By Jack Veltri
Correspondent
Roaming the hallways of a hotel in Gainesville, Florida, a father and son could be found snapping a football.
Last summer, Gannon Burt, a senior long snapper at Fort Mill High School, was practicing his snaps the night before one of the biggest days of his life. By the next sunrise, he would be attending a camp at the University of Florida. His nerves were at an all-time high.
“My dad made me snap in the hallway and they weren’t very good snaps, because I mean, I was tired,” Burt said. “It was kind of dumb that we had to do that. And so those snaps were bad and I was worried in my head. But when I got to the actual practice field … I was just kind of relaxed and I did my warm-up thing. After that, I was ice cold — nothing bothered me too much.”
Burt performed well and won the camp’s most valuable player award. He also landed a preferred walk-on offer from the Gators.
Less than two weeks after receiving the offer, Burt committed to Florida. On Feb. 2, he signed his letter of intent to officially join the program.
While happy to be a Gator, it wasn’t originally his first choice. Burt received interest from the United States Air Force Academy, a school he always dreamed of attending. When he received an offer from Air Force last February, he was all but set to commit. That was until he got a text from Chris Couch, Florida’s GameChanger coordinator.
“I remember the first thing he texted me was, ‘What’s up big timer.’ And then after that, I started looking into Florida a lot,” Burt said. “I figured out they have a great aerospace program because it’s right down from Cape Canaveral. So really, it was the school that marketed itself to me, and I was like, well, I can go get this good aerospace degree and I can have a college life instead of the military. And so that was the deciding factor for me.”
It’s been a long journey for Burt that dates as far back as middle school when he first began long snapping. When he entered high school, he backed up current South Carolina long snapper Cole Rasmussen. He played sparingly as a freshman before earning his big break last season.
As the college offers rolled in, Burt not only long snapped, but he also started at linebacker and tight end. It was a role that always kept him on the field.
“I’d get off from defense and offense would go three-and-out. So, I’d be super tired from playing linebacker, and then I’d have to go out and put a good snap in because I knew every snap was being recorded by people,” Burt said.
While Burt has “been through the wringer with high school snapping,” the years of hard work paid off. After his senior season, he had the opportunity to play in the Shrine Bowl of the Carolinas and the Polynesian Bowl in Hawaii. He said the Polynesian Bowl was his favorite football game he played in.
“That whole week was just amazing,” he said. “It was just cool to be able to walk around the beach, walk around Honolulu. We were on NFL Network and you could see all the cameras and stuff, the announcers. That was really cool too. And then after the game, they all had leis and beads and there was a big celebration. It wasn’t if you won or lost, it was just a celebration of the game.”
After graduation in May, Burt will head to Florida to begin summer workouts. With redshirt sophomore Rocco Underwood being the only long snapper on the Gators’ roster, Burt’s goal is to make the travel squad as a freshman.
Regardless of where Burt’s path takes him moving forward, he knows the journey has been worth it.
“I always thought this when I was a kid, I had no picture of where I was going to go,” he said. “I didn’t know where I was going to end up. I always kind of knew that it would be good, whatever it was, but I never knew where I was going to go. I feel as a freshman and an eighth grader, I put my head down and just worked. I didn’t have too many friends and I would just grind on snapping, homework and grades. I was just hoping that someday it’d pay off, and it did and that’s a really rewarding feeling.”
