Hours before National Signing Day began on Feb. 6, 2019, Miami (FL) was already signing a recruit: Australian punter Lou Hedley, who used the 13-hour time difference between Coral Cables and his hometown of Mandurah in Western Australian to become the Canes' first late-period signee — and Manny Diaz's first signee as head coach — in the 2019 class.
Hedley was a two-star recruit (247Sports) and the top-ranked JUCO punter, though before he arrived at the City College of San Francisco, he had never seen an American football game. In fact, Hedley hadn't seen an American football game before he played in an American football game.
"The first game I ever watched was the game I was playing in. I’ve only been here three months, and I first picked up a football six months ago. But I am learning fast,” Hedley said in a 2017 article for The Guardsman, CCSF's student newspaper. “With rugby punts, or as you guys call them ‘pooch punts’, it is similar since you gotta get under the ball a bit, but the spiral is completely different."
He played Australian-rules football in his home country (and worked as a scaffolder in the desert for eight years) before arriving in San Francisco in 2017, where the then-24-year-old played one season before redshirting in 2018 to preserve three years of remaining eligibility for an FBS prorgam. In 2017, he averaged 25 yards on three fake-punt run attempts, which included a 56-yard scamper.
The tattoo-laden, 6-foot-4, 230-pounder has a son named Loki (photos on Instagram) and made headlines with his February signing photos. And he was profiled by ESPN (Hurricane Louis: The Viral Punter Who Stole Signing Day) in June:
