December 8, 2025
Vamos Vols, Arribe Aguilas - Carlos Lopez's Story
You’ve probably seen Carlos Lopez of Vamos Vols on ESPN’s College Gameday, on your local TV broadcast or heard his voice while scrolling channels on your radio dial. But if you’re a longtime fan of the Carson-Newman Eagles, then you remember a guy not calling a game from the booth, but one suited up on the field, as C-N’s All-SAC kicker from 2008-2011.
You've probably seen Carlos Lopez of Vamos Vols on ESPN's College Gameday, on your local TV broadcast or heard his voice while scrolling channels on your radio dial. But if you're a longtime fan of the Carson-Newman Eagles, then you remember a guy not calling a game from the booth, but one suited up on the field, as C-N's All-SAC kicker from 2008-2011.
Lopez made it to Mossy Creek thanks to his mother, Arly, who brought her family from Venezuela in 2001 in search of a better life in the United States. That choice now has led Lopez down a path even he finds hard to believe, as one of the most successful Spanish sports broadcasters in the country.
"I've just seen what my family and I have done, really what people call it now, 'The American Dream'," Lopez said. "And there are many families like that in the United States. To me, it was about all those families that migrated because of whatever circumstance, and they're coming over here to have a better life. We (Vamos Vols) are in 20 countries worldwide now. We've been featured on Marty & McGee, SEC Network, College Game Day, Paul Feinbaum. It's been unreal."
And part of that unreal path is Lopez's Carson-Newman story.
It was Sep. 26, 2009. C-N, then 3-2 and 1-0 in the South Atlantic Conference was hosting their archrival Newberry. It was a big game that early in the season and would end up having lasting NCAA Division II playoff and SAC title implications. The Eagles had opened the season 0-2 with losses to Winona State and North Alabama. They couldn't afford another defeat, especially in conference.
And that's when the monsoon showed up. The sky opened and flooded Burk-Tarr with a torrential downpour. In a game where C-N would already be battling Newberry tooth and nail, they would also be fighting the weather.
And in the midst of the storm stood then sophomore kicker Carlos Lopez.
Lopez, a graduate of Seymour High School, had taken the kicking job as a freshman, but did not have the campaign that he'd hoped, going just 1 for 4 on field goals. His low point, against this same Newberry team at the Graveyard in Newberry, S.C a year before.
Lopez was 0-for-3 that day and Carson-Newman lost 27-21. Despondent and feeling like he let his team down, Lopez was consoled by his head coach, the legendary Ken Sparks, and still gets emotional recounting the story today.
"Everybody on the team was really looking down on me in that aspect, which, you know, rightfully so," Lopez said. "Ken Sparks pulled me aside and says, 'I trust you.' I was like, what? He said, 'I trust you. Just make sure that your heart is always right with God.' I'm about to start getting teared up. I had just gotten done losing the game for your team and your head coach, who's, you know, what, a top 10 winningest coach, says, 'I trust you. Just make sure, and it went back to the scoreboard does not matter. What matters is winning the game of life. Just make sure that your heart is always right with God.'"
And that was what was on Lopez's mind when he lined up for the game winning kick against Newberry in 2009 in a torrential downpour. He was already 2-for-2 in the rain, hitting a 23-yarder in the second quarter and a 27-yarder to tie the game early in the fourth. Now, in the game's final seconds, the rain was worse than ever. The offense pushed the ball to the Newberry 24 yard-line but stalled. It would be up to Lopez to finish the job in the deluge.
With 37 seconds to go in the game, standing ankle deep in water and with rain in his face, Lopez split the uprights on a 35-yard field goal to win the game and keep the Eagles' SAC record spotless. Carson-Newman would eventually make it all the way to the NCAA DII semifinals that season.
"(Former C-N, Dallas Cowboys punter and Lopez's holder) Chris Jones' whole right leg was underwater. In the monsoon," Lopez said. "I think I kicked water first. It's against Newberry, the team that the previous year, you lose the game for. And then again, we're coming back, I go 3-for-3. So that memory, it's huge."
Life has taken Lopez on a winding journey since his days at Mossy Creek. As a graduate student, he kicked his final year at Middle Tennessee State, then entered coaching, spending some time as an assistant soccer coach at Carson-Newman. It would be football that would once again call to the young man, and he joined head coach Gary Rankin's staff at Alcoa, helping the Tornadoes to multiple state championships.
While at Alcoa, Lopez got his teaching certificate from the University of Tennessee. He would teach Spanish, his first language, while coaching championship football with Rankin.
And that would have been a fine final destination for a kid from Venezuela, but Lopez was called to do more. And Lopez feels that calling started with his journey of faith at Carson-Newman.
"They were just always planting seeds," Lopez said. "I gave my life to Christ in 2008 with Coach Sparks right there in the cafeteria. But from 2008 until 2012, I was still living in my own ways. I'm doing things that I'm not supposed to be doing. In 2013, something clicked. I said, 'Carlos, your life is no longer about you. Your life is about everybody else.' It's been 13 years that I've been living in obedience to the Word of God. From 2013 and you go all the way through 2023, you're just finding ways on how you can serve others. If you look in The Word and you look at the Book of James or just all the Gospels, everything just goes back to, if you want to be a great person, you have to have a servant's heart. We must love each other as Jesus loved us.
"I'm looking back and that's everything that Carson-Newman was about. Carson-Newman was not about the scoreboard. Carson-Newman was not about football. Carson-Newman was about winning the game of life, and that's what I'm noticing now. If I didn't go through Carson-Newman and have those ideas installed in my brain, I would have been totally lost in my life now."
Lopez found his way with the Lord and the Lord helped him find the way into broadcasting. On a whim in 2022, Lopez decided to record himself doing play-by-play in Spanish to a University of Tennessee broadcast against Alabama. Lopez posted it to social media just for fun. He was not prepared for what happened next.
"I was like, you know what, I think that I can do this better," Lopez said. "What if as a Spanish announcer, I was announcing college football games? And then I just posted a 32-second clip. … and it went extremely viral."
That viral moment spurred more Spanish language Vols content from Lopez, which got the attention of local TV stations and then, finally, the Vol Network itself.
"It was Alison Ojeda, who is our (UT's) women's tennis head coach, who just happens to be Mexican-American," Lopez said. "And she said, 'Somebody sent me your video, and this is the greatest thing that I've ever seen. I actually have three girls that are Latina on the tennis team. Do you think you might want to come over here and interview them?' And that's where Vamos Vols with Carlos Lopez began."
In 2023, as part of Hispanic Heritage Month, Lopez called his first official Tennessee football game against the University of Texas San Antonio. It was supposed to be a one-time thing. Just to celebrate the month. Needless to say, it did more than that.
"And then I think we end up reaching millions of social media accounts. And then the following year, I get a call and an email from the Vol Network, and they said, 'Carlos, you want to call the games?' And I said, yeah. In my mind, I was like, you know, how many during Hispanic Heritage Month? They say the university wants you to do all of them.''
And from there, a calling was answered.
"The impact that we're making now is not just about the Spanish broadcast, but the amount of schools, not just from Tennessee, but different states that reach out to me saying, we have a Hispanic population here at school, can you please send us a video?" Lopez said. "Now that's what I do, I go and speak, I send videos to ESL (English as a second language) classes, and at the end of the day, what are we supposed to do? They're part of our community, and our community belongs, Hispanics like American football."
But no one is a bigger fan of Lopez, Vamos Vols and American football than the lady that made it all possible, his mother Arly.
"She (Arly) is the foundation of who I am," Lopez said. "She is just over the moon. At the end of the day, that was my goal. I just want to, after everything that my mother did to bring me to this country, all I wanted to do was represent her the right way."
You can learn more about Vamos Vols and watch Lopez's Spanish play by play clips and interviews, go to Youtube.com/@CarlosSpanishVoice.
