An Ivy League Kicker Embraces His New Role at Penn State

Alex Felkins wanted to play big-time football after graduating from Columbia. The Nittany Lions afforded that opportunity.

As Penn State kicker Alex Felkins trudged through the wet grass Saturday for his first field-goal attempt against Iowa, he stared up briefly at the White Out crowd. Felkins compared it to kicking against a "white painting," albeit one that represented the second-largest attendance in Beaver Stadium history (110,830).

Since transferring to Penn State to bolster the kicking competition, Felkins has seen a plenty of differences from his days at Columbia University. It starts with stadium size (Columbia’s Wien Stadium holds just 17,000) but trickles down to the weight room, the free meals and snacks and the recovery processes that weren’t available. He joked with reporters after the Illinois game that kicking in the Ivy League almost was harder because he knew so many people in the crowd.

"It was just a really great experience getting to play in front of that many people for the first time the whole first half,” Felkins said of the West Virginia game, the fourth-largest Beaver Stadium crowd at the time. “And then when I got in and halftime that was kind of my chance to like soak it in and be like, ‘Wow, I'm finally playing on this level.’ Like this is what I wanted to do for such a long time.”

A two-time All-Ivy League honoree and record-holder at Columbia, Felkins joined Penn State's program in January as a preferred run-on. He spent most of spring ball as the starter for Penn State but lost the job in a narrow fall camp competition to Sander Sahaydak, a third-year kicker for the Lions. Coach James Franklin mentioned when he made the switch that the competition was close enough to make him comfortable with either kicker. Felkins appears to have a hold on the spot for now.

After Sahaydak missed two short field goals in that game, Felkins entered to stabilize the field-goal unit. He is 5-for-7 on field goals (with one kick being blocked) and a perfect 18-for-18 on extra points. His season-long is 46 yards, though he said he’s comfortable from roughly 55 yards

“I think there's been flashes of really good things," Franklin said this week in a broad review of his special teams. "I think our units are playing well and are playing fast and are playing aggressive and hard. I think we just need to be a little bit more consistent at the specialist positions in terms of our field-goal percentage. “I think we’re good, but we need to take the next step from a consistency standpoint.”

Felkins, who enrolled in as Master's program in January, has an interesting background. He went to high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then spent four years in New York's West Side at Columbia. His mother, Inna Felkins, was born in the Soviet Union and played volleyball professionally in Russia, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia. His older sister Anna was born in Ukraine and was an all-conference volleyball player at Stetson University. Alex is multilingual, speaking Russian and Ukrainian.

Felkins said he had accolades “a little better than your average Ivy League kicker” when he enrolled at Columbia, which shook his confidence at times. If he missed a kick, he worried about disappointing coaches and teammates. Being held to higher standards at Penn State, and facing more pressure in practice, has helped him kick some of those worries. He also mentioned the competition with Sahaydak, which forces him to remain sharp.

“I think I'm just much more confident in myself based on what I actually see for myself when I'm out on the field and how I see the ball fly," Felkins said. "And I think that goes hand in hand with me just having four years of college experience, being on the field and starting from day one of my freshman year at Columbia and learning all of those lessons throughout the years. I've always been talented, but I think the mental game is something that I've had to put a lot of work [into]. And I think that part, the mental game, has gotten significantly better for me since I've gotten on here.”

Felkins is the latest Ivy Leaguer to transfer to Penn State, a list that also includes starting center Hunter Nourzad (Cornell). When the Ivy League canceled football in 2020 because of COVID, Felkins knew he would transfer for his graduate season. He actually called his transfer-portal recruitment "disappointing" and hoped to hear from more teams along the way, though things seem to have worked out at Penn State.

“My goal going into the portal was to pick the best possible program that I could play at to give me that big-time college experience that I've been dreaming about for a long time. And obviously Penn State checks all those boxes when it comes to that,” Felkins said. “So when Coach [Stacy] Collins [Penn State's special teams coordinator] reached out to me and we discussed the opportunity, it was a pretty easy decision from there.”

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Max Ralph is a Penn State senior studying Broadcast Journalism with minors in sports studies and Japanese. He previously covered Penn State football for two years with The Daily Collegian and has reported with the Associated Press and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Follow him on Twitter (X) @maxralph_ and Instagram @mralph_59.

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