How to Get Recruited as a Football Kicker

The thing nobody tells you first: coaches almost never evaluate kickers at games. You might attempt two kicks in a night, in conditions nobody controls, in front of nobody who is scouting your position. That single fact reshapes everything about how specialist recruiting works, and why the standard advice given to skill-position players does not apply to you.

Kickers get recruited through camps, verified measurable results and specialist film. Game highlights matter far less than they do for a receiver or a linebacker, because a highlight reel of six made field goals tells a coach almost nothing about your consistency, your range under standard conditions, or your kickoff ability.

Why Specialist Recruiting Is Different

Consider the problem from a college coach’s side. They need one kicker. Possibly they need a kickoff specialist as well, but frequently that is the same person. They cannot watch you play, because your position produces a handful of measurable moments per game and those moments depend heavily on whether your offence gets into range.

So they need a way to compare candidates under controlled conditions. That is what camps exist for. At a camp, every kicker attempts the same distances on the same day in the same wind, and the results are recorded. It is the only setting in which one kicker can be meaningfully compared with another.

This has an important practical consequence. A kicker who is genuinely excellent but attends no camps and produces no measurable results is close to invisible, regardless of how good their season was. Meanwhile a solid kicker who camps consistently, records verified numbers and maintains contact with programmes will get looked at. Recruiting rewards visibility as much as ability, and visibility for a specialist means camps.

Your season statistics tell a coach how many opportunities you had. Your camp numbers tell them what you can actually do. Only one of those is comparable across candidates.

When to Start

Earlier than most people expect, and considerably earlier than skill-position players are often told.

Sophomore year is when serious kickers should begin attending camps, even if only locally. The purpose at this stage is not to be recruited — it is to find out where you stand, get used to performing under measurement, and start building a record of improvement over time. Coaches who see a kicker improve across two years form a different impression from those who see one good day.

Junior year is the main recruiting window for specialists. This is when you should be camping regularly, building your film, and making contact with programmes. A great many college kicking spots are effectively allocated during and shortly after junior year.

Senior year is late but not hopeless, particularly for walk-on opportunities. Programmes that lose a kicker unexpectedly, or that find their situation less settled than they hoped, look for available specialists. But you are working with what is left rather than what was available.

Camps and Combines

Since camps are the central mechanism, it is worth being deliberate about them rather than attending whatever is nearest.

What happens at a specialist camp

Typically you will be measured on field goals from progressively increasing distances, kickoffs recorded for distance and hangtime, and often punts if you do both. Instruction is usually included. Results are recorded and, at larger camps, published or shared with programmes.

Choosing which to attend

Prioritise camps that produce verified, recorded results over those that are primarily instructional. Instruction is valuable, but the recruiting function comes from measurement. A camp where nobody writes down what you did has limited recruiting value regardless of how much you learned.

Attend a mix of local and larger regional events. Local camps are cheaper and let you build a habit of performing under measurement. Larger events attract more attention but are more expensive and more competitive.

How to actually perform at one

The single biggest error kickers make at camps is trying to show maximum range rather than consistency. A kicker who attempts everything from 55 yards and makes two of eight has demonstrated nothing useful. A kicker who is reliable through their genuine range and honest about where it ends has demonstrated exactly what a coach needs to know.

Warm up properly — camps involve waiting around in the cold and then kicking on demand, which is the highest-risk situation for a groin strain. Bring your own tee at your legal height. Sleep and eat properly the night before, because camp days are long.

Building Your Film

Specialist film is not a highlight reel. A coach watching your film is trying to assess your mechanics and your consistency, not to be entertained.

1. Film from two angles. Directly behind your plant foot, and side-on level with the ball. Behind shows approach path and plant position; side-on shows contact point, body lean and follow-through. Each hides what the other reveals.
2. Show the complete motion. Approach through landing, uncut. Clips that begin at contact tell a coach nothing about how you got there, and how you got there is what they are assessing.
3. Label every distance on screen. An unlabelled kick is uninterpretable. Distance, and ideally the conditions.
4. Include kickoffs with recorded hangtime. This is a genuine differentiator because relatively few kickers include it, and kickoff ability materially affects your value to a roster.
5. Show consecutive kicks, not selected ones. Five in a row from the same distance is far more convincing than five makes cherry-picked from an afternoon. Consistency is the product; demonstrate it.
6. Keep it short. Two to three minutes, best material first. Coaches watch a great many of these.

Our guide to becoming a kicker covers the earlier stages of development that produce film worth sending.

Contacting Coaches

Kickers routinely either never make contact or make contact badly. Both waste the work you have put in.

What a good first email contains

Keep it short. Your name, position, graduation year, school, and the specifics: your reliable field goal range, your camp results with the camp named, your kickoff hangtime, and a link to your film. Then a single sentence saying you are interested in their programme and asking whether they are recruiting a specialist for your class.

That is the whole email. Coaches receive many of these and read them quickly. Concrete numbers near the top are what make yours worth finishing.

What to avoid

Do not send identical mass emails with the programme name swapped — it is obvious and it reads as it is. Do not lead with a lengthy personal story. Do not claim a range you cannot back up, because you will eventually be measured and the discrepancy will be noticed. Do not attach large files; link instead.

Following up

One follow-up after two or three weeks is reasonable. Beyond that, further messages rarely help. Instead, update them when you have something genuinely new — a camp result, an improved hangtime, a strong game. New information is a legitimate reason to make contact; repetition is not.

The Walk-On Path

A great many college kickers arrive as walk-ons rather than on scholarship, and treating that as failure is a mistake that costs people opportunities.

Kicking scholarships exist but are limited, and programmes are often reluctant to spend one on a specialist when they can allocate it elsewhere. That does not mean they do not need kickers — it means the route in is frequently preferred walk-on status rather than a scholarship offer.

A preferred walk-on typically has a roster spot secured before arriving, without financial support. From there, kickers who perform frequently earn scholarship support in subsequent years. The path is real and it is well travelled.

Practically, this widens your options considerably. Programmes that would not offer you a scholarship may well offer a roster spot, and asking specifically about walk-on opportunities is a reasonable and common question to include in your contact.

What Numbers Actually Matter

Kickers often train and report the wrong metrics. Coaches are assessing a narrow set of things.

Reliable range, not maximum. The distance from which you make a clear majority of attempts. A kicker who reports 45 yards honestly and delivers is more useful than one who claims 55 and converts occasionally. Coaches make in-game decisions based on what they can trust.

Consistency across a set. Ten attempts from the same distance with eight makes says more than one spectacular kick.

Kickoff distance and hangtime together. Neither alone. A deep kickoff with poor hangtime is a coverage problem, and coaches know it.

Performance under measurement. Camp numbers carry weight partly because they are recorded and partly because they were produced under mild pressure with other kickers watching.

Improvement over time. A kicker whose camp results have climbed across two years demonstrates coachability and trajectory, which matters at a stage where you are being projected forward rather than assessed as finished.

Recruiting Mistakes

Being Realistic

Worth saying plainly, because false expectations cause a lot of unnecessary disappointment.

There are relatively few college kicking positions and a large number of kickers pursuing them. The odds at the highest levels are genuinely long, and that is true for talented, hard-working kickers as much as anyone. Being realistic is not pessimism; it is what lets you make good decisions.

What that means practically is widening your definition of success. There are many levels of college football, and programmes at every one of them need kickers. A kicker fixated exclusively on the largest programmes may miss genuine opportunities at institutions that would suit them well academically and athletically.

It also means keeping perspective on timelines. Kickers develop later than most positions, and some who were unremarkable at seventeen become genuinely good at twenty. Walk-on routes, transfer routes and later development are all real paths, and closing them off early because the initial recruiting cycle disappointed is a mistake.

Frequently Asked Questions

Managing the Emotional Side of Recruiting

This gets discussed far less than it should. Recruiting is a prolonged period of being evaluated, frequently ignored, and occasionally rejected, all while you are still expected to perform on Friday nights. It affects people, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

The unanswered email is the most common experience in specialist recruiting. Coaches receive a great many and reply to few, and the absence of a response usually means nothing more than that they are not currently recruiting your position for your class. Reading it as a verdict on your ability is both inaccurate and corrosive.

The comparison trap is the second. Camp results are published, other kickers post their numbers, and it becomes very easy to measure yourself continuously against people whose circumstances you do not know. Some of them have had coaching you have not. Some peaked at seventeen. Track your own trajectory and let theirs be theirs.

Perhaps most usefully: separate the recruiting outcome from the kicking. Your job on any given Tuesday is to take twenty-five good repetitions, and that job is entirely within your control. Whether a programme replies is not. Kickers who tie their daily motivation to recruiting news have handed control of their training to strangers who are not thinking about them.

What Happens After You Commit

Worth knowing, because the transition catches kickers out more than most positions.

The step up in standard is real, and the environment changes in ways that specifically affect specialists. You will likely be competing with two or three other kickers for one job, several of whom were also the best in their region. The margin between you may be small, and the decision may hinge on consistency across a pre-season rather than on any single kick.

There are also two technical adjustments waiting. Above high school, field goals are held rather than teed, so if you have not rehearsed extensively with a holder you are learning a partnership under competitive pressure. And the standard kickoff tee height drops to one inch, which recalibrates your contact point. Our height comparison guide covers why that transition disrupts kickers who arrive unprepared.

The kickers who handle this best arrive having already done both — regular holder reps and weekly one-inch work — for a year beforehand. It converts what is otherwise a difficult adjustment into something you have already absorbed.

If Recruiting Does Not Work Out

It frequently does not, and that deserves an honest paragraph rather than being skipped.

The number of college kicking positions is small relative to the number of kickers pursuing them, and plenty of genuinely capable kickers do not find a spot in their initial recruiting cycle. That is not evidence of failure, and it is not the end of the road either.

Options remain. Preferred walk-on opportunities open up when programmes lose specialists unexpectedly. Smaller programmes and lower divisions need kickers and often recruit later. Some kickers develop meaningfully between eighteen and twenty and become viable through a transfer route. And plenty of people continue kicking recreationally, coach, or simply keep the skill without it defining anything.

What is worth protecting through all of that is the relationship with the activity itself. Kickers who spent four years experiencing their sport purely as an audition tend to stop enjoying it. Those who kept some part of it about the craft — the satisfaction of a clean strike, the slow accumulation of consistency — generally come out of the process better, whichever way it goes.

Keep Going

General guidance on recruiting processes, which vary by level, association and season. Confirm specifics with your coach and with the programmes you are targeting.