How Borregales brothers — UM’s kickers of the future — are staying fresh amid COVID-19
The Borregales brothers were getting desperate. The Jose and Andres Borregales are currently the first family of kickers in South Florida — Jose, the older, kicks for the Miami Hurricanes and Andres, the younger, is orally committed there — and the COVID-19 pandemic has confined them to a space without any field-goal posts. The only solution, they decided, was try skirting the law.
They had already been cooped up together in the family’s Miami for a few weeks, so they explored for some space they could get some field goals in. A countywide ordinance shut down all public parks in Miami-Dade County, but they tried checking nearby parks anyway. Eventually, they found one without the gates locked. For at least a little while last month, the two kickers got to actually kick — until the police showed up.
“We just went in there, kicked,” Andres Borregales said, “and then we got kicked out by the cops.”
Otherwise, the kickers have not been able to actually do any kicking. They have been doing push-ups together and Jose Borregales has been running — Andres said he’s not really a runner — but kicking practice has been limited to just going through their steps without actually connecting with a ball. Like everyone else, they are now making their way through a life of improvisation as they try to lock down the Hurricanes’ kicking situation for the next half decade.
This fall, Jose Borregales will spend his lone season in Coral Gables, likely as Miami’s starting kicker after he transferred from the FIU Panthers in January.
Once the older Borregales is gone, Andres Borregales will step right in with a chance to be Miami’s kicker for the next four years. The Hollywood Chaminade-Madonna specialist orally committed to the Hurricanes last year and doesn’t plan to back off, even as he has emerged as the clear-cut top kicking prospect in the country.
“UM is my dream school, so it was a pretty easy decision, kind of. I’ve always wanted to be a Hurricane ,and I finally got the opportunity to be one, so I might as well just take it,” said Borregales, who is the No. 1 kicker in the 247Sports.com composite rankings for the Class of 2021. “I got offered in May and I committed in June.”
In the following months, he became a rarity for a kicker: a superstar recruit.
The 5-foot-11, 140-pound junior went 12 for 15 on field goals and banged home three from at least 50 yards, including a career-long 57-yard field goal against Pahokee. He helped Chaminade-Madonna win its third consecutive state championship.
“You look at him, you don’t see it, but he’s got a golden leg, man. We call it the golden leg,” Lions coach Dameon Jones said. “I just felt like when we’d get inside the 40, we’d get three points.”
Like his older brother, Borregales has a soccer background. Both were born in Venezuela, where they played soccer before they had any thoughts about football. The family moved to the United States just before Andres turned 2 and Jose, who was 6, quickly started playing football. Andres followed his brother’s lead and first played running back, scoring 36 touchdowns in his first season.
Once Jose started getting college attention as a kicker at Miami Booker T. Washington, Andres decided to focus exclusively on kicking, too. Each realized his future was on special teams, so Andres stopped playing other positions in eighth grade.
“Me being the little brother, I wanted to do the same thing,” Borregales said. “I just got into it.”
Borregales started at Booker T. Washington, too, and quickly became one of the top kickers in South Florida. Borregales landed his first offer from FIU just a few weeks into his sophomore season, then drew Miami’s attention before the end of his sophomore year. In January, he added another offer from the Louisville Cardinals.
As exciting as it was to commit to the Hurricanes, it was just exciting for Andres to find out his brother was going to play for Miami, too. A Borregales kicking dynasty for the Hurricanes sounds good to him.
“When I found out he was going to go to Miami, I think I was more excited than he was,” Borregales said. “I knew, but at the same time I didn’t know like all the details. He just kept it a secret. I’m that little brother that’s always excited for anything he does.”
