Jai’s journey – nj.com

Jai Patel’s trendsetting journey to becoming perhaps the greatest placekicker in Rutgers University history began on a patchy football field in his hometown about a decade ago.

Jake Rodriguez heard about a star midfielder in South Brunswick’s youth soccer program who spent his weekends kicking footballs with his father for fun. He went to a local park on a scouting mission, watching from his truck.

A few days later, Rodriguez, South Brunswick’s longtime recreation director, went to the middle school and asked a gym teacher to summon Patel from class.

Patel feared he was in trouble.

“Are you Jai Patel?” the stranger wearing a South Brunswick PAL hat asked.

“Yes sir,” Patel replied cautiously.

“I heard you’re a pretty good soccer player,” Rodriguez said. “But I really want you to consider trying to kick footballs instead.”

Patel agreed to stop by the next practice. There, Rodriguez held an audition for anyone who could kick a short field goal. One by one, a dozen 11-year-old boys took turns attempting kicks from 25 yards.

“My coach’s truck was parked next to the field, back behind the goal-posts,” Patel said. “And I hit it into his truck bed. I was thinking I was going to get yelled at. But he just smiled and said, ‘That was awesome.’”

And that’s how the record-setting Patel found the vocation that would make him a Rutgers icon.

Currently in his third season with the Scarlet Knights, Patel stands on the verge of becoming one of the greatest kickers Rutgers has ever seen. Even after a pair of shaky performances, the 5-foot-9, 180-pound senior ranks tied for first in the school’s 156-year-old history for career field goal percentage (77.6 %) and fifth in made field goals (38). Earlier this season, he set a school record for consecutive field goals made (18).

But those familiar with Patel’s background say he’s representing something much larger than football stats.

Patel is believed to be one of only two Indian Americans in the 18-team Big Ten Conference, which boasts roughly 1,900 players. (Sankeerth Veluri, a freshman offensive lineman from Purdue, is the other.)

He’s also hoping to become just the third player of Indian descent to reach the NFL — and the first since 2011.

“I’m proud to be Indian and represent my community, especially culturally,” Patel said. “And I hope to inspire more people to maybe one day follow this same path.”

His story resonates particularly within New Jersey’s substantial Indian-American community, which totals approximately 403,000 people, according to Asian And Pacific Islander (AAPI) data. Nearly a quarter of that figure resides in Middlesex County, home to the Scarlet Knights and where Patel is becoming a household name.

“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen,’’ said Patel’s sister, Tyler Patel.

She recalled taking her baby brother to a New Brunswick bar last year to celebrate his 21st birthday. Just after walking through the doors, all eyes in the crowded pub suddenly turned in their direction as fellow students realized the Scarlet Knights’ star kicker was among them.

“All these people were like, ‘Hey, it’s No. 44, Jai Patel!’” Tyler Patel recalled. “And I’m like, there’s 45,000 kids at this school and they know who you are?’”

‘You gotta see this kid kick’

Rupal Patel can admit it now: the last thing she wanted was for her son to play football.

“We were not happy at all,” Jai’s mother said.

She grew up north of Mumbai, in Baroda, a city situated on the banks of the Vishwamitri River in the Indian state of Gujarat. She was an aspiring tennis prodigy who was forced to give up the sport after graduating high school.

“We didn’t have this same kind of recruiting in India,” Rupal Patel said. “College is for education.”

As for football, Rupal knew little about the United States’ most popular sport when she met her future husband, Tushar Patel, in India in 1994.

Jai’s father was born in India, moved to the United States before his first birthday and grew up in Hoboken, falling in love with football when he played for the city’s pee wee Steelers program. He kept playing all the way through North Bergen High.

“The first time we met we literally talked for 20 minutes before we both realized we were talking about a different football,” Rupal Patel said.

As Tushar Patel built a successful career as a business solutions architect in New Jersey’s expanding tech field, the couple moved to Monmouth Junction, home to one of New Jersey’s largest Indian American’s populations. They had two daughters before Jai was born in 2003.

By then, Jai’s older sisters, Kaelyn and Tyler, were already living and breathing soccer. Jai started playing at age 3.

Jai Patel was something of a prodigy, drawing enough attention to earn an invitation to play for the New York Red Bulls Academy when he was 10. The next year, he was invited to play for a junior academy in Barcelona.

He also convinced his parents to play for South Brunswick’s Pop Warner team, mainly to be around his friends.

“When you’re a really good soccer player like he was, you don’t play for your town; you play for an academy,” Tushar said. “He never got a chance to play (soccer) with his buddies, which is why he played some football as a kid but didn’t really kick.”

On weekends, he’d drill field goals for fun at Rowland Park in South Brunswick, often wearing his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers jersey while his father fetched footballs Jai booted 30 and 40 yards away.

And that’s how he the legend of the kid with the giant foot found its way to Rodriguez.

“One of my buddies in town said, ‘Hey, you gotta see this little kid kick,’” Rodriguez recalled. “So I did.”

It didn’t take long after that scouting trip for Rodriguez to make his pitch.

“Listen, I’ve been at this now for more than 30 years and I’ve coached all the greats who went off to college and some who went on to the NFL,” Rodriguez said. “And Jai was one of those kids who, from the first time I saw him, I thought, ‘He really has a shot to go all the way if he pursues it.’”

The conversation wasn’t easy for the Patel family, who had built their identity around soccer.

“He was having so much success playing soccer,” Rupal Patel said. “Imagine at 10, he’s playing all over England for this super select team representing USA. And then within that same year he didn’t want to play soccer anymore. He just switched to football 100 percent. We couldn’t believe it.”

His family were sold after watching Jai kick on the gridiron.

“How much joy he was getting out of kicking field goals, I was like, ‘I’ve never seen you smile like that as a soccer player,’” recalled his sister, Tyler Patel.

Eric Harris, a former Atlanta Falcons wide receiver from Red Bank who has known Jai sincefourth grade, witnessed the transformation firsthand.

“Once he put on those pads,” Harris said at the Patel family’s tailgate before a recent Rutgers game, “it seemed like his eyes lit up, like he was in a whole other world.”

‘A sense of pride’

Aaron Patel is a self-described “super fan” of Rutgers sports. A 2014 alumnus from Freehold, Patel is a Scarlet Knights season ticket holder in three sports, and he routinely travels to watch the football team on the road.

When Jai Patel arrived at Rutgers in 2022 after setting the South Brunswick High record with 22 career field goals, Aaron Patel was intrigued.

“It’s very interesting to see Indian Americans in non-traditional (sports),” he said.

While Jai Patel was far from the only athlete of South Asian descent playing football at South Brunswick, it’s believed that he’s among the first Indian American football players at Rutgers. (Rutgers does not compile cultural data on its roster of players.)

Aaron Patel just knows the Scarlet Knights kicker with the same last name — but no relation — is a rare breed. Patel, which means “village leader” in the Gujarati and Marathi languages, is the most common surname among Indians in America and Great Britain, according to Business Insider.

“Absolutely there’s a sense of pride,” Aaron Patel said. “To see that name in a box score, to see him in highlights, it’s really cool that he’s a trailblazer. As a first generation Indian American, we’re all just starting to scratch the surface of where we can go, what we can achieve in this country and doing things that people didn’t think were possible before.”

Rutgers did not provide an exact number of Indian American students, but recent data showed Asian students accounted for approximately 27.5 % of the 45,000-student population on the New Brunswick campus.

Meanwhile, New Jersey has the third largest Indian American population behind only California and Texas, and the highest number of Indian Americans per capita, data shows.

“It’s one of the things that makes Rutgers unique compared to a lot of other places — it’s representative of New Jersey, which is so diverse,’’ Aaron Patel said. “And when the football team is diverse and representative of the student body, that’s another layer of pride for everyone.”

That pride is felt acutely through Patel’s surging popularity. His bio ranks among the top five most viewed on the ScarletKnights.com website, alongside NBA lottery picks Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey and NFL running backs Isiah Pacheco and Kyle Monangai, a school official said.

He’s come a long way from colleges being skeptical of his abilities. In fact, Rutgers was his only Football Bowl Subdivision scholarship offer.

“He got written off a lot from name recognition, unfortunately,” Tushar Patel said. “That’s been a challenge he’s had to deal with. But here he had a different attitude, and he just said, ‘You know what? Everybody here is from somewhere else.’ That’s what’s great about Rutgers.”

Prior to last month’s Iowa game, Patel was the first Scarlet Knight out of the locker room. He set up from 25 yards — the same distance that helped seal his spot on South Brunswick’s Pop Warner team a decade ago.

Patel then took three steps in, just as he used to do with his father at Rowland Park.

Thwack.

The ball sailed through the uprights and into the Rutgers student section.