Aidan Birr found his calling at a tryout. The rest is Georgia Tech history

About 10 years ago, a group of Kennedale High freshmen were asked to kick footballs.

The team, south of Fort Worth, Texas, needed a kicker and punter. So coach Richard Barrett told an assistant to round up some of their youngest players and see what they could do.

Most were football players trying to figure out how to kick.

One was different.

He approached the ball with the instincts of a longtime soccer goalie and repeatedly sent it sailing.

Barrett watched.

“This kid may have something here,” he said.

The kid was Aidan Birr.

That tryout changed the course of Birr’s life. Soon after, he gave up soccer and focused full-time on football. He earned a spot at Georgia Tech, where he has made game-winning field goals and was a finalist last year for the Lou Groza Award, given annually to college football’s best kicker.

Two weeks ago at Stanford, Birr set the school record for career field goals made.

“It’s something I wanted to achieve coming here,” Birr said. “It’s a goal I had when I made my first kick and when I became the starter I wanted to go and achieve.”

Birr said he knew nothing about kicking a football before high school. The plant, the swing and the landing were all different from his technique on the soccer field.

So he went to work.

Four days a week in high school, Birr arrived at the football facility at 6 a.m. He brought a tripod and filmed himself kicking for hours.

“And I’m not talking about every once in a while,” Barrett said. “He did it religiously. He kicked and kicked and studied. I was always saying, ‘I don’t know where he’s going to end up, but this kid is going to make it.’”

Birr redshirted his freshman year at Georgia Tech after tearing his ACL in a pickup basketball game. He won the starting job the next season (2024) and made 17 of 19 field goals, an 89.5% rate that was the highest by a freshman in Tech history.

His redshirt sophomore season began with a 44-yard field goal as time expired, pushing the Yellow Jackets to a 24-21 win over No. 10 Florida State in Dublin, Ireland.

The big kicks kept coming.

Last season, Birr connected on a 55-yarder on the final play to beat Clemson. He made a 33-yarder as time expired in regulation against Wake Forest to send the game to overtime, where the Jackets eventually won.

“Every kick is different, but just knowing that I’ve done this before, like, I can do this,” Birr said. “And knowing my team has my back is the biggest thing. It allows you to go out there with a free mind and just swing away.”

It hasn’t always gone smoothly.

In 2024, after his Florida State game-winner, Birr described his performance as “up and down.” He made 68% of his field goals that season and missed two of his three tries from 50-plus yards.

“I took a lot of that on myself,” Birr said. “I felt like I was screwing over the team.”

Jackets coach Brent Key met with Birr and told him he could miss every field-goal attempt and still not get benched.

“Coach Key said I was his guy,” Birr said. “I’m going to miss kicks. I’m human. I think knowing that is part of the job, too.”

Travis Bell received a text message during the Mercer game last month. A friend sent him a picture from inside Bobby Dodd Stadium of Birr’s image on the video board with text that said he was one shy of Bell’s school record for career field goals.

“I said, ‘That’s one’s gone,” Bell said.

Birr tied the record that day and broke it the following week against Stanford.

Bell, who made 61 field goals and all 138 of his extra-point attempts for Tech from 2004-07, has plenty in common with Birr.

Bell, a Roswell native, initially had ambitions of playing soccer. He committed to play soccer at Clemson before Georgia Tech offered him an opportunity in football.

He started strong as a freshman, making 88% of his field goal attempts, before a sophomore stumble where he missed 10-of-21 tries made him question his standing.

“The football thing is hard because it’s between the ears,” Bell said.

“Kicking, you either can handle it or not. That’s why kickers are usually successful long-term. They either have it or they don’t.”

For nearly 20 years, Bell held Tech’s mark for career field goals and other records. But he said seeing his name on lists that included Scott Sisson, Harrison Butker and Luke Manget meant more to him than the numbers.

Kicking at Tech, for Bell, is a fraternity.

“Somebody has to take the torch and keep it lit,” Bell said. “Aidan is the right man for the job. I hope he breaks all the records.”

Birr broke some of Bell’s other records last season. His 25 field goals and 120 points set single-season marks.

But Birr has become more than a kicker within the program.

Key said he and Birr talked on the phone at least twice a week over the summer, about the team and football and life. Key named Birr a permanent team captain for this season during fall camp.