10/30/2026 10:00:00 AM | Football
Once chasing a future in soccer, Nico Cavanillas Alti found another path from Spain to Coastal Carolina’s record book
CONWAY, S.C. — Nico Cavanillas Alti worried about what his new teammates would say. He'd joined the football team at Redmond High School in Oregon hoping to experience an American sport, and his first extra-point attempt had just ended with his foot striking the holder's hand.
"They're not going to like me," Cavanillas Alti recalled thinking. "There's no way they're going to give me another chance."
Instead, his teammates encouraged the exchange student from Madrid, Spain, to move on to the next kick.
There would be plenty more, although Cavanillas Alti couldn't have imagined where they would take him. The teenager who hoped to become a professional soccer player would eventually make field goals from 56 and 58 yards at Coastal Carolina, breaking the program record twice in the same season.
His introduction to football began on a fall Sunday in Oregon, where he was spending his senior year of high school with the Barnes family. His mother, Elena, had been an exchange student in Portland, and a connection to her former host family helped arrange her son's stay a generation later.
While they watched NFL RedZone, his host father, Brandon Barnes, saw a kicker make a field goal and suggested Nico give it a try. That afternoon, they bought footballs and headed to a nearby middle school. Cavanillas Alti's first attempt, from 30 yards, went through the uprights.
"My form wasn't great, but it felt good coming off my foot," he said. "I thought to myself, 'Why not give this a shot?'"
It was already late September when he approached Redmond's football coaches about joining the team. He was playing soccer that fall, too, but wanted to experience football while he had the chance.
His debut came with the junior varsity team. Despite his teammates' encouragement after the awkward extra point, he felt more at home on the soccer field. After two football games, he turned his attention back to the sport he hoped would become his future.
"I thought that was it for me," he said. "I could say I'd tried football and played in high school, but I didn't think I'd play again."
In 2022, soccer took him to Keiser University, an NAIA program in West Palm Beach, Florida. He arrived for preseason after a summer of training, eager to prove he could work toward a professional career. After limited opportunities with the first team, however, he spent the season with the developmental team.
"It was tough for a kid who goes to college with a lot of dreams, thinking, 'I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that,'" he said. "Then you see those dreams start to disappear because you think you might not be good enough."
As Cavanillas Alti questioned his future in soccer, his father, Javier, encouraged him to give football another chance.
That summer, Cavanillas Alti practiced in Mexico City, where his family was living. At the city's elevation, he was making kicks from distances that surprised him. He posted training videos on social media and contacted coaches, hoping to find an opportunity.
Returning to sea level in Florida brought a reality check.
"It hit me like a rock," he said.
He ultimately stayed at Keiser, asking to join the football team two days before the 2023 season opener. He continued playing developmental soccer to retain his soccer scholarship while taking on a second sport.
Third on the kicking depth chart, he waited in a 3XL No. 97 jersey for opportunities. He earned kickoff duties early in the season, but his first collegiate field-goal attempt against Lindsey Wilson sailed badly to the left.
As opportunities became scarce, he found himself watching from the sideline again.
"I was feeling pretty bad," he said. "But at the same time, I didn't see it as a bad thing, because everybody starts at some point and you've got to go through it."
His immediate goal was to earn another chance. When it came, he made a 30-yard field goal. Later that season, an injury ahead of him on the depth chart opened the starting job.
He made both field-goal attempts in his first game as the full-time starter and finished the season with 11 made field goals.
The next year, he converted 11 of 13 field-goal attempts and made a school-record 58 extra points in 59 attempts. He earned second-team All-Sun Conference honors and a spot on the Fred Mitchell Award Watch List. An overtime game-winner at North Greenville helped earn him NAIA Special Teams Player of the Week recognition.
The kicker who'd started third on the depth chart was beginning to see a future beyond Keiser.
"I felt like my kicks were becoming so decisive," he said. "I was putting my team in good situations and helping create momentum. I started thinking I could do this at a higher level."
After two seasons at Keiser, he entered the transfer portal. Interest was limited until South Carolina State offered him an opportunity, drawn to his experience in championship games.
In 2025, he made all 51 of his extra-point attempts for the Bulldogs. His biggest test came in overtime of the Celebration Bowl, with South Carolina State needing a field goal to keep its championship hopes alive.
An initial attempt from 43 yards was blocked, but a penalty against the Bulldogs gave them another chance from 5 yards farther back.
Cavanillas Alti now faced a 48-yarder with the game on the line.
"This was the moment I'd been praying for," he said. "I just had to go through my motion and do what I'd been doing all these years."
He looked toward his target and returned to a phrase he tells himself in Spanish before important kicks.
"Gloria o nada," he said. "It means glory or nothing."
He drilled it. South Carolina State went on to win the HBCU national championship.
With one season of eligibility remaining, Cavanillas Alti entered the transfer portal again, this time hoping to reach the Football Bowl Subdivision.
"I was hoping for so many schools to reach out," he said. "It was the same thing as the last time I entered the portal. I barely had any attention."
Coastal offered him a spot to compete. It was his only FBS opportunity, and he embraced it.
"At the end of the day, that was what I was looking for," he said.
He earned the starting job before the season opener and made his first Coastal field goal at West Virginia. For Cavanillas Alti, it was a chance to reward the people who'd put their trust in him.
"It was a relief," he said. "It created some momentum for me to start the season."
Against Fordham, he was ready to ask for more.
After watching the Chanticleers attempt a fourth-down conversion beyond conventional field-goal range, Cavanillas Alti approached head coach Ryan Beard during the game.
"I can really make those kicks," he recalled telling Beard. "Put me out there. I'll put some points on the board."
When another opportunity arrived, Beard sent out the field-goal unit for a 56-yard attempt.
"As a coach, you ask your guys to believe in what you're doing," Beard said. "They need to feel that same belief from you. Sometimes you show them that by trusting them in a big moment and giving them a chance to go do their job."
With the play clock running down and his long snapper, Mitch Weisenborn, urging him to hurry, Cavanillas Alti had little time to consider the distance.
"I didn't even have time to think," he said. "All I remember was just striking the ball so hard."
He rose onto his toes to follow its flight and watched it clear the crossbar for a program record.
Five weeks later, Beard trusted him from even farther away against App State. Cavanillas Alti connected from 58 yards, breaking his own record and giving him the two longest field goals in Coastal Carolina history.
"I think it would have been good from 59, and that was it," he said. "It's a matter of inches."
By then, his teammates had their own ways of letting him know they believed in him.
"They've called me Nico Money, Cash Nico and the Spanish Cannon," he said with a smile. "It's a special feeling when it's not just you who believes you can do it. It's the whole team."
Heading into this weekend's game at Georgia State, Cavanillas Alti is one of only two FBS kickers with multiple field goals from 56 yards or longer this season. His 58-yarder is also the longest in the Sun Belt this season.
On the Tuesday after each record-setting kick, though, special teams coordinator Nelson Fishback reminded him how to approach the next one.
"Coach Fishback tells me to have the mentality that I haven't done anything yet," Cavanillas Alti said. "The season isn't over. What you did last week is in the past. You've got to focus on the next game."
He's also learned to measure his progress without getting caught up in what other kickers are doing. His own path has given him plenty of reasons to understand that success doesn't follow a set timeline.
The high school student who once kicked the holder's hand would hardly have believed where football would take him. Back then, the future he wanted was on a soccer field.
"I wanted to be a pro soccer player, but it didn't really go my way," he said. "But I'm still finding a way. You just need to stay focused on you, because not everybody's journey is the same."
