Jake Julien’s childhood dream of becoming a professional athlete took a dramatic turn in high school.
He was concentrating on developing as a competitive soccer player when, while working on his skills in the field at Barrie North Collegiate Institute, he got caught up in the football team’s field-goal exercises.
“I found it pretty fun,” recalls the 26-year-old Julien, who grew up in Barrie’s north end.
He was in Grade 11 and playing soccer year-round, competing against teams in the Greater Toronto Area.
But that day on the field, his kicking caught the attention of the school’s football coach, Gary Hamilton, and Julien was invited to play.
Hamilton, who teaches physical education at Barrie North, saw great potential in Julien’s kicking. It reminded him of punter Klaus Wilmsmeyer, who he had played football with in high school.
Wilmsmeyer went on to play in the National Football League for several years, including playing with the San Francisco 49ers team that won the Super Bowl in 1995.
“I said I’ve seen what it takes to excel in football,” Hamilton recalls. “So Jake kicked a couple of footballs and he showed great promise.
"And I guess the rest is history.”
After that first season, Hamilton took Julien aside and suggested he take the sport more seriously. He told him there were kicking camps in the United States that he might be able to take advantage of.
“It kind of took off from there,” says Julien, who, after attending a soccer recruiting trip at about that time, figured his dream of playing professional soccer would likely be unrealized.
And academics didn’t have much allure for him.
“It wouldn’t be a stretch to say I never loved school … I needed that athletic motivation to be my guide in school," he says.
Julien proved to be something of a diamond in the rough during a couple of days at Kohl's kicking, punting and long-snapping camp in Wisconsin that summer after his first year on the school’s football team.
He was sent home with a new set of skills and instructions on how to improve and told to return the following year.
Julien was ready for his final year in high school and his second on the football team. It went well and he caught the eye of scouts in the U.S.
He ultimately ended up at Eastern Michigan University, where he studied and played football from 2017 to 2021, finishing with a degree in communications.
What’s interesting, he adds, is that he got little or no interest from Canadian schools.
He was able to develop his game playing high-level football, but he figured he was amounting to just an average player during those first two years and realized he needed to step it up.
“That third year I did really well and rolling into my draft year I was hearing things from coaches … I played well enough to get a look,” Julien says.
He finished his senior season undrafted by the NFL, but did manage to get signed on to the New England Patriots from May to the pre-season before he was let go.
As a free agent, Julien would try different teams for a day, but could get no traction with a team and felt his time was running out.
It was a tough year. Realizing he could no longer survive on burgers and fries, he changed his diet and routine in a decision to take his football career more seriously.
“I kind of needed to burn my hand to learn what it really takes to be a professional athlete,” Julien says.
“NFL teams were bringing me in and trying me out and I wasn’t sticking anywhere … If no teams signed me, I wouldn’t have my visa,” he recalls. “That’s when I decided it was time to come to the CFL."
He had been drafted by the CFL in 2021 while in college, but deferred for a year to give the NFL a shot.
In May 2023, Julien went to the Ottawa Red Blacks, but was released. That same night, he was signed by Edmonton.
Delighted to finally have a job, he drove his car from Ottawa, back to Barrie, and then hopped on a flight to join the Elks.
He arrived as a rookie, but served as the team’s punter for the entire season and had just the year he had hoped for. He felt good during pre-season games, hitting the ball really well.
That second pre-season game in British Columbia included quite a bit of punting and delivered the best game Julien had ever had up until that point.
And he took that momentum right into the season, surrounded by a great team of players and capping it off with a phenomenal ending by hitting the game-winning rouge with a 54-yard punt over the end zone during the final game, earning the highest punting average in CFL history with 54.
Six months ago, Julien married Kennady Kuhlman, who played soccer for Easter Michigan while studying to be a teacher. The two are currently living in Detroit as Julien prepares for another year in Edmonton. But it’s an option year and says he has the team’s support if he gets picked up by an NFL squad.
“(With) what he did this past year, I’m sure he’s on the radar in the NFL,” says his old high school coach, who has called on Julien a couple of times to come back to Barrie as a keynote speaker at the football banquet.
Julien has also served as an inspiration for the next generation of kickers.
