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High School Old Fashioned Place-Kickers Retain a Toehold in Ohio High Schools

LordJeffBuck

Illuminatus Emeritus
Staff member
BP Recruiting Team
Old Fashioned Place-Kickers Retain a Toehold in Ohio High Schools (by Ben Kesling, WSJ)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...79093443135959528.html?KEYWORDS=place-kickers

VINCENT, Ohio—Teammates mock him. Professional kicking coaches shun him. Even the laws of physics conspire against him. He is the square-toe football place-kicker.

Yet here in Ohio, where high-school football scores festoon newspaper front pages and talk radio dissects performances of local teams, old-fashioned place-kickers maintain a toehold in a sport dominated in recent decades by soccer-style kickers.

One Friday night recently, Cole Wigal, a tall 16-year-old who learned the technique from his father, squared up to the ball to kick off for the Warren High School Warriors. He took a few powerful strides, and swung his leg straight through the ball, like a pendulum, sending the pigskin high into the lights and deep into the end zone—just what his coach wanted.

"I tried kicking it soccer-style for less than a week," young Mr. Wigal says. "I just kept kicking it with my toe, so I switched back."

For much of football's history, straight-on kickers were legion. Manufacturers responded with a special, square-toe shoe—which looks like an unholy amalgam of a Civil War-era brogue and a jester's curved-up slipper—to ensure perfect contact with the ball.

Things started to change in the early 1960s when Pete Gogalak, a Hungarian-born soccer player turned kicker for Cornell University, popularized a new style seldom seen in the U.S. Instead of the usual straight-ahead approach, he ran toward the ball on a diagonal path, swung his leg in an arcing motion and contacted the ball with his instep. He later brought soccer-style kicking to the pros.

The technique is used by the majority of players today and the kicking cognoscenti feel it is unquestionably superior.

"You can't compare the two for overall height and overall distance," said Chris Sailer, a professional kicking coach whose camps are common destinations for college-bound kickers. "To be honest with you, the [square-toe kickers] I've seen are horrible. It'll all be gone in a generation."


Cole Wigal wears a square-toe shoe when he kicks for the Warren High School Warriors football team.

Physicists say soccer-style kickers clearly have a leg up on toe-punchers. "I don't know why they would kick it that way," said Professor Chang Kee Jung, who teaches a class in the physics of sports at Stony Brook University, noting that the twist of the body and the angle of the foot provide more power and accuracy for the instep kick.

Still, square-toe kickers haven't been completely dislodged from the record books. Russell Erxleben, a toe-puncher for the University of Texas, kicked an NCAA record 67-yard field goal in 1977, a feat later duplicated by two soccer-style kickers. And NFL legend Tom Dempsey's 63-yard game winner for the New Orleans Saints in 1970 has been matched three times by instep kickers, but never surpassed.

CONTINUED
 
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