What do you get when you mix a Southern girl who served as a University of Alabama football recruiting hostess with a Swedish tennis pro who had grown up in a world where soccer was king?

The answer can be found on Monday Night Football this week, on both teams.

The prime-time matchup on ESPN will pit Daniel and Anders Carlson — Colorado Springs brothers and graduates of The Classical Academy — on opposite sides. Daniel is a two-time All-Pro and the most accurate placekicker in franchise history for the Las Vegas Raiders. Anders is in his rookie year with the Green Bay Packers after being taken in the sixth round of this year’s NFL Draft.

The pair are among 10 NFL kickers who have yet to miss a field goal attempt this season.

Recent NFL history is filled with examples of thriving brothers. Peyton and Eli Manning, Tiki and Ronde Barber and J.J. and T.J. Watt are among the best. Travis and Jason Kelce famously met earlier this year in the Super Bowl, a first for siblings.

This Colorado Springs family never expected to join this group.

TCA grad Anders Carlson recalls bizarre draft day, looks forward to NFL career

“Some of the coaches or dads at TCA would make comments like, ‘Oh, we’re going to see him on Sundays,’” said the brothers’ mother, Jodie Carlson, recalling the days when Daniel first emerged as a standout in football. “I used to think, ‘They’re crazy, they don’t know what they’re talking about.’ That was such a far-fetched thing to think about.

“I’m in absolute shock that they’re there.”

Origin story

With each successful kick Daniel Carlson makes, the more the mythology of his introduction to football grows.

The condensed version is that the Carlson family had just returned from a year living in Sweden. One Sunday at North Springs Alliance Church, family friend Chris Coughlin approached them in hopes of convincing Nils Carlson to kick for TCA’s football team. Coughlin was the school’s special teams coordinator and knew Nils was a strong soccer player. However, Nils had decided to stay in Sweden for his final two years of high school. However, his younger brother Daniel was intrigued by the idea.

Daniel studied YouTube videos, worked with Coughlin and turned himself into a high school standout, the all-time leading scorer at Auburn and one of just four kickers in NFL history with a field goal success rate of over 88%.

“It worked out perfectly,” Carlson previously told The Gazette. “It’s just funny how God works in those mysterious ways.”

Anders then followed Daniel’s path through high school, to Auburn and into the NFL.

The story actually began long, long before that.

Jodie Carlson (née Jones) was raised as a self-described die-hard Alabama football fan, the daughter of a Crimson Tide baseball player and cheerleader. A family friend — also through church — had a connection to the Alabama football team and procured an application to serve as a recruiting hostess for the football team. She landed the gig, serving four years in the role and earning a partial scholarship as coach Bear Bryant’s teams won national championships in 1978 and ’79.

Hans Carlson grew up playing soccer, like most of his friends in Sweden. But this was the time that the country was producing tennis greats like Björn Borg. With tennis featured on television most weekends, Hans found his interest shift from the pitch to the court. His family hired a coach for once-a-week lessons and Hans grew into a serious player.

He came to the United States in 1980 to play at Alabama, which is where he met his future wife (a scenario that would play out again for his sons at Auburn).

Jodie points out that she brought something else to this genetic mix.

She was a member of the drill team in high school and earned the Miss Highstepper Award at a competition.

Las Vegas Raiders kicker Daniel Carlson honored by alma mater TCA with jersey retirement

The plaque she earned noted that this future mother of 1/16 of the current NFL placekickers was, “The best kicker in the USA.”

This combination that, in hindsight, seems such an ideal match to have produced a pair of NFL kickers didn’t seem so obvious to them.

“I did not put two and two together and never would have if it weren’t for Chris Coughlin,” Jodie said. “He was the one who did all that.”

After graduation from Alabama, Jodie started a career as a flight attendant that is approaching its 40th anniversary. Hans gave the professional tennis circuit a brief try, but his world ranking of around 550 wasn’t enough to earn a living. So he became a teaching pro, primarily in Europe.

The couple married in 1990 and settled in Dallas, where they welcomed their three boys. About three months after Anders was born, famed tennis coach Dennis Ralston — a former Wimbledon finalist — invited Hans to become the head tennis coach at The Broadmoor.

“We wanted to get out of the big city,” said Hans, who for the past 15 or so years has worked through the Colorado Springs Racquet Club. “We love Colorado Springs. It’s a great place to raise kids. We like to be outside and do things.

“We’ve been here 25 years now.”

Sibling rivalry

Nils Carlson compiled a list of six factors that go into the making of elite athletes for a sports psychology course in college.

No. 1 among them?

Having a sibling. Period.

“You’ve got that natural competitive rivalry thing built in where you really are helping each other get better all the time,” Jodie Carlson said.

When the boys were young, Hans and Jodie would drop them off at the soccer fields at Cottonwood Park for hours at a time and run errands while Daniel and Anders would launch hundreds of shots at Nils.

Nils was a soccer goalie who would go on to play professionally in Sweden and Canada and collegiately at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla.

“He’s the one who made Daniel and Anders good in soccer, and that translated into kicking, of course,” said Hans, who thinks Nils might have been the best athlete in the family.

The brothers fought and competed but also leaned on each other. In 2008, when Nils was a sophomore in high school, Daniel was in junior high and Anders was in fourth grade, the family moved to Sweden. The three boys shared a room as they lived for one year in a two-bedroom apartment with no television in a foreign country with no built-in friends.

Jodie remembers the creative pranks they would pull (woe to the brother on the top bunk when the wooden support planks were removed), the videos they would create and the lip-synced versions of “Sweet Home Alabama” they would perform. This was before Alabama coach Nick Saban opted against offering a scholarship to the Carlson kickers, prompting them to instead end up at the family’s previous arch-rival, Auburn.

It was at Auburn where Daniel, as a senior, and Anders, as a red-shirt freshman, were on the same football team for the first time.

“Daniel really took it on himself to become the mentor to Anders at that point, which was total role reversal from Daniel instigating and tearing down Anders every chance he got,” Jodie said. “I guess he had matured at that point.”

Parental guidance

Hans Carlson didn’t tap into his decades of coaching experience to help his sons when they developed a serious interest in sports. Instead, he deliberately chose the opposite.

“I’ve seen too many parents pushing kids in tennis,” Hans said. “I talked to them a little about the mental game, but I didn’t coach them.”

When Daniel and Anders gravitated toward football, the family left their training to camps run by nationally renowned expert Jamie Kohl and the coaching staff at TCA.

Hans had only a few rules when it came to sports. The boys had to play tennis through age 13 (Daniel announced his “retirement” from the sport on his 13th birthday). They also had to try at least five sports.

“I think that’s the advice I give to parents when they ask me the secret — let your kids pick the sport, not forcing them into what your favorite sport is,” Hans said. “If I made them play tennis, they probably would have had a good chance to play in high school for sure, maybe in college. But it worked out for Nils in soccer and Daniel and Anders in football.”

But they weren’t hands-off parents in other areas.

“God made them and God gave them the ability to do well in school,” Jodie recalls telling her sons. “And therefore I was responsible for holding them to that standard.”

To keep them motivated she told them they would be responsible for paying their own phone text fees if they didn’t maintain straight A’s in school. It was only $10 per month, but the strategy worked.

The family also took in a series of refugee families, including several from the Congo. The boys helped build homes through Habitat for Humanity, but also gained an appreciation for what they had as they watched families start from scratch and learn how to shop at an American grocery store and sign up for government programs.

The TCA community also played a role in molding the Carlsons, including Nils, who now works as a aerospace engineer with a wife and two children in Sweden.

Jodie was intrigued by the concept of a classical education when she learned of a school with that philosophical foundation in Dallas, but Nils, the only child of school age at the time, didn’t get in through a lottery. After moving to Colorado Springs and discovering TCA, Daniel and Anders began attending in kindergarten and Nils, who didn’t get in on the original wait list, started in second grade.

“TCA was a great experience for the boys,” Hans said. “They learned a lot of good quality character traits, which you maybe don’t learn in other schools. We’re really very thankful for the TCA teachers and coaches in different sports.”

Nils now gives back to his community as a volunteer soccer coach on evenings after work. Daniel and Anders have become involved in Boys and Girls Clubs and make the rounds as speakers at schools.

“To me, that’s more important than being a great football player,” Hans said. “Performance is important, of course, but I always said the person is more important than the athlete.”

TCA football coach Justin Rich said the Carlson brothers are an example the program often points to not because of what they have done but who they were.

He said both brothers were “athletic freaks,” but were also among the hardest-working players on the team.

“Talent and hard work,” Rich said. “It’s a great story. We talk about it all the time.”

Game on

If Jodie Carlson misses a moment during Monday night’s game, it won’t be because of her old nervous habits.

Anxiety over watching her boys perform — from Nils in goal to Daniel and Anders as placekickers — used to keep her from actually watching them perform.

“My dad told me really early on when they started playing in college that I needed to just put on my big-girl pants and watch,” Jodie said. “Because I had my head turned at that point, I couldn’t even watch.”

Still, she will be a little distracted in Las Vegas on Monday. Nils is traveling from Sweden for the game along with his 4-year-old son. The family will also be joined by Daniel’s two children, who are 3 and 1.

So there will be diaper changes and distractions for Jodie and Hans as their group wears custom-made navy blue sweatshirts that say in orange writing “Carlson Brothers: Daniel and Anders.” The colors reflect those of Auburn and are neutral for this game.

Hans will wear a hat featuring both the Raiders and Packers logos.

Don’t expect to see them featured on the broadcast, however.

“I was told by both of the boys, if (the networks) reach out and ask where we’re sitting, don’t tell them,” Jodie said. “I have embarrassed my kids enough in life that they probably prefer me not.”

On camera or not, she expects to feel something that goes beyond pride as her sons share an NFL stage.

“To me it’s more about gratefulness,” Jodie said. “It would have never happened without Chris Coughlin taking them under his wing and pointing them in the right direction with Jamie Kohl’s kicking camp and the support they got at TCA from the coaches.”

But she knows the sons on the field will be feeling something else. The same thing that drove them to the top of their sport. A good ol’ sibling rivalry.

“My goal is that hopefully everybody’s going to make their kicks and hopefully it won’t come down to a kick to decide the game,” Jodie said. “But my kids would probably love it if it came down to a kick from them. Both of them. I think they would totally relish that.”