After Lucas Borrow's request for an additional year of eligibility was denied by the NCAA following spring practices, the University of Hawai‘i football team's coaching staff searched far and wide to find a new starting punter.
Hawai‘i's search led them to somebody who had never played the sport before, albeit in familiar territory: Billy Gowers, a professional Australian rules footballer. A native of Melbourne, Australia, Gowers impressed UH coaches in clips sent over from Prokick Australia, an organization that sends kickers and punters to college football teams.
Before moving to the Islands, Gowers dabbled in a variety of sports in addition to Australian rules football, including golf, volleyball, cricket, and most recently, kabaddi, a prominent sport in South Asia.
Back home in Australia, Gowers also developed a passion for cutting hair. A barber and entrepreneur, Gowers has been cutting hair for half a decade, giving out an estimated 10,000 haircuts in that span. He even opened up a shop, Zeppelin Barbers, in his hometown.
Gowers, 29, left everything behind in order to move to Hawai‘i over the summer and join the Rainbow Warriors on a football scholarship.
"Everyone here has been amazing, really welcoming," Gowers told Aloha State Daily. "The school is great. The school work, not so much for me, just because it's a bit of an adjustment. But yeah, the place of Hawai‘i is just incredible. The beaches, people, mountains, everything. I love it."
Early returns for Gowers on the field have been promising. The power in his right leg is evident when he's seen booming 75-yard punts in the Mānoa air. The ball can trickle and land further when he rolls out to his right, which he calls his "AFL style" punt. He is not a fan of the term "rugby punt," which has become the default to describe Australian punters in football vernacular.
"He's just scratching the surface right now," Hawai‘i special teams coordinator Thomas Sheffield said. "There's still so much more left in the tank. He's only really been punting a football for like, seven, eight months. This is all brand new to him, and all we're trying to do is coach him and mentor him and build consistency and get him comfortable with the game."
During fall camp, each practice has been an opportunity for Gowers to learn more about the game leading up to UH's 2025 season opener against Stanford on Aug. 23. In a Saturday scrimmage, he punted behind a shield for the first time, continuing to turn heads with powerful spiral punts that whistled and pierced through the wind.
Gowers is UH's sixth Australian punter since the turn of the millennium, joining Mat McBriar, Alex Dunnachie, Scott Harding, Stan Gaudion and Borrow. Although Gaudion hasn't punted for the Rainbow Warriors since 2020, he and Gowers both graduated high school in 2014.
As the rest of Hawai‘i's freshman class settled into campus prior to fall camp, Gowers realized he was at least 10 years older than his classmates.
"It's been interesting. A lot of the guys here, their bodies are just so big that I kind of look at them and forget that they're young until they start talking. It's been a nice little adjustment," Gowers said. "I've always sort of hung around some younger people as well, playing playing AFL and VFL, so it hasn't been too hard to adjust to. Obviously my interests and all that are a little bit different to what they are, and I'm sort of pretty locked in at the moment. It's still good. It keeps me young, that's for sure. But I certainly don't feel too old. So, that's nice as well."
Added Sheffield: "He's 29, but you got to think him coming to America and just his whole life just turning upside down, he's really like an 18-year-old kid as far as that is concerned, but he's able to handle it better than a 17-, 18-year-old, because he is so much older and much more mature. He blends in really well with the guys. The guys love him."
Gowers is currently studying business at UH, an area where he has a head start due to his real-world experience opening and maintaining a barbershop back home. Teammates and coaches are certainly aware of his haircutting prowess — Sheffield and his kids have already received cuts from Gowers.
On a recent afternoon, Gowers gave a haircut to Rainbow Warrior defensive lineman Jackie Johnson III. Johnson, a 2021 Roosevelt graduate, is listed as a senior on the roster, but received a haircut from a freshman seven years older than him. While a standard haircut at his shop costs 70 Australian dollars before additional services such as a beard trim, Gowers hasn't charged his teammates or coaches for a cut.
"I think of it as looking after people's mental health, really. I feel like a haircut can change the way you feel about yourself," Gowers said. "It's good having a haircut. Whether it's a good one or a bad one, hopefully walking away thinking it might be a good one, it's a nice feeling I think."
Gowers spent approxamtely 40 minutes meticulously cutting Johnson's hair with his own clippers and scissors, lamenting that he didn't have his blow dryer with him because of the difference in voltage between Australian and American power outlets.
The soft-spoken Johnson appeared very satisfied with his fade and beard line up, dapping up Gowers and thanking him before heading back to his home.
It became evident quickly to Johnson that Gowers is a professional barber. There may be a day when Gowers opens a shop in Hawai‘i, but that would be after he gets a clear answer on how far his American football career could take him. He admits he's only watched one NFL game, the 2025 Super Bowl, but it was intriguing enough for him to make it his next pursuit.
"I probably wouldn't have moved across the world at 29 with life so stable, and life is pretty good in Australia. That's the ultimate goal: The NFL," Gowers said. "But look, there's a lot of performance that needs to happen prior to that, as well as a lot of learning from my end. At this rate, I probably don't understand the game as well as I need to be to even be thinking about the NFL. So for me, it's more so just learning the game, understanding the game, and trying to execute the game.
"So, from there, I think the NFL stuff, whether it happens or not, it's pretty much just up to me whether I'm good enough. ... I think I'll know reasonably quickly if I'm even close to that standard, or ever going to be close to that standard. But right now, I just want to sort of wrap my head around the game and play well for Hawai‘i."
Christian Shimabuku can be reached at christian@alohastatedaily.com.
