Field Goal Kicking Drills: 10 Drills That Build Make Percentage
Ten drills, what each one actually fixes, and the order to run them in — because drilling the wrong thing is just organised wasted time.
Before you pick a drill, diagnose. The most common mistake in kicking practice is running drills that address a fault you do not have. Log twenty kicks and note where each miss goes. Scattered misses mean setup inconsistency; clustered misses mean a specific mechanical fault. Those need completely different drills, and confusing them wastes months.
What follows is organised by what each drill fixes rather than by difficulty, so you can go straight to the one your data points at.
📋 What’s in this guide
Match the Drill to the Fault
| What your data shows | Run these drills |
|---|---|
| Misses scattered, no pattern | 1, 2, 4 |
| Consistent hook (left, right-footed) | 2, 3 |
| Consistent push (right, right-footed) | 5, 6 |
| Low, blocked-height kicks | 1, 6 |
| Fine centre, poor from angles | 8 |
| Good in practice, poor in games | 9, 10 |
| Range shorter than it should be | 3, 6, 7 |
A drill is a tool, not a virtue. Running the right one for three weeks beats running all ten for a season.
Foundation Drills
Drill 1: The cone plant drill
What: Place a cone where your plant foot should land — level with the ball, roughly a football’s width to the side. Take twenty full approaches landing on it. No ball, no kicking.
Why: Plant foot position causes more missed field goals than any other single factor, and removing the ball is what lets you actually observe your mechanics. With a ball present, your attention goes to hitting it and your body runs on autopilot.
How to run it properly: Walk it first, then jog, then full approach speed. Only progress when you hit the cone consistently at the current pace. Check your plant toe direction too — it should point at your target, not at where the ball would be.
This is the least enjoyable drill in the guide and the one that produces the most improvement. That correlation is not a coincidence.
Drill 2: The rope line
What: Lay a rope or line of tape from your starting position to the ball. Take ten approaches staying on it.
Why: A curved approach brings your foot across the ball and produces a hook. It is the most common fault among kickers who came from soccer, and almost nobody believes they do it until they see the evidence.
How: Expect to drift on the first few. Seeing it is most of the correction. Give this three to four weeks — a soccer-derived approach curve is a habit built over years.
Drill 3: Slow-motion contact
What: Twenty-five kicks at roughly twenty per cent power, from a single step, sending the ball five yards.
Why: At full speed you cannot feel where your foot met the ball. At twenty per cent you can feel everything — ankle lock, contact point, whether your foot travelled through or across.
How: Ball on the tee, laces forward, one step, strike just below centre with the top of the foot. The ball should travel low and straight. Sideways spin means your foot is crossing the ball.
💡 Film this one. Slow-motion kicks plus slow-motion video is the fastest technique-correction loop available to a kicker training alone.
Consistency Drills
Drill 4: The twenty-yard groove
What: Thirty kicks from twenty yards, identical setup and steps every rep. That is the entire drill.
Why: Repetition at a manageable distance is how a motion becomes automatic. This is the single most valuable drill for building consistency and the one most people skip because it feels unproductive.
Standard to hit: twenty-four of thirty struck cleanly. When you clear that reliably, you are ready to add distance or complexity.
Drill 5: Follow-through hold
What: Twenty kicks where you hold the finishing position for three full seconds after each.
Why: A short follow-through means you were decelerating before contact, which costs power and leaves the hips short of full rotation — the classic cause of a push. Holding the finish also exposes balance problems you cannot otherwise feel.
How: If you cannot hold it without stepping or wobbling, you were off balance during the strike. That is genuine information, not a failure of the drill.
Drill 6: One-step kicks
What: Fifteen kicks using a single step of approach.
Why: Removing momentum means all the power has to come from your leg mechanics rather than from running at the ball. It exposes a loose ankle, an incomplete follow-through, and any reliance on approach speed to mask poor contact.
How: Expect these to feel weak initially. The distance will be short and that is fine — you are testing mechanics, not range.
Range and Angle Drills
Drill 7: The progressive ladder
What: Start at twenty yards. Make one, move back five. Miss one, move forward five. Continue for twenty kicks.
Why: It finds your genuine reliable range rather than your imagined one, and it rewards accuracy rather than power. Kickers consistently overestimate their range because they remember their best kick rather than their average.
What to record: the distance you spent most time at. That is your honest working range, and it is the number a coach can actually use.
Drill 8: The angle ladder
What: Three kicks each from far left, left hash, centre, right hash, far right — all at the same distance.
Why: Below the NFL, hash marks are wide enough that angled attempts are a large share of real kicks, yet most practice happens from the centre. Most kickers lose twenty to thirty per cent of their accuracy from wide positions the first few times they try this.
What to track: your angle gap — centre accuracy minus wide accuracy. Watching it narrow across a season is one of the clearest signs of genuine improvement.
Pressure Drills
Drill 9: Five in a row
What: From twenty-five yards, make five consecutive kicks. Miss one and the count restarts.
Why: It introduces consequence. Making four and then missing produces a genuine emotional response, and that response is a mild version of game pressure you can train against.
Drill 10: The one-kick game
What: At the end of every session, one kick. One attempt only, with a stated scenario — fourth quarter, three points down, four seconds left. Make it and the session succeeded.
Why: This is the closest a solo practice gets to a real field goal. It trains producing on demand, which is the actual job description.
Make it real: it feels contrived for about two sessions, then it starts genuinely raising your heart rate. Adding a physical component — sprinting forty yards first — makes it closer still.
⚠️ If your practice accuracy far exceeds your game accuracy, these two drills matter more to you than any mechanical work. The fault is almost never technique; it is tempo under adrenaline, and only exposure narrows that gap.
Putting Them in a Session
A forty-five minute session that uses these well looks roughly like this.
- Warm up ten minutes, finishing with ten build-up kicks from thirty per cent rising to seventy. Never go from stretching to full power.
- One foundation drill, fifteen reps. Usually the cone plant drill, no ball.
- Drill 4, the groove, fifteen kicks. Identical setup every rep.
- One targeted drill, fifteen kicks. Whichever your data points at.
- Drill 10, one kick. Consequence attached.
- Cool down five minutes, static stretching.
Note that roughly half the kicking volume sits at one comfortable distance. Kickers instinctively want to spend sessions at maximum range, which produces poor feedback and grooves a tense motion.
Knowing When to Progress
Each drill has a standard worth clearing before moving on.
The cone plant drill is complete when you hit the cone twenty times out of twenty at full approach speed, with your plant toe pointing at the target each time.
The rope line is complete when you no longer drift — and then it becomes a maintenance drill you revisit whenever a hook reappears.
The groove is complete at twenty-four clean strikes from thirty. Below that, adding distance or complexity is premature.
The angle ladder never really completes; you are watching a gap narrow rather than closing it entirely. A gap under about ten per cent is genuinely good.
Expect a temporary dip whenever you consciously change something. Your make percentage may fall for a week or two before climbing past where it started. That dip is the pattern reconsolidating, not evidence the drill is wrong, and it is where most kickers abandon work that was succeeding.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best drill for field goal kicking?
The cone plant drill — twenty approaches landing on a marker level with the ball, taking no kicks at all. Plant foot position causes more missed field goals than any other factor, and removing the ball is what lets you observe your own mechanics.
It is dull, which is precisely why most kickers skip it.
How many drills should I do in one session?
One foundation drill and one targeted drill, plus the groove work and a single pressure kick. Attempting five drills in a session means none of them gets enough repetitions to consolidate.
Pick your targeted drill from your logged miss pattern and stay with it for at least a fortnight.
Why do drills without a ball help?
Because when a ball is present your attention goes to hitting it and your mechanics run on autopilot. Remove the ball and you can actually observe what your body is doing.
Two of the three foundation drills involve no ball contact for exactly this reason.
How long before a drill shows results?
Plant position typically takes two to three weeks. Approach path takes three to four, because a curved run-up is usually a long-standing habit. Contact point varies from two to six weeks depending on whether you can feel it.
Expect a short dip in results immediately after any conscious change.
Should I drill at game distance?
Mostly no. Roughly half your volume should sit at a comfortable distance where you can strike cleanly and feel your contact. At maximum range you are straining, your feedback is poor, and you groove a forcing motion.
Range is built on top of a reliable motion rather than instead of one.
Why Most Drill Work Fails
Kickers do not generally suffer from a shortage of drills. They suffer from running them badly, and the failure modes are consistent enough to be worth naming.
Drill hopping. A kicker reads about a drill, runs it twice, sees no change, and moves to the next one. Nothing consolidates, because motor patterns need weeks of repetition rather than a couple of enthusiastic sessions. Over a season this produces a kicker who has tried everything and improved at nothing.
Running drills for faults you do not have. The angle ladder is excellent and useless if your problem is a loose ankle. Diagnosis has to come first, and diagnosis means logged data rather than a general sense that something is off.
Treating the drill as the goal. The point of the cone plant drill is not to become good at hitting cones — it is to make a correct plant automatic when a ball is present. Kickers who nail the drill and then revert the moment they kick have not finished the work; they have finished the easy half of it.
Quitting during the dip. Any conscious change temporarily disrupts the automaticity of the whole chain, so results get worse before they get better. That phase feels exactly like the drill not working, and it is where the majority of abandonment happens.
Doing them tired. A drill run after your technique has degraded is teaching your body the fault. Drills belong early in a session, not tacked onto the end when you have already kicked forty balls.
Adapting Drills to Your Situation
Few kickers have ideal conditions, and every drill here scales down without losing its purpose.
No field. The cone plant drill, the rope line and follow-through holds all need a few square metres and no goalposts. You can maintain plant consistency and approach path through an entire off-season without kicking a ball at a target.
No net and no help retrieving. Cut kick volume and raise quality. Ten kicks where you walk to collect each one and think about the previous strike is a legitimate session, and the walking is genuinely useful thinking time.
Limited time. Warm up properly — never cut this — then one foundation drill and ten groove kicks. Twenty-five minutes and you have preserved most of the benefit.
Shared field with a team session. Prioritise anything involving other people, since that is what you cannot do alone. Do your cone work and slow-motion contact solo later.
Winter, no daylight. Mobility and no-ball drills indoors. Both the cone drill and follow-through holds work in a garage or hallway.
💡 The drills requiring least equipment are the ones addressing the biggest faults. Plant position and approach path cause most missed kicks, and both can be worked with a cone and a length of rope. That is genuinely convenient, and it removes the most common excuse.
Building a Drill Rotation Across a Season
Drills should not stay constant all year, because your needs change between phases.
Off-season is when foundation work belongs. This is the only period where you can afford for your kicking to get temporarily worse while a change consolidates. Heavy cone plant work, rope line if you hook, slow-motion contact throughout. Kick volume low, drill volume high.
Pre-season shifts toward consistency and range. The groove drill becomes the centrepiece, the progressive ladder establishes your honest range, and the angle ladder gets serious attention. Foundation drills drop to maintenance.
In-season is almost entirely groove work and pressure. You are not building anything; you are staying sharp and arriving fresh on Friday. One foundation drill weekly as maintenance, the groove as your main volume, and the one-kick game every session.
After a bad game, resist the urge to overhaul. Return to the groove drill at short range and rebuild rhythm. Diagnostic work belongs on Sunday with film, not on Saturday with tired legs and frustration.
Measuring Whether a Drill Is Working
Drills are easy to run for months without knowing whether they helped, because the outcome you care about is affected by many things at once. A small amount of structure fixes that.
Establish a baseline before you start. Twenty kicks from a fixed distance, logging makes and miss directions. Without that number you have nothing to compare against, and memory will flatter whichever drill you enjoyed most.
Then change only one thing and hold everything else constant. Same distance, same session structure, same volume. If you introduce a new drill while also adding range and changing your steps, the resulting data tells you nothing.
Re-test at two weeks, not two days. Daily testing measures how you felt that morning. Fortnightly testing measures whether the pattern has shifted, which is the actual question.
Look for the right kind of improvement. A plant drill should show up as reduced scatter rather than as sudden extra distance. An approach drill should show up as your hook shrinking. If you are seeing improvement in a metric the drill does not target, something else changed.
And be willing to abandon a drill that genuinely is not working — after a fair trial rather than during the dip. Six weeks with a proper baseline and no movement in the targeted metric is reasonable grounds to try something else, or to conclude the fault was diagnosed wrongly in the first place.
📚 The most common measurement error is judging a plant drill by whether kicks went through. Plant work shows up first as consistency — your misses clustering rather than scattering — and only later as makes. Watching the wrong metric makes successful work look like failure.
Pick the drill your data points at, run it for a fortnight without hopping, measure the metric it actually targets, and give it room to work before you judge it.
📚 One final thought. The two drills in this guide that need no ball — the cone plant and the rope line — address the two faults responsible for the largest share of missed field goals. They are also the two most commonly skipped, because standing on a field not kicking feels like wasting a session. That instinct costs kickers more improvement than any other single habit.
Drill Checklist
- Logged twenty kicks and identified your miss pattern before choosing a drill
- Running one foundation drill per session
- Running one targeted drill matched to your actual fault
- Staying with a drill for at least a fortnight
- Roughly half your kicking volume at one comfortable distance
- Cone plant drill included regularly
- Filming slow-motion work from behind and side-on
- Tracking your angle gap, not just overall accuracy
- Recording your honest reliable range from the ladder
- Finishing every session with one consequence kick
- Stopping when technique degrades rather than at a rep count
- Expecting a temporary dip after any conscious change
The bottom line: diagnose first, then pick one drill and give it time. Scattered misses need setup discipline; clustered misses need the specific drill for that fault. The cone plant drill and the twenty-yard groove between them address the majority of what limits most kickers, and both are unglamorous enough that they get skipped in favour of hitting long kicks — which is exactly why so many kickers plateau.
Keep Going
❌ Common MistakesTwelve faults and their causes
🎯 Accuracy DrillsEight more, focused on line
⚙️ Drill GeneratorBuild today’s session
General training information, not individual coaching. Stop and consult a professional if you experience pain while kicking.