A Virginia Tech Hokie in Moscow
I always knew that at some point I would tell this story. Given recent events, now seems like the right time.
Following the Friday terrorist attack at Crocus City, a couple metro stops from where I used to live in Moscow, and with fighting ongoing in Ukraine, I wanted to share with you my memories of football in the Russian capital and the great people I met through the game.
Aside from a few trips back to the U.S., I lived in Moscow from February 2007 through June 2014, then again from July to December 2015. During that time I earned a Master’s degree in the History of International Relations at Moscow State University, M.V. Lomonosov, worked at Ernst & Young, and did most everything people do in their 20s. I got married, became a father, and made lifelong friends. I also played a lot of football.
Militsiya
The first time anyone ever pointed an AK-47 at me, I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. In true What’s-a-Texas-county-mounty-doing-in-Arkansas? style, a traffic cop, the runt of the group of three who had just driven up in a little Zhiguli squad car, waved around his semi-automatic weapon and told our group to break up the football game we had going in the courtyard.
The area where we were playing was surrounded on three sides by Moscow State University’s imposing main building. Constructed just before Joseph Stalin died, it is the largest university building in the world. And it was my home for two and a half years.
That we were playing at all was a minor miracle, the result of having met Dorothy, a Bulgarian medical student, at the circus a month earlier. She was one of Irina’s acquaintances. Irina was the program coordinator for our study abroad group. Seventeen years later, she’s still a good friend.
The circus in Russia is beyond awesome, and if you ever get the chance, you should go. In my case, I should have stayed. But, loyalty being what it is, I left at intermission and returned to my dorm room to listen (not watch) the Clemson-Virginia Tech basketball game over the internet. That was the one and only year Seth Greenberg got the team into the tournament. Had Tech won that day, at home against a beatable Tigers team, they would have at least tied for the regular season ACC men’s basketball championship. They lost by a point.
A few weeks later, we (a group of about 12 American study abroad students, all in our early 20s) moved from an off campus dormitory to the main building. By chance, our rooms were in the same sector as Dorothy’s, and pretty quickly word got out that she had an “American” football.
What? What do you mean she has a football? Can she throw it?
Turns out she could! Her form was not unlike Juan Marichal throwing a pitch. High leg kick, tight spiral. She was even better than Christina, who played quarterback every other play for our VT co-ed intramural team, the Mechanicsvicks, in the fall of 2005. And Christina was really good. (Editor’s note: Jack has still not gotten over being caught from behind on the one yard-line after a long catch and run in a playoff game that ended with the ball 36 inches from pay dirt and the Mechanicsvicks on the losing end of the score.)
As a side note, in case you were wondering, Virginia Tech is not widely known amongst most Russian football fans. The NFL is where it’s at in Russia. College football is a tougher sell because most Russians have no concept of inter-collegiate athletics. They have club sports, but that’s it. I had people ask me why I cared so much about “student football”. Why not professionals? The notion that 100,000 people would crowd into a stadium and scream their heads off for three and a half hours in support of a bunch of students is completely foreign to all but the most diehard fans.

Anyway, back at the university, a bunch of us used to play out in the courtyard on nice days. The weather was uncommonly mild that spring, and everyone took advantage by spending as much time outdoors as possible. We got some pretty lively games going, too. At first the Russians looked at us like we were aliens, but after a while a few got the nerve to join in.
That’s what we were doing on the evening of April 16 (local time), when Nick, an American guy in our group, who was then a student at Oregon St., came up to me and said, “Uh, dude, the worst mass shooting in the history of the country just happened at your school.”
Looking back, I am really glad I had managed to make some good friends in the first 10 weeks I was in Russia. I definitely leaned on them in the wake of the shooting. It was rough. I don’t have to tell you all.
Sleepless nights
That fall, I returned to the university as a full-time Master’s student. After a bit of searching, I figured out how to get Bill Roth and Mike Burnup live through Yahoo Sports. The radio coverage was a lifeline, but the eight-hour time difference was brutal. Noon games were doable, but all the most anticipated games were played in primetime. That meant rise and shine around 4 a.m. on Sunday. And hard as I tried, getting any real sleep the night before was just impossible. Think about it, while Hokie Nation was tailgating, I was trying to sleep. It never worked.
Still, a win would make the sacrifice worth all the trouble. The only problem is that the Hokies lost all three games they played in primetime in 2007. And they didn’t just lose. They lost in the most excruciating fashion possible.
To this day, what sticks out most in my memory is the sound of Bill Roth’s voice, talking about Tyrod Taylor entering the game at LSU, combined with the way my sleep deprived eyes took in the particular hew of snot green that my wall, and seemingly every other wall in the country, was painted. Makes me shudder just thinking about it.
Tough Nuts
In the spring of 2009, I met an Azerbaijani student named Mehdi at the History Faculty building. He was a football fan, newly introduced to the game. While he didn’t play, his friend Sasha did, so he introduced us. Sasha was, I believe, in his third year at the university and he was studying the history of the Balkans region (the area around the former Yugoslavia).
Sasha told me he played on a flag football team and offered to introduce me to the guys. That first Saturday I met Alexey, the team captain and quarterback, we worked out for a good two hours. He is about 6’1”, shifty, stronger than me, and really knows the game. I ran fly pattern after fly pattern and he laid the football out just beautifully each time. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Alexey offered me a roster spot, and I happily accepted. The team, Tough Nuts in English, was prepping for a tournament that would take place in the end of May. The Scorpions would be there. We were a competitive team, but at that time, no one had ever beaten the Scorpions, who featured a 6’3”, 218 lb. safety named Sergey Ivanov.
The previous year, Ivanov had been a practice squad player with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. If we’d have been in pads, he would have killed me. Literally. Thank God for flags.
At the tournament we won our first two round-robin games, which left us good and warmed up for our rendezvous with the Scorpions. We got the ball first and did not nothing on first and second down. On third down, Alexey called a wide receiver reverse that I would throw out of. We were lucky my wounded duck didn’t get picked. Fourth down.
There is no punting in 5-v-5 flag football, so on fourth and midfield, Alexey dialed up my best play, a 9-route. Ivanov was playing man coverage underneath on someone else. I had a shorter, less athletic guy manning up on me out wide. I got a step on him, Alexey’s pass was perfect, the DB didn’t turn around, and I waited to put my hands up until the split second before the ball arrived. Boom! Touchdown. We came to play.
I caught another touchdown pass later in the game, but as I recall, the real star for us was Andrei, who played wide receiver opposite me. He caught a bunch of passes and shut down Ivanov on defense. We held on to win by a touchdown. The Scorpions were no longer unbeaten.
At the end of the day, we were the only undefeated team in the tournament, so by the agreed rules, we should have been crowned champions. But the Scorpions were fixing for a rematch, and what were we going to do, duck ‘em? Not on your life.
The shame of it is that by the end of the day, we were gassed. We only had five and half guys on the roster that day. Kolya had a broken finger and could only rush the passer on defense, meaning most of us played every snap of every game. The Scorpions went 10-deep and substituted liberally throughout the tournament. We played hard, but just couldn’t get any separation on tired legs. And we also couldn’t get a fortunate (or merely not disastrous) bounce to save our lives. So, we lost the championship game, and walked away with silver medals. Honestly, though, the whole thing felt like the first Rocky movie. Everyone in attendance knew the times were changing, and there was a new football power in town.
Unfortunately, that was my high water mark individually. I dislocated my shoulder (for the umpteenth time) in practice a week before the next game. It was pretty gruesome. I put the arm back in myself and, genius that I am, tried to play in the tournament the following week. I was a shell of the player I had been at the previous tournament and, again short on players, we bowed out in the semifinals.
I graduated a few weeks later and returned to the U.S. One year and a thousand or so rejected job applications later (hurray Great Recession), I was back in Moscow. No longer a student, I taught English for a year before catching on with Ernst & Young.
I returned to the football field, but things had changed. The other guys had gotten a lot better.
Football takes off, and I’m grounded
Many Russians will tell you that August is when bad things happen. In 2010, it was the fires outside Moscow that engulfed the capital in a thick smoke, which, combined with six straight weeks of 95+ degree temperatures, made life absolutely miserable.

Once the smoke finally cleared, around mid-September, I got a few weeks of training in, then promptly got really sick and spent a week in the hospital. Upon discharge, I was on strict doctor’s orders to observe a couple weeks of bed rest and no strenuous exercise for a few months. It took a while to regain my (limited) strength and then get back in shape. Tyrod Taylor was well into his first preseason as a pro before I started rounding into form.
The injury bug bit again that fall, with another horrendous shoulder dislocation finally leading to surgery. My orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Ivan Radysh, did a fantastic job, and the newly renovated hospital was as comfortable as can be. Such a surgery is often an outpatient procedure these days, but I ended up spending a couple nights in the hospital and did not have to pay a dime out of pocket. All in all, a positive experience.
The guys as I knew them, circa 2010 - Kolya (Nikolas) speaking directly to the camera and Alexey (Big Green), the lefty quarterback, plus all the guys from the teams that we regularly trained with each week.
I want to say a bit about the core group of guys we trained with. There were probably 10 or so teams in Moscow at the time, but the opposing team I got to know best was The Zombies.
Lev, their quarterback and team captain, devised the most devilishly effective offensive system. In those days, our team was more talented, so Lev compensated by creating the flag football version of Paul Johnson’s offense. It was all predicated on misdirection. One false step as a DB and you were toast. The Zombies are a great group of guys, but I hated playing against them. It was so mentally taxing.
An interesting note about flag football in Russia, and Europe more broadly, is that it’s quite popular with girls too. While there is some co-ed play, a lot of the girls play on all female teams. I remember one time watching an all girls team play against an all guys team. The guys didn’t take the girls seriously. They should have. The girls won, going away.
Before things really intensified in Ukraine, Tough Nuts and The Zombies would travel to Germany each year to play in Big Bowl, a massive international tournament. In the first few years, both teams finished in the bottom half of the bracket. However, they improved every year, so much so that in later years they were competitive with even the elite teams and consistently finished toward the top of the standings.
National Champions
My shoulder surgery in November 2011 was successful, but the recovery time was still long. I eased my way back onto the field about eight months post-op, but didn’t get my (nearly) full range of motion back until a full year after the operation.
Even after recovery, I was never the same player I had been. Nine months post-op, I remember bobbling a wide receiver screen. The ball bounced straight into the air, and the charging cornerback plucked it and housed it. Everyone knew I was coming off a pretty serious injury and it was just a regular training session, but it was demoralizing nonetheless. It was also the first indication that my role was going to change.
In 5-on-5 flag football, the best athletes usually play safety on defense. I was no longer one of the two best, so I moved up to cornerback, where there was a greater emphasis on tackling. The results were mixed, at best.
That fall I rejoined Tough Nuts for the Moscow Cup, my first tournament in years. I don’t remember much about it, other than being happy to get out on the field and compete. We finished second, losing to a team with a really great aerial attack. These guys had big, athletic wide receivers and a quarterback who, while average, was good enough to just chuck it deep and let his guys go make a play. Really, though, that was just a warm up for the main event. The National Championship was only weeks away, and we knew we would see the best teams from the Moscow Cup, as well as all over Russia, in that, the mother of all Russian tournaments.
By late 2012, Tough Nuts had changed in terms of personnel since I first joined the team, three and a half years earlier. Sasha was off doing academic field work and Andrei, Kolya and I were in and out of the line up. However, Alexey had done a great job recruiting new talent. We now had a full complement of players. Lev had done the same with the Zombies, who were now a top tier team.
If memory serves correct, the Scorpions played in this tournament, but Ivanov wasn’t there, and they weren’t really competitive. Think Sonny Liston after losing to Muhammed Ali.
One thing that stands out in my memory is the play in which I finally got my confidence back. On what was perhaps the only inaccurate pass Alexey threw all day, I managed to reach up and snag a one-handed catch with my surgically repaired arm. It turns out a little of the ole magic still remained!
If I remember correctly, we ended up in the loser’s bracket pretty early, but we battled our way to the championship game, and a rematch with the team that beat us for the Moscow Cup.
The other team, whose name escapes me, didn’t do anything new or different in the rematch. Neither did we. And in the early going, the results were pretty similar to the previous time we had played them. By halftime, the final result seemed all but assured, with only the margin still in question. We trailed 14-0, but it felt like a lot more. We could not generate any offense, and we were holding on for lives on defense.
In the second half, the other team was driving for what probably would have been the decisive score. Our defense stiffened up, forcing a fourth and short. In a mental lapse, the quarterback rushed when he didn’t have to and overthrew a wide open receiver. Turnover on downs. It was the break we needed.
In the span of a few minutes, the momentum swung completely in our direction, and we tied the game. The clock was running down at this point, and the next score would probably be the game winner. I had not played much in the game, but Alexey called my number, and in I went for a critical defensive series.
After a couple incompletions, the opposing quarterback got desperate. He lofted a ball to midfield, where I was waiting all alone in medium zone coverage. It felt like the ball hung up in the air forever. By the time it finally came down, I had a frantic receiver bearing down on me. No matter. I made the interception, and we now had a chance to win the game in regulation.
Credit to the other team, they stopped us short of the goal line, and the game went to overtime. In OT, they got the ball first and did nothing with it. When we got the ball, Alexey was of the mind to end things. After advancing the ball almost to midfield, he called a wheel route to Andrei up the left sideline as the primary route. A perfect pass beat perfect coverage, and as he had done time and again, Andrei snagged the pass and managed to get his feet down in bounds. It was a thing of beauty. We were National Champs!
Life in 2024 and beyond
It’s been seven years since I last stepped foot on Russian soil, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the place. But even more than I miss the actual city, I miss those endless summer days when we would practice, in sunlight, until 10:30 pm. I miss the days when Ukrainian teams would come to play in Russian tournaments and Russian teams would take a night train over to play in Ukrainian tournaments. Mostly, I miss how carefree the times were.
But while the times in which we now live are challenging, the future seems bright. Lev’s sons are big and strong, and rapidly approaching college age. I saw a picture of them all together recently. Until I read the caption, I thought his sons were just random new guys on the team. It’s been that long since I’ve seen them in person. Turns out Lev is the Deion Sanders of Russian flag football.
Alexey, too, became a father a couple years ago. Although just a toddler, his son already moves well in the pocket. Perhaps by the time he’s of age, college football will have truly gone global. If he ends up being half the player his old man is, I’d love to get him in an orange and maroon jersey.