Nick Sciba: Faith, family and the kick that didn’t change the Clover grad’s life
For a brief moment in a game in September of 2018, Wake Forest’s starting kicker was lost.
Nick Sciba, the Clover High School grad who was then just a freshman in college, was walking back to his kicking net and tee in innocent ignorance. He’d just watched a third-down play, one where his quarterback scrambled for a few yards and dove forward as he was tackled. Sciba thought the chains were moving — that Wake Forest earned a first down and was extending its first drive in its so-far scoreless home game against No. 8 Notre Dame.
But it wasn’t a first down. It was 4th and 6. Sciba was still standing on the sideline as the field goal unit assembled. And that’s where his story begins.
“So I rush out,” Sciba started, speaking over the phone on an exceptionally warm fall afternoon. He was cleaning his car in his driveway as he, in good spirits, relived the play he knew he’d be asked about, just like he had been so many times before: He said he remembered the echoing of his name on the Wake Forest sideline; the panicked sprinting; the rushing through his pre-kick routine; the deep breaths to try to offset his racing mind and body once he got on the field.
Then came the snap, the clean swing of his leg for the 37-yard try and the ball banging off the left goal-post. And then came the aftershock: the Twitter trolls; the C’mon Mans; the cameo on SportsCenter’s Not Top-10.
Sure, the miss wouldn’t have changed the game’s outcome — a 56-27 Wake Forest loss. And sure, less than two minutes of game time would pass before Sciba drilled his next opportunity, which was from a similar distance. But the play was already going viral.
“Even though it was a slap in the face,” Sciba continued to The Herald, “I think it prepared me for the rest of my career here.”
So much about that day is notable for Sciba, in retrospect.
For one, the whole sequence of events simply didn’t make much sense. Sciba was always the first one on the field when his unit was summoned, he said. He’d been that way since his days at Clover High School: In his senior season, if he wasn’t on the field, or alone at his kicking net, he was by his coach’s side — ready to nudge the spread-offense, go-for-it-all play-caller in coach Brian Lane, who wasn’t used to having such a good kicker on his roster. (“Nick,” Lane recalled once telling Sciba, his voice playful but being completely serious, “every time we cross the 50, you get close to me, and you bump me on third and fourth down so I won’t forget that you’re right here.”)
For another, and most importantly, that kick immediately predated what would make Sciba a household name. After all, the Clover grad responded better to that miss than any kicker ever had to any other miss in the history of college football: He nailed his next 34 tries, which earned him an NCAA record. He was named a Lou Groza semifinalist (the “Heisman Trophy” award for kickers) as a sophomore. And just last week, he was named to the Lou Groza Watch List again as a junior — despite the fact that his team, due to COVID-19 issues, will play in its first game Saturday since Nov. 14.
Finally, though: that hot September 2018 day in Winston-Salem was notable because of how it could’ve defined him, but didn’t. Of how separate and how insulated it was to the rest of his career and life. However it might’ve tested the 5-foot-9, 188-pound kicker, it didn’t make Nick Sciba — the protective big brother, the easy-going son and the player who, by his soft-spoken nature, doesn’t let on how good he is.
“You’d never know he’s a top kicker in the country,” starting quarterback Sam Hartman told reporters Tuesday. He then added: “He’s got a really great family. Obviously he’s got a really cool backstory. He’s one of those guys you want to have on your side.”
‘Thank God he’s not lived a perfect life’
From the outside looking in, Nicolas Brian Sciba seemed to have always lived a blessed life without strife.
Born in Shelby, North Carolina before moving to Gastonia and then growing up in a Clover town that feels a lot smaller than its 6,500 population, Sciba was brought up in a “church home.” He loved FIFA. Manchester United. Being on the lake. Fishing. His Christian faith, by high school, was part of his identity. And so was being an athlete.
Like many high-level football kickers, he began as a soccer player and was a pretty good one, per his childhood coach and father who once played soccer at Gardner-Webb. But soon — after getting connected with a well-known kicking guru based out of Charlotte, Dan Orner; after having some good showings in some high-profile camps across the country; and after a few serendipitous details that can’t be captured in the broad strokes of a story like this one — Nick chose to go all-in on football. In his senior year of high school, over walk-on offers from Virginia Tech and South Carolina, Sciba chose to take a scholarship at Wake Forest. He committed over the phone to coach Dave Clawson in front of the Wait Chapel in Winston-Salem, after the Sciba family visited the Wake Forest campus for the first time.
Everything, from the looks of it, seemed to work itself out smoothly: Sciba was a freshman kicker with a scholarship, a rarity considering that most first-year kickers walk-on to programs and then “earn” their money. He was invited on campus early. And even though being a kicker is treacherous work — the best ones are only separated from the mediocre ones at the margins, in ways that can be undone in an afternoon (two more missed field goals a month, a few more made extra points a season) — Sciba was set up well. And he’s pretty much always delivered.
But in between the lines that frame his story, his parents, Nikki and Brian, were close enough to see its color.
“It’s never always good,” Nikki told The Herald, her friendly Southern twang bringing the words to life. She is a nurse at an elementary school in the Clover School District, and her husband, Brian, works for Gaston County as the director of building inspections. They talk with their son pretty regularly, about once a day, whether he’s asking if he can put potatoes in a microwave, or if he’s just saying goodnight. “I mean, listen, that’s not life. And thank God he’s not lived a perfect life.”
Nick Sciba’s family: Being the protective big brother of ‘rockstar’ Braden
Nick is the eldest of three Sciba kids. The youngest is Emery, who’s 7 years old and who looks so much like her older brother that if you put a bow in Nick’s hair, Nikki said, they’d be identical. And the middle child is Braden.
Braden, 18, has a chromosome deletion syndrome. He has craniofacial anomalies and intellectual disabilities, but he’s high-functioning. His parents call Braden the family’s “rockstar.” Their “social butterfly” with a contagious smile. He works at a local saltwater fish market, Brian said, and the town of Clover has warmly “wrapped their hands around him.” Nick said Braden has taught him “not to take anything for granted and to just enjoy life, because I know for sure he does.”
Braden, though, has had more than 50 surgeries, his parents estimate. And Nick was never hidden from that reality: For as many stories as there are about the days Nick would schlep Nikki and Brian to football kicking camps across the country, there were other, more difficult stories — ones of a young Nick waking up his parents in the middle of the night because Braden was having trouble breathing; ones of Nick seeing Braden with screws in his head after a required surgery. Nikki said the family moved from Gastonia to Clover largely because the school district in York County had advanced special needs services to help Braden.
“Nick’s life took a standstill for a long time,” Nikki said. “I don’t wanna say it took the backburner, because obviously we always take care of our kids. But he had to. He’s always lived where his brother’s health needs obviously came first.”
In other words, Nick saw hardship. Health scares. “Real life,” as his mother put it. When he was still quite young, Nick also saw his mother give birth to a stillborn baby, who they knew as Ellie Grace. To this day, Nick writes “EGS,” his sister’s initials, and draws a cross on the wrist tape of his football uniform before every game. He does it to “pay tribute” to his sister he never met but who he knew. He also checks on Braden and Emery regularly, and he’ll continue to look out for them until “they put me in the ground,” he said.
“He was born for the role he’s in,” Nick’s father said of Nick, the protective, field-goal-kicking big brother in the family.
Nick Sciba’s faith
Through everything he’s seen, Sciba said the “biggest test” of his faith came just in the first few weeks at Wake Forest.
“When I got here, I kicked the worst I’ve ever kicked in my life,” said Sciba, who graduated early from Clover to be at Wake Forest. “That spring that I came early, I think I was at 50-something or 40-something percent.”
It’s tough to deduce exactly why he struggled.
Perhaps there was newfound pressure in being a kicker on scholarship and competing for the starting job — an unfair sense that failing didn’t only mean letting down yourself, but that failing also meant letting down those who believed in you enough to invest money in you.
Or perhaps there’s a difference between the high school and college kicking games — one unintelligible to those unfamiliar with the subtleties of a kicker’s craft.
Whatever it was, it tested him, he said.
“That really humbled me, and so I sought out God,” Sciba said. “I prayed. And I just tried my best to not put it all on me. And just to give it to Him. And I feel like that really helped me. I feel like, a lot of times, when things are going bad, and when things can be, I guess, tough, people kind of put everything on themselves and say, ‘I can’t believe I did that. Ah, it’s all my fault.’ Things like that. Me, I just give it all to God. I say, ‘God, I’m here. I’m asking for your help. I’m giving it my all, but I’m going through a rough patch. I need you.’ And I know He hears me.”
Sciba ended up squeaking out the starting job and hasn’t relinquished it. He’s made 88.7% of his field goals and hasn’t missed an extra point in his career. And this year, despite having to relocate living spaces multiple times before the season started due to COVID contact tracing, and despite working with a brand-new long-snapper and holder in a year when preseason reps were limited, he’s been fine.
And his gaffe in his freshman year? An anomaly. Merely one “learning” point of many he’s had in his career. He and his team laugh about it now.
When asked this week about how Sciba has improved since his freshman year, Wake Forest coach Dave Clawson flashed a smile and joked: “I mean, the good thing now is that when we get in field goal range, he’s ready to kick.”
Nick Sciba’s future
Sciba said he hopes to one day play in the NFL. If he succeeds in that dream, Sciba would be the third pro football player to ever come out of the Clover School District — joining Lamont Hall (Class of 1993), who played for the NFL’s Green Bay Packers and the New Orleans Saints in the mid-90s and early 2000s; and Fred Hambright (Class of 1929), who played two years in the American Football League.
And if he gets lucky enough to one day have a platform as a player, Sciba has ideas of how he might use it, he said — from providing faith-based resources and communities to college athletes, to giving back to special needs programs in his hometown: “Clover actually has a really good special needs program with Patti Myers,” he said. “I was actually involved with it while I was in high school, and I’d love to give back and help her if I was able to in any way.”
In an interview after that first one in October, I asked Sciba if, considering his journey, he’d ever questioned God. He acknowledged that it’s hard not to sometimes, but he said he hasn’t, really.
He then carefully explained why.
“I think this life in general is a test. Everything we go through on a daily basis, from football, to things with family — anything is a test. So I definitely think that I’ve been tested. But at the end of the day, my identity is who I know I am, and who God knows I am,” he said.
“And at the end of the day, I can’t stray from that.”
This story was originally published December 10, 2020 at 8:00 AM with the headline "Nick Sciba: Faith, family and the kick that didn’t change the Clover grad’s life."
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