Football Kicking Equipment Checklist: Practice, Game Day and Season

What this is: not another buying guide, but a set of practical checklists. What goes in your bag for practice, what you need on game day, and what to check before each season starts. The purpose is to stop the small, avoidable problems — the forgotten tee, the flat ball, the cracked rubber nobody noticed in August.

If you want help deciding what to buy in the first place, our equipment priority guide covers that. This one assumes you own the kit and want to manage it properly.

The Practice Bag

What should live permanently in your bag so that a practice session never depends on remembering something.

Essential

• Kicking tee at your legal height. The foundation of everything. If you kick off and place, one of each.
• Spare tee. Cheap insurance. Tees are the single most commonly lost item a kicker owns.
• Football, correctly sized. Ideally two or more if you do not have a net, because retrieval eats session time.
• Cones, six to ten. For the plant-foot drill and the angle ladder — between them, the two highest-value accuracy drills available.
• Ball pump with a needle. Under-inflated balls change how contact feels and teach you the wrong thing. Check pressure regularly rather than by feel.
• Phone or camera plus something to prop it on. Filming from behind the plant foot is the closest thing to a coach that a solo kicker has.

Strongly recommended

• Water. Obvious, routinely forgotten, and dehydration meaningfully affects both performance and cramp risk.
• A notebook or a tracking app. Logging attempts, makes and miss direction is what turns practice into progress.
• Resistance band. Takes no space, covers warm-up and mobility work when you have nothing else.
• Small towel. For drying the ball, the tee and your hands in wet conditions.

The Game Day Bag

Everything from the practice bag, plus a few additions and a different mindset. On game day you are not troubleshooting or experimenting — you are removing every avoidable variable.

• Your game tee, confirmed legal. The one you have practised on all week. Not a substitute, not a borrowed one.
• Legal backup tee. If anything is ever questioned by an official, you swap and carry on rather than improvising.
• Broken-in shoes. Never debut new footwear in a game. Your contact point calibrates to the shoe you practise in.
• Spare laces. Trivial to carry, genuinely disruptive to lack.
• Warm layers. The sideline problem is real — you will be inactive for long stretches and cold muscle is where strains happen.
• Gloves if it is cold. More useful for holders than kickers, but cold hands affect your whole state.
• Your pre-kick routine, mentally rehearsed. Not equipment, but the thing most worth having ready.

Pre-Season Equipment Audit

Twenty minutes once a year that prevents most in-season equipment problems. Do this before your first session, not after your first failure.

1. Confirm the legal tee height with your coach. Rules are revised between seasons and vary by association. This is the single most important item on the list, and our rules guide explains how to verify properly.
2. Inspect every tee for cracks. Check the base sits flat on a hard surface and that the grip surface still holds a ball securely. A worn tee lets the ball shift fractionally at contact, which costs accuracy invisibly.
3. Check ball condition and pressure. Balls lose shape over a season. One that will not hold pressure needs replacing rather than repeatedly pumping.
4. Examine your shoes. Strike zone wear, stud wear on the plant foot, and whether the leather has stretched past a snug fit. See our shoe guide for what to look for.
5. Test the net if you have one. Frame integrity and netting tears. A net that fails mid-session ends the session.
6. Restock consumables. Tape, spare laces, and anything you used up last year.
7. Replace anything marginal now. Equipment that is “probably fine” in August reliably fails in October, and mid-season replacement means kicking on something unfamiliar.

Weather-Specific Additions

What to add when conditions are not benign.

Cold

Extra layers you can keep on until the moment you kick, and put straight back on afterwards. Gloves. Something to sit on that is not frozen ground. Crucially, plan for a longer warm-up and more build-up kicks — cold muscle strains far more readily, and the sideline wait compounds it.

Wet

Towels, plural — one for the ball, one for your hands, one spare. A change of socks. Be aware that your tee will accumulate mud in the ridges, which stops the ball seating properly, so clean it between reps rather than at the end.

Wind

Nothing extra to pack, but change your habits: check the laces immediately before your approach rather than when you first place the ball, because wind rotates balls on tees. Our Weather Impact Planner covers the kicking adjustments.

Heat

More water than you think, and somewhere shaded to wait if possible. Cramp affects mechanics before it becomes painful, and a cramping calf changes your plant.

Away Games and Travel

Away fixtures introduce failure modes that home games do not.

The main one is surface uncertainty. You may not know whether you are kicking on grass or artificial turf, or what condition it is in. If you own studs for both surfaces, bring both. If you own one pair, firm ground is the safer default and worth knowing in advance if you can.

The second is that you cannot pop home for a forgotten item. Everything you might need has to be with you, which makes the backup tee and the spare laces meaningfully more valuable than they seem at home.

The third is timing. Travel disrupts warm-up routines, and a coach schedule is not built around your specialist needs. Have a compressed version of your warm-up ready — one you can run in a smaller space and less time — so that a delayed arrival does not mean going straight to full-power kicks cold.

Keeping It Organised

Small habits that prevent most equipment problems entirely.

• Mark everything with your initials. Paint pen on tees, cones and ball. In a shared equipment room, unmarked kit becomes communal within a fortnight.
• Count your tees before leaving the field. Tees get left behind more than anything else, particularly kickoff tees, because you strike and immediately run downfield.
• Keep the bag packed permanently. Restock rather than repack.
• Store gear cool and dry. Not in a car boot through summer — heat warps rubber and cracks leather.
• Keep a written note of your legal tee height and the date you confirmed it. In the bag, not in a drawer at home.

What Kickers Forget Most

From the recurring pattern of things that go wrong, roughly in order of frequency.

The tee itself is first by a distance, and it is almost always because it was left on a field rather than never packed. This is exactly why the spare exists.

Checking ball pressure is second. It is invisible, gradual, and changes how contact feels enough to make a kicker question their technique.

Water is third, and it affects more than comfort — dehydration raises cramp risk and cramp changes your mechanics.

Something to prop the phone on is fourth and easily solved with a bag or a water bottle, but people plan to film and then cannot.

Warm layers is fifth, and it is the one with actual injury consequences. Kickers dress for how they feel during warm-up rather than for how they will feel sitting still in the third quarter.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why Equipment Discipline Matters More for Kickers

It is worth explaining why a checklist article exists for this position at all, when a linebacker manages perfectly well without one.

The reason is that kicking is a repeatability skill, and equipment is one of the variables that determines whether a repetition is genuinely a repetition. When a receiver runs a route with a slightly different ball or slightly worn cleats, the effect is negligible against the far larger variables of coverage, timing and contact. When a kicker strikes a ball that is two pounds under pressure, on a tee whose grip surface has worn smooth, in shoes whose leather has stretched half a size, the cumulative effect on contact quality is meaningful — and completely invisible.

That invisibility is the real problem. Equipment degradation does not announce itself. It produces a gradual drift in contact quality that feels exactly like a technique problem, which is why kickers spend months rebuilding a swing that was working fine while the actual cause sat in their bag. A kicker who audits their kit properly eliminates an entire category of phantom faults.

There is also a simpler argument. The specialist positions get the least coaching attention and the least logistical support in most programmes. Nobody is checking whether your tee is cracked. If you do not manage your own equipment, it does not get managed.

Every hour you spend fixing a technique problem that was actually a flat ball is an hour you will not get back.

Building the Habit

Checklists only work if they get used, and most people abandon them within a fortnight. A few things make them stick.

Attach the check to something you already do. Count your tees while packing the bag, not as a separate step you have to remember. Check ball pressure at the start of every session as part of the warm-up rather than as an additional task. Habits that piggyback on existing routines survive; standalone ones do not.

Keep the checklist physically in the bag. A note on your phone gets buried; a card in the side pocket gets seen. It does not need to be elaborate — the master list at the end of this guide, printed small, is enough.

Make the pre-season audit a fixed date. Not “before the season starts” but a specific day in your calendar, ideally the weekend before your first session. Vague intentions get postponed; dated ones happen.

Do the count before you leave, not after you get home. The moment to notice a missing tee is while you are still standing on the field where you left it. Thirty seconds of counting has recovered more lost equipment than any amount of subsequent searching.

A Realistic Minimum

Everything above assumes you want to do this properly. If you genuinely will not maintain a full system, here is the version that captures most of the value in almost no effort.

Own two tees, both marked with your initials, both at your confirmed legal height. Keep them permanently in a bag that also contains a ball, a pump and some cones. Count the tees before you leave any field. Check ball pressure once a week. Inspect everything once, in pre-season, and replace whatever looks marginal.

That is perhaps five minutes a week and twenty minutes a year, and it prevents the overwhelming majority of equipment problems a kicker will encounter. The more elaborate systems above are refinements on top of it, useful if you want them and not essential.

What is genuinely not optional is confirming your legal tee height each season and owning a spare. Those two together address the equipment failures with actual competitive consequences — turning up with something an official will not allow, and being without a tee at all.

Equipment for Coaches Managing a Group

If you are running a specialist group rather than managing your own kit, the problem changes shape.

The dominant issue becomes attrition. Shared equipment disappears at a rate that surprises people new to managing it, largely because nothing belongs to anyone specifically. Numbering every item helps considerably, as does a simple sign-out habit for anything that leaves the equipment room.

Buy in a single consistent height across the squad wherever the rules allow. Mixed heights in a shared bin mean kickers unknowingly practise on the wrong one, which miscalibrates their contact point — a genuinely damaging outcome from an administrative oversight.

Budget for around twenty per cent more tees than you think you need. That is not waste; it is planning for a known rate of loss. And choose high-visibility colours, because orange tees get returned to the bin and black ones stay on the field.

Finally, do the pre-season inspection as a group activity rather than alone. It takes less time, it teaches the kickers what to look for, and it builds the habit in athletes who will eventually be managing their own equipment.

The Ball Pressure Point, Expanded

One item on the list deserves more than a bullet, because it is the most commonly neglected and the most quietly damaging.

Footballs lose pressure gradually and continuously. The change from one session to the next is imperceptible, but across a fortnight it becomes enough to alter how the ball feels off the foot and how far it travels. A softer ball absorbs more energy at contact, so the same strike produces a shorter kick — and because the change is gradual, the kicker experiences it as their own decline rather than as an equipment issue.

Temperature compounds this. Cold air reduces pressure further, so a ball inflated correctly in a warm room reads noticeably lower on a frosty morning. Kickers training through winter can find themselves consistently under-inflated without ever having done anything wrong.

The fix is trivial: own a pump with a gauge, and check pressure weekly rather than judging by squeeze. Squeezing tells you almost nothing, because your hand recalibrates to whatever you have been handling recently. A gauge takes ten seconds and removes the variable permanently.

None of this is complicated, and that is rather the point — equipment problems are almost never solved by knowing more, only by checking more.

Keep Going

General equipment guidance. Confirm tee legality and any equipment restrictions with your coach or governing body before competition.