With place kicker Jame McCourt in his last season this fall, Illinois looked to add a kicker to the roster in the class of 2022.
They did just that on Wednesday, picking up a pledge from Will McManus from The Hun School in Princeton, New Jersey.
Illinois had a connection to The Hun School, a prep school in New Jersey. Tight end commit Owen Anderson is a teammate of McManus.
McManus took visits to Army, Navy, and Rice, but he couldn't turn down a chance to play Power 5 football and get a great education.
"Illinois first contacted me around the end of April after my coach put them in contact with me," he said. " I chose to progress talks further because I knew they were a good Big Ten program with an excellent business school as well."
McManus will initially be a preferred walk-on and will enroll in the spring. He's been promised a scholarship if he can win the staring PK job. He'll compete with Caleb Griffin, a local product from Danville.
"The offer I got including enrolling in the spring played a huge part in why I committed here," McManus said. "I know it's a very special opportunity to go in this spring and have such a good opportunity to compete for the starting job right away, it was very hard to pass up."
McManus is a post-grad student Hun. This season he's made all five of his field goal attempts and 23 of 26 PAT's.
He's new to place kicking McManus said, and he needed at extra year at prep school to make a name for himself and garner some recruiting attention.
"My high school career has been interesting," McManus said. "I only started kicking a little over a year ago, and I didn't get many division one looks my senior year because we didn't have a season and I had no film. So I decided to do a post-grad year here at Hun where I could have a year to get good game film."
The plan is for McManus to compete to handle field goal and kickoff duties, but he's also a punter and will continue to hone those skills.
Illinois has punter Hugh Robertson, a redshirt freshman, on the roster and he's been assumed to be the replacement for fellow Australian Blake Hayes.
Koh's, the premier punting and kicking camps in the U.S., ranks McManus among the top kickers in the class of 2022.
" I've attended multiple Kohl's kicking ranking showcases, and right now I'm the 26th ranked kicker in the country," McManus said. "This summer I competed at the national scholarship camp in Tennessee, which is the biggest kicking camp held every year by Kohl’s. I finished 4th in kickoffs and tied 8th in field goals out of 550 kickers."
Locking down a kicker of McManus' ability to compete in the spring with Griffin was an important step for Illinois.
He definitely has the leg strength to be a Power 5 kicker and put together a good career at Illinois.
"I'd say my best skill as a kicker is the height I get on my kicks," McManus said. "It's really important to get good height so the ball gets over the line fast and there's no chance of a block and with my height there's nothing really to worry about. My personal best right now is 65 yards, which I hit at one of the Kohl's ranking camps in May."
