How 2 older guys from England wound up playing football for this Charlotte HBCU
Andrew Hirst and Lukasz Smolen know they can cause anyone taking a spin through the Johnson C. Smith University football team’s roster to do a double-take.
For multiple reasons, but perhaps most comically to them, the fact that they look pretty darn old for a pair of freshmen. And they are — Smolen, 25 since April, and Hirst, who turned 26 this past June, check in as the oldest and third-oldest on a nationally ranked Golden Bulls’ squad that classifies them as first-year student-athletes.
So yes, these two kickers/punters are routinely feeling their age.
Sometimes it’s a self-imposed sentiment, like when at a practice earlier this fall an older coach made a reference to the Sega Genesis video-game console that almost no one but Smolen and Hirst got. “Most of our teammates said, ‘What are you talking about?’ I was like, ‘Nooooooo!,’” Smolen says, as he puts his hands to his temples and feigns shock, before bursting in to laughter.
But other times, the ribbing is completely unsolicited, like when one of the commentators calling JCSU’s game at Virginia State in October spotted Smolen’s and Hirst’s photos on the roster sheet and blurted, “Oh, you can tell these guys are old freshmen!”
“My mum called about it afterwards,” Hirst says. “I was wettin’ myself. It was funny.”
This, now that he mentions it, brings up another thing causing these two to stand out, on paper and in-person. They’re both imports from the United Kingdom — Smolen from London, Hirst from the London-commuter town of Watford — and therefore the only Golden Bulls who qualify as international.
Oh, and we might as well acknowledge the elephant in the stadium, too: They’re among the only white guys on this resurgent HBCU’s team, which is 8-1 and flirting with a conference-title-game berth heading into the final week of the season.
It’s a whole lot of uncharted territory for the both of them. Prior to arriving together in Charlotte last January, only Hirst had been to the U.S. before (and that was when he was about 6), and only Smolen had played organized American football (and that was when he was just a boy, for a local amateur team).
Which begs an obvious question: How are they adjusting to everything so far?
A longing to return to the playing field
This time a couple of years ago, Hirst and Smolen were a couple of working stiffs in London who’d gone straight from secondary school into the service industry.
Hirst, who’d played rugby through most of his teens, was the activities manager at a hotel frequently booked by NFL teams visiting London as part the league’s International Games. Smolen — whose athletic background included the sport the English call football, the sport Americans call football, and the sport both countries refer to as flag football — was a retail-store security guard.
Neither was in their dream job. Both longed to return to the playing field, even if just for fun and not profit.
To that end, both, on a bit of a lark, signed up to train with United Kicking, a coaching company that aims to develop the skills of English and other European athletes interested in playing American football in the kicking, punting and long-snapping positions.
Both young men rapidly showed prodigious potential. Before long, they were introduced to each other, became friends, and started doing reps together.
The next thing they knew, their coach, Bradley Charalambous, was floating the idea of them possibly landing at a U.S. college program. While trying not to get them too excited, of course.
“Coach Brad asked me about my dream school,” Smolen recalls, “and I said, ‘My dream school is Oregon. … Ever since I found out they play at colleges, all I’ve been watching is the Oregon Ducks.’ And he said, ‘Yeahhhhh, you’re probably not going there.’”
But both prospects did start getting looks from schools, including Division II JCSU’s program.
It was something of a circuitous route to get them all matched up. Golden Bulls special teams coordinator James Lott was on the hunt last year for a new kicker when he asked for input from California-based kicking coach Drew Vezina, who had played for the Charlotte school back in the late 2000s. Vezina referred Lott to Charalambous, who offered up Hirst as a candidate. Over the course of the next few months, as conversations progressed, Lott asked for film of Hirst playing the holder position ... and the video Hirst submitted turned out to greatly impress the assistant coach.
Mainly because he couldn’t help but notice that the kicker Hirst was holding for — that’d be Smolen — also had one heck of a leg.
‘Quite nice to have a familiar accent’
A vision for a package-deal-type offer came together quickly after that.
Lott could sense the two men had chemistry, realized they could read and react to each other well, and “I knew that they would be leaders, because they were a little bit older. They had already been 18, 19, 20.”
Hirst and Smolen, meanwhile, both viewed it as a chance to play high-caliber football in a first-class city, but more importantly as an extremely attractive opportunity that could set them up for long-term success: one full scholarship apiece, to cover the cost of JCSU’s highly regarded sports management program.
And if you’re wondering whether they had reservations about signing on as a twofer (all the way down to agreeing to be roommates), since they kinda-sorta would be competing for a job, Hirst would be the first to flatly shoot that notion down.
“We saw it as, ‘We’re moving across countries, quite nice to have a familiar accent and face.’”
It was definitely a daunting scenario. “I tried to push it to the back of my mind, thinking, Oh, no, it’s fine. I’m 25, I’ll be all right. I can always come back if I need to,” Hirst recalls. “Then the first night here, I was like, Ooo. That was one hell of a move.”
Adds Smolen: “And I thought, If something goes wrong, I can’t go anywhere. I can’t say, ‘Oh, I’m gonna go spend some time with my mum.’”
But they both say their initial anxieties were allayed by the Southern hospitality they experienced, from the welcoming residents they bump into on the sidewalks of the Biddleville neighborhood near campus to their new fellow students and teammates. They’ve also set an immediate example in the classroom; Lott says they are both carrying GPAs above 3.7, and Hirst says they’ve already helped a fellow special-teamer who was struggling school-wise to get back on track.
As for them being British guys at an HBCU not used to European imports?
Coming into it, Smolen thought he might feel like a bit of an outsider in the way he did after he moved with his family from Poland to the U.K. as an 8-year-old who didn’t know more than two words of English. But at JCSU, he says, “everyone I’m surrounded by daily made sure to make this place feel like home for me.” Hirst agrees: He’s never felt like a minority at JCSU. “You hear a lot of stuff on media back home about the divide in America. But no, here, at the end of the day, it’s not anything to do with race. You’re a football player. Which is incredibly refreshing.”
They do get some gentle joshing about their accents, to go with the old-guy jokes. “It was a struggle at first, trying to understand what they were saying,” JCSU quarterback Kelvin Durham says, chuckling, then adding: “They like to say ‘mate’ a lot, at the end of their sentences, which is kind of new for us.”
But in all seriousness, their QB says, “they fit right in. … Our team is made up of a lot of guys who love football and love to have fun as well. Those guys check both of those boxes.”
It’s just an added bonus for everyone that they happen to be checking them for arguably the best JCSU team in over half a century.
Setting school records, eyeing title game
Of the many pleasantly surprising culture shocks they’ve experienced since arriving in Charlotte 10 months ago, perhaps the most exhilarating came as soon as they stepped onto the field for their first game of the season against Morehouse.
“Back home,” Hirst says, “even rugby or anything like that, there’s not — obviously, unless you’re a pro — there’s not many fans. The most you normally play in front of is, like, 200.” More than 8,000 watched the Golden Bulls’ 45-9 rout that afternoon, at Harvard Stadium in Cambridge, Mass.
“It genuinely feels like a movie, or you’re in ‘Madden,’” he says of playing in front of that many people, “which is a very surreal thing.”
In terms of their actual on-field roles, Hirst handled all punting duties for the first two games, but since September has had to step back from that role while nursing two herniated discs (a back problem that has earned him some good-natured “old man” jokes from younger teammates).
At the same time, he’s still been able to serve as a steady and reliable placeholder for Smolen — who has emerged as a star.
Smolen ranks as second in the CIAA in both punting average (39.4 yards) and percentage of field goals made (83.3%). Twice he’s been named the conference’s special teams player of the week, including against Bluefield State in September, when he set a school record by going a perfect 9 for 9 on extra points. Says Lott, the special teams coordinator: “He’s an NFL-style punter right now.”
Just this past Saturday, Smolen kicked an early 32-yard field goal that ultimately proved the difference in a 17-14 road win against Fayetteville State, a team JCSU had lost eight straight against.
The victory gives the 17th-ranked Golden Bulls a shot at a CIAA championship berth, which they could secure with a win in their 2025 regular-season finale against Livingstone College.
JSCU owns just one other conference title, captured the year current head coach Maurice Flowers was born: 1969.
Smolen still sometimes can’t believe how this has all unfolded, from the two of them winding up here to the team winding up being on the cusp of history. When he was working security, he says, “I was in mostly high-end shopping stores in London. It was pretty cool, but I stood there and I was like, This is not what I wanna do for the rest of my life. Then when I got this opportunity, I said, Maybe one day, I’ll be one of those guys coming in here spending all this money. Maybe, maybe not. But it gave me something more to chase. As an athlete, there’s always something you can chase.
“So being able to just come to a new country — and then chase the dream I’ve had since I was a younger kid — is incredible.”
This story was originally published November 4, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
