How Australian kickers and punters have found their footing in Canada's game

Kickers and punters in football are often seen as a distinct group of players. This year on the Montreal Alouettes, the unique dynamic between the kicking unit and the rest of the team is particularly pronounced.

That's because the Alouettes have three Australians booting the ball this season.

"We go from French to the Aussie terms quite a bit, so I catch myself saying 'mate' quite a few times," says Alouettes special teams coach Byron Archambault.

Joseph Zema, 30, is in his fifth season with the Alouettes, while Joshua Hutley, 29, and Joshua Sloan, 25, are rookies.

"It's awesome, it's honestly a dream. My dream's just to be playing professional sport," Sloan says.

WATCH | Australian Alouettes players on breaking into Canadian football:

The Montreal Alouettes have three Australians on the roster for the 2025 season — and they're all kickers.

He and his compatriot Hutley both say that growing up in Australia, neither of them ever dreamed of playing professional football in Canada.

"It's nothing that I would have planned or thought about 15 years ago," Hutley says.

"I just wanted to learn a new skill and give it a go and I think as I developed as a punter and kicker, I sort of realized that I'm not awful at it."

Prior to 2019, it would have been relatively complicated for an Australian to land a spot in the Canadian Football League due to the league's system of roster quotas.

Roughly half of all the players on a CFL gameday roster are required to be "national players" or Canadians. The other half, or "import players" generally came from the United States where football is king and there is an abundance of talented players looking for paycheques to play the sport.

So any Australian aiming to land a spot in the CFL would have qualified as an "import player"and been competing directly with Americans.

But starting in 2019, in an attempt to globalize the game of football, the league put in new rules to allow for new roster spots for players from outside of Canada and the U.S. It also began holding a yearly global draft to recruit these players.

Since then, Australian kickers and punters have slowly been gaining more and more of a share of those global picks. In 2021, Australian kickers accounted for just 16.7 per cent of all players drafted. Last year, they represented 44.4 per cent.

The Alouettes seem to be a team that has a particular affinity for Australian legs. Since 2021, they've drafted six Australian kickers and punters. Only Hamilton, with seven, has drafted more Australian special teamers than Montreal.

The Alouettes say this was not by design.

"It just worked out that way," says Montreal Alouettes general manager Danny Maciocia.

"It's not like we said we're going to target just players that are from Australia."

All three Australians on the Alouettes point to their background in Australian rules football as the foundation for their success in Canada.

The game is a national sport in Australia. It's played with a ball called a footy and, as the name implies, it involves a lot of kicking.

"In Australia, we grow up learning to kick first so that's the first thing my dad taught me," Sloan says.

Zema says he also grew up kicking the ball and "it's pretty easily translated into punting for American and Canadian football."

But while more and more Australian footballers are ending up in Canada, typically they don't come directly to the great white north from down under. Most are first recruited to U.S. college football programs in the NCAA.

Sloan, for example, played for the University of Memphis Tigers in 2024 and with the University of Texas at El Paso Miners for four seasons before that. Hutley, meanwhile, kicked for the Concord University Mountain Lions for two seasons before being drafted.

Zema, who played college ball at the University of the Incarnate Word in Texas, says there is a learning curve from the American to the Canadian game, but it's not that dramatic.

"Slight differences, but it's still a ball," Zema says.

CFL teams often identify kicking prospects in a yearly showcase in San Diego.

"It's huge, it's huge," Maciocia said of selecting international players through the global draft.

"You could either have one or two on your roster. So you have to factor that in the composition of a roster and it's extremely important that you're picking the right guy."

It's unclear if the league's intention of implementing the global draft was to focus so heavily on the kicking game, but it's certainly becoming an aspect of the Canadian sport that Australians are happy to claim as their own.

"We just grow up doing it," Hutley says.

"Everyone [in North America] probably wants to grow up and be a quarterback or a receiver or one of the glory positions. But back home, we want to be footy players."