dwelling.

In Australia, Siposs is remembered largely as a former participant for the St. Kilda Soccer Cub, the Australian guidelines soccer membership nicknamed the Saints. In 2015, at age 22, he was reduce after successive accidents triggered him to overlook months at a time. (Yet one more harm might forestall him from enjoying on Sunday evening.)

Mailata, a bear of a person with an astoundingly stunning singing voice, comes from a rugby league background.

In 2017, he rejected a contract price 5,000 Australian {dollars} (about $3,500) from a rugby league feeder group whereas he was working as a scaffolder to pay the payments. After being drafted within the seventh spherical within the 2018 N.F.L. draft, he performed in his first sport in 2020. In 2021 he signed a four-year, $64 million contract.

Earlier than the draft, he scored a spot on the N.F.L.’s Worldwide Participant Pathway program, a 12-week coaching camp for international athletes who largely haven’t performed American soccer. He had by no means a lot as worn a helmet earlier than, he instructed the reporter Michael Sokolove for a profile in The New York Occasions journal in 2019.

American soccer, in contrast to basketball, baseball, soccer and hockey, usually doesn’t draw from an abroad expertise pool. Coaching potential gamers from scratch, because the Worldwide Participant Pathway program tries to do, is a frightening proposition.

A lot of the Australians who’ve performed within the N.F.L. have been punters. Many discovered their manner there by ProKick Australia, a punting academy run by the previous N.F.L. punter Nathan Chapman that works to get promising Australian athletes alternatives in American soccer. About 190 of them have obtained full scholarships to American schools, in line with the corporate.

The academy first approached Siposs when he was 17, he wrote in a weblog publish in 2018. Not figuring out the foundations and having scarcely watched the game, he recalled, “I put the letter to at least one aspect and didn’t give it one other thought.”

He knew of different Australian punters who had made the transition, however noticed it as a distraction from the true prize: enjoying within the A.F.L. at dwelling. “I assumed it was only a manner they might keep in skilled sport,” he writes. “While you’ve bought an enormous leg, why not go over there for a couple of years should you can?”

Later, dealing with difficulties with getting his personal A.F.L. profession off the bottom, he determined to offer American soccer one other go, ultimately successful a scholarship by ProKick Australia to Auburn College.

“So long as I may keep in mind I’d at all times kicked the footy, whether or not simply to myself exterior or mucking round with my little brother with a small footy inside the home, inflicting a ruckus,” he writes. And whereas the method (and the ball) differs between the 2 sports activities, he says, “I suppose kicking has at all times been my No. 1 talent.”

Mailata — who’s 6 toes 8 inches tall and weighs 365 kilos — knew he must discover a substitute for rugby league when his coaches started making use of stress on him to shed extra pounds.

“I used to be right down to 310, and so they needed me to lose 30 extra kilos. I already had hardly any physique fats, so it was an possibility the place I’d both need to starve myself or chop off a leg,” he instructed The Occasions. “I talked to my company, and so they stated, ‘Why don’t you play a sport that appreciates your dimension?’”

Listed here are the week’s tales.

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