Notre Dame Receives "Hockey Assist" In Landing 2023 DE Armel Mukam

Armel Mukam‍ didn’t even plan on giving football an honest shot, but it didn’t take long for him to get sucked in by the sport.

Two years ago, the 6-foot-3, 250-pounder was going to school in Canada, focusing on hockey - and more immediately, his upcoming French class – when the high school football coach stopped him on his way to his locker.

“He asked me if I wanted to come try football,” Mukam recalls. “I was like, 'Nah, I've got too much on my plate with hockey and school.'”

But the coach didn’t give up and continued to text Mukam, pleading with him to give football a try.

“One day, I was like, 'You know what? I'm going to go to a practice. I'm going to tell him I don't like it and he's going to leave me alone,’” Mukam remembers.

It was the perfect plan to put an end to the situation once and for all.

Only one problem.

“I fell in love with the game,” Mukam says.

“Just the physicality of the game, the brotherhood and the values. The brotherhood, the respect and physicality of the game, that's really what I like. When I was playing hockey, people were telling me that I was too physical. In football, there's no restraint. You can go all out.”

But Mukam does credit hockey with helping him on the gridiron.

“Hockey is hard because you're on skates, so you need to have good footwork,” he says. “I definitely think that hockey helped me with my footwork.”

When he was still on the ice, Mukam always dreamt of playing Division-I hockey in the United States. One day, he half-jokingly mentioned to his coach the possibility of him playing Division-I football in the U.S.

“He was like, 'Bro, if you put the work in, you could really, really, really go to college and play Division-I in the U.S,'” Mukam says. “I was like, 'Oh, alright.'”

When COVID hit in 2020, Mukam went to work on his craft, much of which involved watching clips of the NFL’s top pass rushers on YouTube; Nick Bosa, Von Miller, Khalik Mack, Chandler Jones and others.

While Canada is increasingly become a source of talent for college programs, Mukam knew if he wanted to true exposure, he needed to get to the States beforehand.

“I did some research to go the U.S. and I found Woodberry,” he says of the prestigious Woodberry Forest School in Virginia.

After some Twitter follows and direct messages back and forth, Mukam was eventually set up on a Zoom with the coaching staff at Woodberry.

“Because of COVID, I wasn't able to go visit, so we had to go through the Zoom,” he says. “I really liked the head coach and d-line coach and I started to go through the application process. I got in and decided to make Woodbery my home.”

Barely a year later, Mukam was choosing his next home and in June, committed to play college football at Stanford. But a couple months after that, Notre Dame reached out to Mukam and he followed a similar process that brought him to Woodberry; building quick relationships and research via a virtual visit.

By the time the virtual visit was over, Mukam was seriously considering flipping from the Cardinal to the Irish and last week, he made it official, announcing his commitment to Notre Dame.

Marcus Freeman, Al Washington and Chad Bowden certainly did a find job recruiting Mukam in such a short period of time, but that high school football coach up in Montreal definitely deserves at least a “hockey assist.”

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