Coaching Football Kickers and Punters | FBCP S11E13

Coaching kickers seems to be one of the most overlooked and underappreciated skills in the football world. For a team that’s supposed to entail the figurative third side of the ball, it seems there is very little info out in the football world about how to take the average high school athlete and make them into the one kid held responsible for all of your special teams situations. It’s even been said that some very large colleges will not staff a kicking coach throughout the year.

On this episode Joe, Daniel, and Coach Joel Mathews of Headcase Kicking talk through some of the easiest reasons to get involved in your kickers training, the basics of kicking a ball off of a tee and punting, how to identify your next punter and the proper practice plan to make them better without burning them out.

Why is it important to be able to coach kickers and punters?

• Kicking is a private coach dominated industry, but those coaches aren’t at your practice when the punter is getting reps.
• The worst case scenario is having too many coaches coaching the single kicker. A kid can quickly become overwhelmed from multiple sources of input. If you have the competence to coach all kickers, you can remove the distractions and work to improve the kickers’ abilities.
• Prevent your kicker from being a head case by being the coach they can discuss their job with. Once again, if a private coach isn’t at practice or every coach is the kicking coach they may not find it easy to talk about their concerns with kicking.

 

Key points that you should teach your kickers:

• Keep the same leg swing (think golf or baseball swings here, you need consistency to have a baseline to coach from)
• Steps have to be the same every time, and the number of steps is purely personal preference (2 or 3 steps back and 2 steps sideways are most common)
• Aiming point during approach is not the ball itself, but your plant foot spot. This will naturally cause your hips to be square.
• Knob of the foot (top of the foot) should make contact with the ball
• Follow through should be straight and the consistent

Key points that you should teach your punters:

• The ball should be caught and kept away from the body throughout the kicking process
• Find YOUR hand hold and be comfortable getting the ball into that hold quickly
• Stand up tall, don’t let your body (head) bend to meet the ball, stop any additional torso movement.
• The action of dropping the ball should be similar to shaking someone’s hand. Just open the hand and allow the ball to fall freely. The ball should drop without additional rotation or momentum. A coaching point here is to have your athlete look at the label and watch it through the kick.
• Toes must stay pointed out, not up towards the sky.

Picking your kicker, and building a practice plan

•  Picking your kicker can be as simple or complicated as you make it. Raw power in kicking is often a great starting place. Being able to identify a proper leg swing may be something you as a coach can build around too. 
• You can make most athletes into a decent kicker with time working on the technicalities. Power may take more time to develop.
• If your star player is also your kicker, don’t burn them out with high reps. Use the quality over quantity approach for practice kicks.
• Practice can become taxing on a kicker if you aren’t careful. Your kicker doesn’t need to “kick 100 balls” every day. Get shots from PAT depth and then move around. Have the kicker place footballs around the field at different angles and depths and then just go kick them. Don’t repeat the same kick over and over.
• Use situational practice reps just like you’re doing with your other teams. 

Related Links

• If you’re in need of a special teams plan, listen to this episode from season 9 where Joe details creating a practice plan.
• In this episode from Season 6, Joe covered some special teams schemes you SHOULD be using.
• Way back in 2012, Season 4 of The Football Coaching Podcast, this episode covered whether special teams was REALLY one-third of the game.