It's a place James Madison freshman Colin Newcity thought he'd never see again: the inside of a soccer net.

"I mean, Coach Martin had talked to me in the spring, saying we'd like you to come here," recalls Newcity, who graduated from Harrisonburg earlier this year.

"Four (goalkeepers) was the maximum we could handle," says Tom Martin. "So we didn't discourage him. There just wasn't an opening at the time."

So Newcity walked on as a punter with the JMU football team. But then Martin's goalkeepers all started getting hurt.

And Newcity's phone started ringing.

"I'd just started getting used to the football guys," says Newcity. "Started knowing everybody's names, stuff like that."

"We figured, well if there's four, and David (Meiklejohn) doesn't get back, we've still got three pretty solid ones," says Martin. "But no way could we have imagined that two other guys were going to go down."

"I've been playing soccer my whole life," says Newcity. "So when I talked to the football coaches, and they said they were going to redshirt me this year, and I wasn't going to play, it was kind of an easy decision."

Newcity has been practicing with the soccer team for almost two weeks.

"The first few days were rough," says Newcity. "And then one day I cramped just doing drills, couldn't do much."

"He's looked fine. He's really helped us out," says Martin. "You know, there are things every freshman can work on. But he's done well."

Newcity says he doesn't know which sport he'll play next year.

But Martin's happy to have him now.

"Our message to Colin was, 'Hey, this is an opportunity,'" says Martin. "'Yeah, you're helping us. It is self-serving. But boy, it can really help you, too, for down the road.'"