Alumni Spotlight: Connor Hughes

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — When he looked at his phone after the game in which he became the University of Virginia football program’s all-time leading scorer, kicker Will Bettridge saw multiple text messages. The first was from Connor Hughes, which was only fitting.

Hughes is the former Cavalier whose record Bettridge broke last weekend at Scott Stadium.

“He was like, ‘I’m so happy for you. Congrats. You did a lot to get here,’ ” Bettridge recalled Tuesday at the Hardie Center.

Hughes, also a kicker, became the program’s all-time leading scorer in 2005, his final season at UVA. He finished his career with 332 points, surpassing the 293 scored by Gene Mayer (1912-15), whose record stood for 90 years. (One of Hughes’ teammates, tailback Wali Lundy, also passed Mayer, totaling 312 career points.)

He knew all along that his record would fall one day, Hughes said, and “that allows me to celebrate with Will and celebrate with the team and be excited about it.”

Hughes and his wife, Bekah, are team leaders in UVA’s chapter of Athletes in Action, a global Christian ministry. Bettridge was a freshman in 2022 when he and Hughes met, and the tragic shooting that rocked the University that fall tightened their bond. In November 2022, three Virginia football players were slain on Grounds, and one of them was Bettridge’s close friend D’Sean Perry, a fellow graduate of Gulliver Prep in Miami.

“Obviously it was a tough time, and Connor was really there for me,” said Bettridge, who wears jersey No. 41 in memory of Perry. “So it was good to get that relationship with him and kind of build to what it is now.”

In his role with Athletes in Action, for which he’s worked since 2016, Hughes meets with and counsels student-athletes and coaches at UVA. Another former Cavalier, Vincent Croce, works for UVA’s chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and he’s chaplain of the football team, so Hughes doesn’t do as much with that sport as he once did.

“Vince is doing a great job here, and I felt like he was covering football great,” Hughes said. “But it really is a cool partnership between FCA and AIA here. We share notes and meet and do a lot of things together.”

Hughes grew up in Williamsburg and attended Lafayette High School. Soccer was his sport of choice as a boy, but when Hughes was a ninth-grader at Lafayette, a senior on the football team, Kase Luzar, approached hm.

“He was like, ‘You're really good at soccer, why don't you come kick?’ ” Hughes said.

Hughes didn’t know much about football, but he figured he had nothing to lose, and so he agreed to audition for Lafayette’s coaches. He barely missed a 50-yarder on his first field-goal attempt, and the job was his.

By the time Hughes finished at Lafayette, he’d amassed 331 points, a national record for a high school kicker. Moreover, as a senior, he also started at quarterback for a team that won the Group AA, Division 4 state title.

In the state semifinals, Hughes’ 49-yard field goal lifted Lafayette to a 3-0 win over Liberty. In the championship game, he rushed for 167 yards in Lafayette’s 41-28 win over Pulaski County.

In 2002, he arrived as a recruited walk-on at UVA, where his teammates included Luzar. Hughes took over on extra points and field goals after the ninth game of his freshman season and never relinquished the job. He received a scholarship after his first year.

Virginia’s quarterback for Hughes’ first two years in head coach Al Groh’s program was Matt Schaub, who also held on kicks.

Outside of tight end Heath Miller, Schaub said on a Wahoo Central Podcast, “Connor was probably the ultimate security valve to have, because you knew you didn't have to force the ball. If you crossed the 40-yard line, you got three points, and if it wasn't there, you could throw it away and you knew you were getting points out of the drive with Connor ... He was a huge part of our arsenal.”

In his 42 games as a Cavalier, Hughes made 134 of 138 extra points and 66 of 79 field goals. One of his most memorable performances came on Sept. 27, 2003.  In front of 60,884 fans at Scott Stadium, Hughes hit two field goals in the final two minutes—a 53-yarder to tie the game and a 38-yarder to win it—as UVA rallied to edge Wake Forest 27-24.

“That was special,” Hughes said of the 53-yarder.

“This is a kicker who’s got real guts,” Groh said after the game.

On This Date in UVA Sports History...
Sept 17, 2005: @UVAFootball edges Syracuse 27-24 on the road as @Connor_J_Hughes' 19-yard field goal with 1 second left wins it. #GoHoos 🔷🏈🔶 pic.twitter.com/7rLzPxwgsx

— UVA Flashback (@UVAFlashback) September 17, 2026

In 2005, Hughes kicked a 19-yard field goal as time expired to lift Virginia to a 27-24 victory over Syracuse, then a member of the Big East, at the Carrier Dome.

Hughes closed his freshman season with a flawless showing in Charlotte, N.C. In the inaugural Continental Tire Bowl, he went 6 for 6 on extra points and 2 for 2 on field goals in Virginia’s 48-22 rout of No. 15 West Virginia at Bank of America Stadium.

“It was such a great game,” Hughes said, “because West Virginia came in with all this hype.”

UVA and WVU haven’t met in football since then, but that’s about to change. At 7:30 p.m. Saturday, in a game to air on ACC Network, the No. 25 Cavaliers (2-0) meet the Mountaineers (2-0) in the Duke’s Mayo Classic at Bank of America Stadium.

In the years that followed his graduation from UVA, where he majored in religious studies and sociology, Hughes worked out for numerous NFL teams, including New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Washington and Dallas, but never made a regular-season roster.

If you’re a kicker with NFL experience, “teams will take a shot at you,” Hughes said. “If you don't, it's really hard to break in.”

He was one of the Saints’ final cuts in the 2006 preseason. Then-head coach Sean Payton “was basically like, ‘Hey, you've done everything we asked of you. You'll play somewhere, but we need a veteran,’ ” Hughes recalled.

In 2007, he played in the Rhein Fire in NFL Europe. In 2008, he kicked for the champion Philadelphia Soul in the Arena Football League. NFL Europe folded after Hughes played in Germany, and the Arena Football League suffered the same fate after his championship season with the Soul.

“So I always joked like that the NFL never wanted me to play, because then the league would have collapsed,” Hughes said.

He continued pursuing his NFL dream for a couple of more years. Hughes remembers signing a free-agent contract with Dallas and going through a workout in which he made 14 of 15 field-goal attempts. Hughes was confident he’d done enough to earn a spot on the roster, but the Cowboys went with another kicker.

“It was super frustrating,” Hughes said.

Finally, in 2010, he’d had enough. “I was just like, ‘I've done this for four or five years now and I've had this body of proven work and it hasn't happened,’ ” Hughes said. “I was like, ‘I'm done. I'm just going to walk away. This isn't the holy grail paradise that I thought it would be.’ ”

Hughes leaned into his faith as he moved on without football.

A turning point in his life came after his first year at UVA, Hughes said, when he began “to really understand what it meant to know God in a personal way, through Christ. Which was really neat, because it changed the way I kicked. It changed the way I looked at pressure. It changed everything. It gave me this confidence and power, and I wasn't nervous to go out in fourth quarters, and I think that showed in my career.”

While playing for the Philadelphia Soul, Hughes had begun attending Sovereign Grace in Marlton, N.J., and he became more active in the church after his football career ended.

Sovereign Grace is where he met Bekah, and they began dating in 2010. They were married in June 2011 and have four children, all boys: 13-year-old Paxton, 10-year-old Haddon, 8-year-old Tripp and 5-year-old Ryle. All of them, not surprisingly, have strong legs that serve them well on the soccer field.

That was their father’s sport of choice growing up, and Hughes enjoys coaching his sons.

“My boys think they're learning soccer to play soccer,” he said, then smiled. “Little do they know, it transitions really well into football, too.”

To receive Jeff White’s articles by email, click the appropriate box in this link to subscribe.