Sometimes Shaun would bring some football gear along and go out onto the field and practice kicking.
“A few times people would stop by, watch a little bit and say, ‘You know you ought to try out for the Arcanum football team — you’re pretty good,’ ” Erin Suisham, Shaun’s wife, said with a chuckle. “And Shaun, he’d just smile and say thanks.”
Then in mid-November the Pittsburgh Steelers said the same thing to Shaun. They thought he was pretty good and wanted him to replace veteran placekicker Jeff Reed, who had missed seven of his 22 field goal attempts this season.
And so this Sunday — as the Steelers meet the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl XLV at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas — the most unlikely tale of the title game will be coming right out of the Miami Valley.
Suisham is the Steelers’ celebrated new kicker, the guy who connected on four field goals, all over 40 yards — the last the game winner in overtime — to beat Buffalo. He’s the guy who kicked two more to provide the winning points over Baltimore late in the regular season and the guy who sank the Bengals with three field goals.
He’s the same guy who spent the first two months of the NFL season sitting in the stands watching Arcanum take on its Cross County Conference foes.
“Every weekend it was Friday Night Lights for us,” Erin said with a smile. “We’d go sit in the end zone, eat hot dogs and cheer for Arcanum.”
Erin had graduated from Milton-Union High in 1999 and recently she and her husband and their daughter Sienna, now 2, had moved back home onto five acres just outside Greenville.
As they settled into small town life, the 29-year-old Shaun still chased big time dreams. In years past, he had kicked briefly for the Dallas Cowboys and for parts of three seasons with the Washington Redskins, where he became the club’s all-time most accurate kicker.
Then he got cut late last season, had another brief stint with the Cowboys and was cut again. This season two more teams — Cleveland and St. Louis — cut him after brief stays in the offseason. After that four more teams invited him in for a tryout only to reject him.
But the most crushing blow came Nov. 1 when Erin’s mother, Gloria — for whom they’d thrown a surprise 60th birthday party at their home a week earlier — died suddenly from what’s thought to be a heart attack.
“We were devastated and in a lot of ways we still are,” Erin said with a voice that began to waver Monday. “But then two weeks later the Steelers called Shaun.
“And without a doubt, I believe my mom had a hand in all this. The Steelers were her favorite team and now they’ve given our whole family something to be excited about again.”
Small town to big time
Erin said she grew up in a house that was in Laura, but with a yard that was in Potsdam: “I’m definitely a small-town girl.”
At Milton-Union, she ran track and cross country. She also showed horses.
Shaun is from a similar background, growing up in Wallaceburg, a small Canadian town in southwest Ontario.
Although he played hockey and soccer, he was coaxed by his uncle — the football coach at the high school — to join his team. After kicking a 58-yard field goal in a championship game there — and a 57-yarder the week before — Shaun decided to look into college football in the U.S.
He and his uncle sent a video of his exploits to some 75 schools and a few — including Bowling Green, then coached by Urban Meyer — responded.
Shaun came to BGSU, where, it turned out, Erin was a walk-on member of the cross country and track teams. A mutual friend introduced them, but Erin said it took Shaun three weeks to muster up the courage to call her. When he did, there was enough of a connection that she called home to tell her mother she’d met a boy.
“Mom said, ‘Yeah, that’s great. Your father and I will be up on Saturday to meet him,’” Erin laughed. “Mom ended up really liking him and that was that. Shaun and I have been together 10 years.”
In 2005, Shaun was invited to camp by the Steelers as a free agent, but then cut before the season. In October that year, he latched on briefly with the Cowboys, was cut after kicking two field goals, then re-signed near the end of the season.
He lasted six weeks into the 2006 season, was cut again, picked up by Washington after another six weeks and over parts of the next three seasons had some big games for the Skins before being cut in December 2009.
“That really hurt,” Erin said. “He had only missed three kicks. We had a home in Virginia, but suddenly I really, really wanted to get back to Ohio.
“I didn’t know then, but I think this was the Lord’s plan. If we had stayed in Washington, I wouldn’t have had all this time with my mom before she passed.”
On solid footing
Once moved into their new place in Greenville, they embraced small-town life both here and up in Wallaceburg, where Shaun has become something of the patron saint of local sports.
He holds a free football camp for local kids there each year. He raised money to get his high school a scoreboard, bleachers and even some equipment that had been discarded by the Redskins.
Until she died, Gloria had been his biggest champion. “We told her she should be his agent,” Erin said. “She stayed up on what every kicker (in the NFL) was doing and she’d tell us and we’d tell his agent. She especially liked the Steelers because they had given him his first chance in the NFL.”
Since joining the Steelers Nov. 16, Shaun kicked 14 of 15 field goals in the regular season and made two of three in the playoffs.
“From the moment we arrived in Pittsburgh, it’s felt like the entire city has given us a big collective hug,” Erin said. “And it’s been everybody — the fans, the players, the coaches.”
And at the AFC title game nine days ago, something extraordinary happened. Erin was in the Heinz Field parking lot with her sister Tiffany and her brother-in-law when a man who had just exited a big stretch limo suddenly approached their pickup truck.
It was Steelers president Art Rooney II. He didn’t known them — he thought they were just fans — but when he found out who Erin was, he beamed.
He told her how glad he was they were a part of the Steelers, adding that her husband was pretty darn good.
That’s the same things the folks in Arcanum were saying not long ago themselves.
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