It’s Period 5. Anyone Seen The Kickers?
One of the most complicated jobs I ever had as a special teams coach was managing the specialists. It was a year round challenge. Everything from planning your kickers and snappers’ off-season strength and conditioning to the practice schedule during the season was difficult.
To complicate it even more I was always also responsible for another unit on the football team. For most of you that is still the case unless you are at the University of Georgia or Texas.
During the season and during practice the first consideration was making sure that when you had a special teams period that the kickers were actually there. You see, often times the specialists go off to another field to practice.
One sure way to get chewed out by the head coach is to have a field goal period and no kickers are anywhere in sight. So as you can imagine there was ample time spent on making sure they were there EARLY. Often times I would encourage the punters and kickers to be available to help with offense and defense. This of course, as long as no contact was involved.
When Your Kickers, Punters & Snappers Are Out Of Sight Are They Getting Better?
However, here is another consideration that many coaches do not think about. What are the kickers and punters doing when they are out of sight? At the end of the day, they are no different than the rest of the players. If they practice poorly, they are going to disappoint everyone with that kick to win the game with 15 seconds on the clock.
When I was the special teams coach at Tennessee, I was fortunate. I had an assistant coach who handled the specialist. Taylor Mehlhaff had kicked with the Saints and the Vikings. He also had a great career at Wisconsin, where he was a first team all american. Taylor coached 12 years in college football before focusing on his personal kicking instruction business.
Several years ago, Coach & Coordinator’s Keith Grabowski and I sat down with Taylor Mehlhaff to talk about the challenges of managing the specialists throughout the year. This podcast is packed full of helpful tips if you are a head coach or an assistant who coaches the specialists on your football team.
