Common Field Goal Kicking Mistakes (And How to Fix Each One)

Read this first: the place a mistake shows up is almost never the place it started. Kicking is a chain — stance feeds approach, approach feeds plant, plant feeds contact — and errors travel forward. A kick that slices looks like a contact problem and is usually a curved approach two steps earlier. Fixing the symptom achieves nothing; fixing the earliest broken link improves everything downstream at once.

What follows is organised the way you should actually diagnose: by what you observe, working backwards to the cause.

Diagnose Before You Fix

The most common error in fixing kicking faults is starting work before you know what is wrong. Log twenty kicks first, noting where each miss goes. The shape of that data tells you where to look.

Misses scattered in every direction with no pattern point at inconsistency — your setup or your steps are varying, so you are producing a slightly different kick each time. Misses clustered to one side point at a specific mechanical fault that is repeating faithfully. Those two situations need completely different work, and confusing them wastes months.

A consistent miss is genuinely good news. It means your motion is repeatable and one element within it is wrong — which is a solvable problem. Random misses are harder, because there is no single thing to correct.

A kicker who misses left every time has one problem. A kicker who misses everywhere has a process problem. The second is more common and less often recognised.

Setup Mistakes

Approach Mistakes

Plant Mistakes

Contact Mistakes

Mental and Situational Mistakes

Fix Them in This Order

Because errors propagate forward, work through the chain from the beginning rather than starting at the point where the problem became visible.

1. Setup first. Laces, steps, ground. These are free to fix and resolve a large share of scattered-miss problems immediately.
2. Approach second. Speed and line. Both feed directly into where your plant lands.
3. Plant third. Position and toe direction. The anchor everything else rotates around.
4. Contact fourth. Ankle lock and strike point. These often correct themselves once the plant is right.
5. Follow-through fifth. Usually a symptom of balance problems earlier in the chain rather than an independent fault.
6. Mental and situational last. Not least important — but hard to assess honestly while your mechanics are still moving.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why the Same Mistake Keeps Coming Back

Almost every kicker has a fault that they fix, feel pleased about, and then find has quietly returned six weeks later. Understanding why that happens is more useful than any individual correction.

The first reason is that faults are usually symptoms of something upstream. If you correct your contact point without addressing the plant position that was forcing it, you are holding a compensation in place through conscious effort. Conscious effort fades. Under fatigue or pressure your body reverts to whatever the upstream link makes easiest, and the fault reappears looking exactly as it did before.

The second reason is that corrections need consolidation time that most kickers do not give them. A new movement pattern takes weeks of repetition before it becomes the default rather than the thing you are deliberately doing. Kickers who fix something, see immediate improvement, and then move on to the next project have changed their conscious behaviour without changing their automatic behaviour.

The third reason is drift. Steps lengthen imperceptibly. Approach angles widen by a degree a week. None of these changes are noticeable day to day, and all of them accumulate into a meaningfully different setup across a season. This is why re-measuring your steps from scratch before each session is worth the thirty seconds — it resets the drift before it becomes a slump.

Faults That Only Appear Under Pressure

Some mistakes never show up in practice at all, which makes them particularly difficult to work on. They emerge only when something is at stake, and by definition you cannot fully replicate that alone on a Tuesday afternoon.

Approach acceleration is the main one. Adrenaline compresses your sense of time, so a tempo that feels identical is measurably faster. The plant lands differently, and the whole chain shifts. Kickers describe this as their technique deserting them, when in reality only one variable changed.

Grip tension in the shoulders and jaw is the second. It slows the leg without any conscious sense of trying harder, which is why a maximum-effort pressure kick often travels shorter than a relaxed practice kick from the same distance.

Target drift is the third and least discussed. Under pressure kickers tend to aim more centrally — safer, they feel — which on an angled kick actually reduces their margin rather than increasing it.

The only real remedy is exposure. Add consequence to your practice: one attempt at the end of each session with a stated scenario, sprints before kicking so your heart rate is elevated, and occasionally kicking in front of someone. None of it fully replicates a game, but each narrows the gap.

Building a Personal Fault Log

The kickers who improve most reliably are not the ones who know the most about technique. They are the ones who keep records, because records reveal patterns that memory actively obscures.

1. Log every session, briefly. Attempts, makes, distance, and the direction of each miss. Thirty seconds of writing beats an hour of recollection.
2. Note conditions. Wind, surface, whether you were fresh. Without these, outliers look like decline.
3. Record what you were working on. One line. If you cannot name it, the session had no focus.
4. Review fortnightly, not daily. Daily review measures mood. Fortnightly review measures progress.
5. Track recurrence. When a fault reappears, note how long since you last fixed it. A fault returning every three weeks is telling you something about an upstream link.

The Progress Tracker handles the logging. What it cannot do is the fortnightly review — that part is on you, and it is where the value is.

When to Stop Self-Diagnosing

Most faults in this guide are ones you can identify and correct alone with a phone camera and some patience. A few are not, and recognising the difference saves a lot of wasted effort.

Seek outside eyes when you have worked the same fault for more than six weeks with no improvement, when your make percentage is falling despite consistent practice, or when you genuinely cannot tell from film what is happening. A coach, an experienced kicker, or even a specialist camp will often spot in ten minutes what you have been circling for two months.

Seek medical advice rather than coaching advice if any fault coincides with pain. Kickers frequently develop compensations around a niggle without connecting the two — a groin that hurts slightly on the plant produces a subtly shortened approach, which produces misses that look mechanical. Fixing the mechanics while ignoring the cause is how a minor issue becomes a season-ending one.

The Two Faults Worth Checking First, Always

If you are short on time and want the highest return, check these two before anything else. Between them they account for a remarkable share of missed field goals at every level below professional.

The laces. It sounds too simple to matter and it is responsible for an entire category of misses that appear technique-related and are not. Because a laces strike produces no consistent pattern, kickers reading their own data see scatter, conclude their motion is unreliable, and begin altering a swing that was working perfectly well. Half a second of checking eliminates the whole problem. If you do nothing else differently after reading this guide, do that.

The plant foot. Every serious analysis of kicking faults arrives at the same place. Where your non-kicking foot lands determines your body position, your hip rotation, your contact point and your balance. Almost every mechanical fault further down the chain is either caused by or worsened by a plant that is too far back, too far forward, too close, too distant, or pointing the wrong way.

The cone drill that addresses it — twenty approaches landing on a marker with no ball involved — is genuinely tedious. It is also the single highest-value thing most kickers could add to their week, and it needs nothing but a cone and twenty minutes.

A Realistic Expectation of Progress

Fixing faults is not linear and expecting it to be causes people to abandon corrections that are working. A typical successful correction looks like this: a week of feeling worse and slightly awkward, a fortnight of inconsistency where good kicks and old-fault kicks alternate, then a gradual settling as the new pattern becomes the default.

That middle phase is where most kickers quit, because alternating between good and bad feels like the change is not working. It is in fact exactly what consolidation looks like — two competing patterns, with the new one gradually winning. Push through it and the fault resolves. Abandon it and you return to the original pattern having wasted three weeks.

Give every correction a minimum of two weeks before judging it, and measure with logged data rather than by how the session felt. Feel is unreliable during a change precisely because the correct new movement feels wrong.

Keep Going

General technique information, not individual coaching. Stop and consult a professional if you experience pain while kicking.