New Cal kicker emerges from obscurity to live dream
It wasn’t long ago that Greg Thomas thought he’d be spending his weeknights quietly studying for a geography test or typing away on a sociology paper.
Instead, there he was Tuesday night at Memorial Stadium: explaining to a media gaggle the perfect storm of events that swept him from being a transfer student majoring in urban studies at Cal to being the football team’s starting placekicker.
“It’s a huge honor,” he said. “It’s something I’ve dreamed about since I was a little kid. It’s a great opportunity, and I’m just trying to do the most with it.”
In an effort to replace Matt Anderson, who graduated as the school’s all-time leading scorer with 316 points, Cal was chasing two other preferred walk-on prospects. When neither arrived in January, special teams coach Charlie Ragle put his vast list of contacts to work.
He got word of a kicker at City College of San Francisco, and it was a name the coach remembered from his days at Arizona (2012-16). That was enough to prompt Ragle to go watch Thomas kick and review his video.
Sure enough, this was the same Greg Thomas, who backed up 2016 Lou Groza Award winner Zane Gonzalez at Arizona State and kicked in relative obscurity at CCSF last season.
“I think he was done (as a football player). I think he was under the impression that he wasn’t going to have an opportunity, and he was just going to come to school here,” Ragle said. “… But everything lined up for him. … It was a perfect scenario for him and us.”
Well, the perfect part wasn’t immediate, even after Ragle found a walk-on spot for Thomas.
During the first couple of weeks of camp, the four kickers competing for the starting spot at Cal struggled — going entire sessions without making a single attempt and combining to go 3-of-8 during the team’s first scrimmage. In the past two weeks, however, Thomas has emerged.
He drilled a 50-yard field goal in the Bears’ second scrimmage and regularly has been the team’s most accurate kicker since then.
“Trust yourself,” Thomas said. “You’ve just got to be confident, and I feel like that’s when everything started to click.”
The 5-foot-9, 175-pound junior regained the consistency that made him Petaluma High’s Player of the Year in 2015, earned him a spot to apprentice under Gonzales at Arizona State in 2016 and allowed him to convert on 10 of his final 11 fieldgoal tries at CCSF last season.
And, he has done some of his work in Berkeley under trying circumstances.
In an effort to simulate gamelike tensions, the Cal coaching staff often decides on postpractice conditioning based on whether a kicker makes or misses a field-goal attempt. Toward the end of training camp, Ragle even started squirting the kickers with water while they were approaching the ball for pressure-filled kicks.
“You learn to enjoy it, almost,” Thomas said. “It’s almost like swimming, when the water kind of gets stuck in your ear.”
Said Ragle: “I try to get it in those little spots that really annoy you: the crevices, the ankle, down the neck and maybe in the ear. Just enough to annoy you and see if you might lose focus. We’re pleased with how he’s handled it, and excited to watch him go. …
“I don’t have any qualms about running him out there and letting him kick. I feel like he’s going to do a really good job.”
When Thomas got the news Monday, his parents got the first call.
Now, he’s trying to accumulate as many tickets as possible to Saturday’s season opener against North Carolina to accommodate friends and family who plan to the make the 40mile drive south for the game.
“They are proud of me, for sure,” Thomas said. “They know how hard I’ve worked for it. It’s cool for them, too.” Rusty Simmons is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rsimmons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Rusty_SFChron