There Is No One Right Way to Kick

Notes from 4th Down Focus, Episode 103, with Brian Egan of Performance Kicking Academy.

Walk onto any field where specialists are being coached and you'll hear absolutes. Plant here. Lock the ankle. Approach at this angle. Some of it is good information. All of it is delivered as though it were universal.

It isn't, and the coaches who work at the highest level know it isn't.

Brian Egan founded Performance Kicking Academy and works as a swing coach for kickers now in the NFL - Brandon Aubrey, Cameron Dicker and Will Reichard among them. Episode 103 is worth your time because of where he spends most of it: not on the one correct technique, but on differentiation. How instruction has to change with the athlete in front of you, and with the level he's actually at.

How to Choose a Kicking Coach

Most parents start looking for a kicking coach at the worst possible moment - the season is half over, the field goals are coming up short, and a signing deadline is somewhere on the horizon. That pressure makes it easy to buy the first thing that looks credible.

Here is what actually separates coaching that changes an athlete from coaching that just fills a Saturday.

Objectivity Is the Whole Job

Notes from 4th Down Focus, Episode 101, with Grant McKinniss of Combine Kicking.

Every specialist evaluation comes down to one question: compared to what?

For most of the history of this position, the answer was somebody's eyes. A coach watched a kid kick for twenty minutes and formed an opinion. That opinion travelled - to a staff, to a camp invite, to a scholarship or the absence of one. It was often right. It was also unfalsifiable, which is a problem when a kid's next four years hang on it.

That's the thread running through our conversation with Grant McKinniss on Episode 101. Grant punted at Kentucky and Missouri, worked as a special teams analyst at Eastern Michigan, and now runs Combine Kicking out of Indianapolis. He came up through the subjective era and now builds his evaluations on measurement. He is worth listening to on what changed and why it matters.

Why "Repeatable" Beats "Talented": The Principle in 4th Down University's Training

Every recruiting coach has watched the same kid twice and seen two different players.

Friday under the lights, he drills a 45-yarder with room to spare. The following Tuesday, in a scrimmage that means nothing, he shanks three in a row off the same steps, same distance, same conditions. Nothing about his leg changed. What changed is the thing almost nobody trains for on purpose: repeatability.