Whether he’s changing schools or switching sports, Michael Cklamovski has never had a problem with his life turning at the drop of a hat.

Unlike the majority of his teammates on the NIU football team, the senior kicker never made any recruiting trips to DeKalb. Even if he had, he would’ve been visiting Eric Luzzi and the men’s soccer team, not the NIU football coaching staff.

Hailed as one of the best soccer players in the country throughout high school, Cklamovski played for the Chicago Sockers, one of the best club soccer teams in the nation.

Heavily recruited out of high school, Cklamovski accepted a scholarship to play for the Vanderbilt men’s soccer team. In December of his senior year of high school, though, Cklamovski received a call from the Vanderbilt men’s soccer head coach informing him the program had been cut by the school’s athletic department.

Under the impression that Vanderbilt was failing to comply with Title IX, the Commodores made the decision to adopt a women’s swimming team in favor of keeping the men’s soccer program.

At that point, Cklamovski had a couple options: accept a far less lucrative scholarship offer to play soccer at another school, or accept a recently extended invitation to be a kicker on the University of Illinois football team.

Cklamovski played football in high school, but only to reconnect with the friends that travel soccer had alienated. Never had he considered playing college football an option until the U of I scout approached him.

Burned out on the game of soccer, Cklamovski made the difficult choice to accept the Fighting Illini offer.

“I could have gone away to play soccer at Boston College or Boston University,” Cklamovski said. “But those were really far away, and I had this opportunity to play football in the Big Ten. I had a couple friends going there, so I decided to go to Illinois.”

With two former NFL kickers in the family – in former Dolphin Pete Stoyanovich and Ohio State Hall of Famer Vlade Janakievski – Cklamovski never doubted his potential on the college level.

Cklamovski handled kickoff duties on and off for the Illini from 2006 to 2008. His tenure in Champaign featured no field goal attempts, but did include a trip to the 2008 Rose Bowl against USC.

After his junior year, Cklamovski took one look at the Illinois depth chart and was once again faced with a difficult choice.

“I decided not play my senior because I knew that they had some younger kickers that they put ahead of me,” Cklamovski said. “So, instead of using my fourth year of eligibility at Illinois, I decided to graduate and start applying to law schools.”

While searching for the law school best suited for him, Cklamovski never forgot that he had one year of eligibility left on the football field.

“I was trying to find a situation that would work, and I knew Mike Salerno would be graduating from NIU,” Cklamovski said. “So, they had a situation where they had some freshman coming in and a senior leaving.”

Before touching the field for the Huskies, the first year law student had to attain a waiver from the NCAA permitting him to play football as a graduate student at a school other than Illinois.

To expedite the process, Cklamovski enlisted the help of Christian Spears, senior associate athletic director for Administration and Academic/Enrollment Services.

“Michael’s main goal was to get an education,” Spears said. “That makes it a lot easier with the NCAA. It only took a few weeks after applying in July to get the waiver.”

Free to play for the Huskies, Cklamovski entered into a tightly contested position battle for field goal kicking duties. During some early season struggles, former NIU men’s soccer player and Cklamovski teammate on the Sockers, Josh Karsten kept in touch with the senior.

“We would text each other back and forth during that early part of the year,” Karsten said. “He would text me if he had a bad week or something, but I knew he would recover with that big leg.”

Putting the early season struggles behind him in the third week, Cklamovski enjoyed some poetic justice booting his first-career field goal against Illinois, a 48-yarder to stake his claim to the starting job.

There’s no telling where Cklamovski would be if Vanderbilt didn’t cut its men’s soccer program. The only certainty is that he wouldn’t be preparing for a MAC West showdown with Toledo on Tuesday night.