He grew up playing rugby at his school in Bristol, but now a lad from Stapleton has swapped one oval ball for another and signed to one of the top US college football programmes.
Akram Elnagmi has just turned 20 and has taken a major step to fulfill a dream of playing American football in the NFL, despite never even putting on the shoulder pads until he was 17.
He’s 6ft 6ins tall and tips the scales at more than 21 stone, and the former Bristol Grammar School boy has now been accepted onto the football programme at the prestigious University of Pittsburgh, where the football team the Pittsburgh Panthers are a top Division 1 established college football team.
College football in the US is a bigger spectacle than the professional NFL game, with student games televised live across the country and watched by crowds of more than 100,000. The four-year course will hopefully end with Akram getting drafted to a professional NFL team.
The 20-year-old grew up in Frenchay and Stapleton and went to Begbrook Primary before heading to Bristol Grammar School where he first showed promise on the rugby field. “I was always just like a school-level athlete, but I was always just like a bigger lad,” he said. “So from Year 7 to Year 11, that’s when I was playing rugby.” Akram was initially bigger than almost everyone else he ever played against as a prop, so was BGS’s best player to start with. But then his peers caught up. “For the first few years, it was like that, and then everyone just started having growth spurts,” he remembered.
His older brother Ezzat was into American football, and played for two years for the UWE Bullets at the University of the West of England. He and his teammates encouraged the then 16-year-old Akram to give it a go.
So he applied to the NFL Academy, which is based at Loughborough University’s elite sports centre, and got in. He completed the first year of sixth form at Bristol Cathedral Choir School, but quit to go straight to Loughborough. And that was the very first time he put on the American football pads and made his first block in a real-life game, at the age of 17.
“It was never something that I watched online, but it was something that I saw my older brother play in Bristol. So when I saw him play that and me and him had a similar frame, so I thought ‘maybe this is something I could do’,” Akram said.
“His teammates were telling me it’s something I should do, especially because I was still young. They were telling me maybe I should start and just look into it. And that’s when I found the NFL Academy,” he added.
Meanwhile, big brother Ezzat left the UWE team and was the first to cross the Atlantic. He got into Canadian college football – at St Clair University in Windsor, Ontario, playing for the St Clair Saints. Last year he was named ‘offensive lineman of the year’, and this year the 23-year-old turned pro, signing onto the practice roster for the Montreal Alouettes in the CFL.
Little brother Akram has taken a slightly different path, after getting accepted onto the NFL Academy programme, set up to get the best potential American footballers from the UK into US colleges to play the game, even though he’d never actually played the game before.
“Just seeing his successes made me push myself harder to reach that goal,” he said. “So I joined the NFL Academy with no prior experience. Obviously with my background in rugby, they did take a big risk on me as well, that I didn’t play – I just had a big frame. So the coaches thought they could work with it,” he explained.
It worked, and now he’s an accomplished American football player. This year, six students have made it to the college football game, and in the new year, Akram will be one of them.
He’ll be at the Pittsburgh Panthers for four years, before hopefully getting drafted into the NFL. He plays as an offensive tackle – one of the big men in the line whose job is to protect the quarterback and other team-mates with the ball, by blocking the opposition players. It’s a similar position to prop in rugby, where he played at school in Bristol, but the two sports are very different.
“Obviously you’ve got the equipment on and American football is more of a tactical game,” he said. “You’ve got the stop-starts, but then that just gives the opportunity for the offense to get their plays in, and figure out a strategy to get to the end zone. It gives the defence the same opportunity to try and stop that,” he added.
With playbooks and strategies filling huge folders that players have to memorise, the game is far more like a lightning quick game of physical chess. “You have to have all that information in your mind and then process it all very quickly,” said Akram. “You have less than a second to process it, especially on the offensive line. It gets very quick and very hectic quickly, especially with big bodies on the line that you need to block,” he added.
There’s also the psychological battle between two huge men crunching helmets, shoulders and their whole bodies into each other in a game of push and shove, and there’s always a lot of trash-talking and sledging in that line, but Akram isn’t one for saying much. “I don’t really tend to talk a lot,” he said. “I just let my game play and if I can, I’ll try and get into their heads because it’ll make them a little bit more nervous. I do keep the talk to a minimum, but maybe I might throw one or two comments in when they first come onto the field just to get them on their edge,” he added.
Back in Bristol, and over in Montreal, the family are cheering him on. “Ezzat’s excited for me. He’s got some big plans of his own, but him and my younger brother, they’re really supportive of my journey. My whole family, my dad, my mum, my younger sister, all my friends in Bristol, they’re very supportive of my journey. They push me when maybe I want to eat something nice, you know, they’re like ‘focus!’ so they keep me on the right track,” he added.
The next stop for Akram will be Pittsburgh and the start of a four-year journey. “It’s always been like a dream of mine to live in a different environment. Obviously growing up in Bristol… Bristol’s nice and all, but I just wanted to have that new experience of living out of the country. So this gives me that perfect opportunity,” he added.
There’s still a long way to go – the path from college football to the NFL sees only a small percentage make it. But if he makes it in college football and then gets in to the NFL there’s the chance he could come back and play in London when the NFL brings matches over every season.
“It would just be like a full circle moment, being from the UK, getting into an NFL team and coming back here to play would just be like a dream come true,” Akram said. “It’s a small number, a very small percentage of people that get this opportunity. That’s why I’m very grateful every day for the opportunity and I know I won’t waste it. I’m going to give that 110 per cent every day,” he added.