After watching a meltdown turn into a miracle opportunity, Winchester High football head coach Wally Dembowski didn’t hesitate to put the fate of the game on the foot of his first-year starting kicker.
Belmont scored a touchdown against the Red and Black with about 30 seconds left to take a 32-30 lead in Week 5 of last season. Winchester was on its way to a crushing loss, but the ensuing kickoff was returned over 50 yards into Marauders territory.
Dembowski asked junior Kieran Corr if he needed a timeout before attempting a game-winner from 48 yards with three seconds to go, but he declined.
Corr admits in hindsight he should’ve taken the timeout to prepare for the whipping winds that night, since his kick had the distance but pushed wide. The Red and Black lost, but Dembowski had no regrets. He knew what he had in Corr.
Nine months later, the five-star kicker and punter announced his commitment to Harvard University. In the following days, he converted a 65-yard field goal to secure the Kohl’s Professional Camps’ No. 1 ranking – earning one of two national kicker selections to the acclaimed Under Armour All-America Game in January.
“You learn a lot more from the mistakes than you do from doing something well,” Dembowski said. “Week in and week out, he has gotten better, and better, and better. … He’s such a great kid, a great student.”
Kohl’s Professional Camps ranks him the No. 1 kicker in the country and the 28th punter.
It’s a running joke for the 6-3, 175-pound Corr to tell his parents he made a mistake deciding to play football. It’s funny because in the spring of his sophomore year, his mother initially resisted his decision to leave the varsity soccer team and pursue kicking.
It didn’t take long to show it was the right choice.
Corr came to the idea by watching videos of kicking camps, thinking they looked fun. He played football in Pop Warner before focusing on soccer in middle school, but had the chance to do both his freshman year when the pandemic moved football to the spring. After the freshman year ended, Corr surprised himself with a 50-yard field goal to win a Kicking World camp in Boston.
His return to soccer in the fall of sophomore year was automatic and earning a spot on the varsity team was exciting, but he still had a desire to kick. There was no reason he couldn’t still participate in kicking camps, so that’s what he did.
That ensuing May, he had an aha moment.
“I went into the Kohl’s Eastern Spring Showcase in New Jersey, and after that camp, I got a 4.5-star ranking and like, No. 42 in the country or something,” Corr said. “In my eyes at the time, it was amazing. I wanted to try to be a college athlete, and I maybe could’ve played D3 soccer or found a smaller school to play soccer at. But I really wanted to push myself and see what I could achieve. … That’s when I realized I had a potential future in this.”
From there, it was a deep dive.
Dembowski looks back at Corr’s work ethic last year fondly, but even he felt the workload might’ve been too much. He estimates Corr kicked about 150 balls each week. Come the offseason, he showed just what he was working so hard for.
Corr’s mother may have briefly resisted football at first, but his parents didn’t rob him of any opportunity. They helped him attend kicking camps in Texas, Tennessee, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Florida since his freshman year. Corr’s ranking just kept rising, leading up to the recent Kohl’s camp in July that saw him beat a group of 900 kickers to secure a coveted spot in the UA All-America Game.
The seven finalists were nailing field goals from over 60 yards, and he needed a 65-yarder to win it.
“It’s awesome, I’m so grateful to have come such a long way since I first started,” Corr said. “I always think back to freshman me on this field. I didn’t really know if I was going to play football. … To be able to perform in this Under Armour All-America Game, it’s just an opportunity that I never would have thought would be possible.
“My parents are a little blown away by how far this has gone.”
There’s little surprise Corr chose Harvard, citing its culture to simply be the best at whatever ambitions students aspire to. But in the meantime, Dembowski is thrilled for the opportunity to have one of the best special teams in the state this year.
Between Corr’s high touchback rate on kickoffs, and the college-level operation time of the field goal/punting unit with University of New Hampshire-committed long-snapper Dillon Keough, Winchester has a clear advantage. If weather conditions are right, Dembowski is open to sending the field goal unit in for as far out as the 40-yard line.
“I don’t know the state record for longest field goal, but we’re going to give it a shot,” he said. “I’m going to have no problem sending the field goal team out on the 40-yard-line, and line up to kick 58-yarders – in high school. … (Special teams) is a huge advantage.”
