Sophomore punter Nick McLarty shows sports editor Noah Weiskopf where to drop the ball when punting. Credit: Carly Damon | Asst. Photo Editor
Who knew punting a football could cause so much pain?
My foot.
My hamstring.
My ego.
And my self-esteem.
Punting is something many people see but few think about. Punters are difference-makers in games and can be the reason a game is won or lost. Some people even think it’s easy.
I wanted to see what it takes to punt a football in a game-like situation, so I spent an afternoon learning what all goes into punting with Ohio State’s Nick McLarty.
My key takeaway: It’s harder than I ever imagined.
McLarty and I met up to start my training at Lincoln Tower Fields, right outside Ohio Stadium.
A native of Melbourne, Australia, McLarty was recruited to Ohio State after a video of him kicking a football over a soccer stadium went viral with more than five million views on social media. At 6-foot-7, he towers over most, and his deep, Australian accent makes heads turn.
We dropped our bags off at the end of the turf field next to a chain-link fence. He pulled out a pair of white cleats and told me we’d start by warming up. The difference between punters and other types of players already started to come into focus.
Punters have to be extremely flexible — much more so than the average person — because of the range of motion needed from the kicking leg. I should have taken that as a warning sign, but I brushed it off as we kept talking.
We took a two-minute jog from one end of the field to the other and then started stretching with a hip mobility exercise, for which we stood on one leg while lifting the other, moving the leg off the ground in an outward and inward direction. Then, we performed a standing hamstring stretch by balancing on one leg and placing the heel of the other foot on the ground with toes pointed upward at a 45-degree angle, then bending forward at the hips to stretch the muscle..
McLarty said he spends an hour stretching before kicks, sometimes twice a day. I got five minutes in before realizing my body might not be meant to do this.
My hamstring felt tight, like a rubber band losing its elasticity.
After about 10 minutes of stretching, we walked to the fence and McLarty unzipped his black North Face duffel bag, pulling out four footballs, each with the Ohio State logo painted on one side.
First step in punting: holding the ball.
“Shake my hand,” McLarty said.
Sophomore punter Nick McLarty shows sports editor Noah Weiskopf proper hand placement on the ball. Credit: Carly Damon | Asst. Photo Editor
I shook his hand, and as soon as I did, he let go, leaving my right hand frozen in mid air. This was how to hold the football, he said, and slipped it into my hand. The white laces were just above the webbing between my thumb and index finger. McLarty then angled the ball to the side.
My second job was to focus on the technique of dropping the ball.
“It should either bounce straight up, or it should bounce a little bit out,” McLarty said. “The one we don’t want is when it goes forward. When it goes forward, it means it hit the back of the ball and that’s when we get that tumbly [punt] over the front.”
I dropped the ball on the ground. Upon impact, it rolled slightly forward, exactly what it wasn’t supposed to do.
“When we’re dropping it, the cue that we have in our heads is parachute,” McLarty said. “When we drop it, we’re just trying to let the ball flutter down.”
After two tries, I got the hang of it — I dropped it down and it bounced backwards.
“There you go,” McLarty said encouragingly.
Next, we walked over to a 15-foot fence with netting to warm our legs up. We practiced dropping the ball onto our foot in the exact same spot and kicking it into the net set up on the field to keep soccer balls from escaping. It was called the one step.
McLarty went first. He took one step, dropped the ball and booted it into the top of the net.
My turn.
The football hit my toe one inch from the middle, where it’s supposed to hit, but my first kick was a line drive three feet off the ground.
Placement on the foot, McLarty said, is the difference between an awful punt and a great one.
“You see someone shank the ball, that’s all because the ball wasn’t here,” McLarty said, pointing at the top of his foot, just behind the toes. “This wind is coming off my left shoulder, so I’ve also got to be careful not to have the ball out too far or the wind is gonna catch it.”
He kicked another one, perfect again. To see McLarty’s kicks at their highest point, I had to bend my head all the way back to look straight up in the sky. My next punt line drove 18 yards.
Next, we stood about 15 yards apart and practiced directional kicking. McLarty dropped the ball and punted it into my chest.
I dropped the ball to my foot, made contact and it went right to McLarty. He was impressed.
“There it is!” McLarty said excitedly.
We then went to midfield and found a red line on the turf, 50 yards away, to simulate a pooch situation — a time when, due to where the ball is snapped, the punt is purposely kicked shorter to have a better chance at hitting a target. For McLarty, it was 40 yards.
He lined up with the white horizontal line painted on the turf, dropped the ball and kicked it, all within a second. The ball shot directly into the air, like a rocket blasting off. The ball kept getting higher and higher before it hit its apex and arched toward the ground. It thumped down on the turf after about four seconds in the air and landed on the white line.
He did the same thing again and again, the result the same each time.
When it was my turn, we picked up the football and walked 10 feet closer to the white line — as if that was going to be the difference.
I kicked the same, low-line drive. The good news: It was in the right direction. The bad news: It felt like I’d just kicked a rock, with the pain radiating through my foot like a bolt of lightning.
McLarty went again and kicked one that looked like it landed 10 yards to the left of the line.
“I’d consider that a miss-hit,” McLarty said.
A miss-hit? If I kicked that ball, I would be elated.
One thing that helped McLarty’s transition from Australia to the United States was his comfort with Australian rules football, which uses a roll-out punt. That means he gets the ball from the long snapper, takes a lateral step to his right, one step diagonally, a few more steps forward and then kicks the ball while on the run.
Ohio State is one of 50% of college football programs that also utilizes the roll-out punt.
As I stepped up to attempt my roll-out punt, McLarty gave me a subtle warning.
“It looks very easy,” McLarty said. “It’s not very easy.”
I took a step to the right, a diagonal step and then ran into three more steps forward. I was so hyper-focused on making sure my footwork was right that when I made contact with the ball — ouch — it felt like I just kicked another rock, leaving the top of my foot throbbing and causing me to limp. And the ball only went 20 yards.
I did it twice more and had a similar lack of success.
Trying to do all those technical things in the two seconds you have to kick the ball is next to impossible. My mind simply couldn’t focus on five things at once.
I was exhausted from the day. I was limping pretty noticeably, as my right foot throbbed in pain. The harder I tried to walk without a limp, the more my foot pulsated. I needed to go home.
So, after two hours, we put the footballs back in the bag, McLarty packed up his cleats and we headed off the field.
As McLarty walked off, and I limped off, I told him something I had been thinking about all day.
“So, my best punt is just a shank for you?” I said.
“Yeah,” McLarty admitted, laughing. “But I can’t do journalism.”
