Every week, another high school kicker slides into my messages with the same question: what is it actually like? Not the scoreboard photo. Not the scholarship letter. The Tuesday. What does a Division 1 kicker’s Tuesday actually look like, hour by hour? Most kids are picturing something between an NFL facility and a summer camp. The truth is more structured, more repetitive, and honestly more boring than the highlight clips suggest — and knowing that before you sign anything is worth more than any offer letter.
Every program runs the week a little differently, and the coordinator you land under will change the details. But the skeleton below shows up almost everywhere I have seen, talked about, or heard described by specialists at that level. Read it as orientation, not a schedule taped to a locker.
The Week at a Glance
- Monday — recovery lift for specialists, film review of the game, and a short kicking session just to shake the weekend out of your leg.
- Tuesday — full special teams practice at game tempo. Kickoffs, PATs, field goals, live snaps, coverage units sprinting past you while you try to keep your steps calm.
- Wednesday — usually the heaviest lift of the week, team meetings, and a moderate kick count focused on your operation rather than your range.
- Thursday — shorter practice, special teams install, and a small scripted set of kicks. Often the day you rehearse situations: hash kicks, wind kicks, end-of-half timing.
- Friday or Saturday — game day, plus whatever travel comes with it.
- Sunday — off in most places, and the good programs protect it hard.
Notice what is not on that list: nobody is out there booming sixty-yarders on a Tuesday afternoon. In season, your reps are rationed on purpose. Your leg is a resource the staff is budgeting across a twelve-game season, and the first time you try to prove your range in week two, you will feel it in week seven. This is exactly why understanding your kick count before you arrive matters — the kids who show up already thinking in terms of workload adapt months faster than the ones chasing highlights.
Meetings Eat More Hours Than Kicks Do
This is the part that surprises people. You will spend far more time in meetings than you ever spend on a field. Special teams meetings, breakout meetings with your position coach, film sessions where every rep from Saturday gets picked apart, and full team meetings on top of those. Add class, tutoring, treatment, and a training table schedule, and your day is full before a single ball is teed up.
The film part is real work, too. At that level you are expected to know the opponent’s protection tendencies, which hash you prefer, what their return unit shows, and what your own chart says about your last three weeks. If you are not building the film-review habit in high school, learning to chart your own kicks is the single cheapest head start you can buy.
The Lift Matters More Than the Highlight
Specialists lift with the team and then do supplemental work on the parts of their body the season attacks — hips, glutes, hamstrings, adductors, and the small stabilizers around the plant knee. The volume is programmed around the game calendar, not around soreness or ego. A heavy Wednesday lift before a Saturday game is normal. Skipping it because you “feel flat” is not your call to make.
The kickers who last are the ones whose bodies can absorb a season. That is built years earlier, in the unglamorous work. If your strength base is thin right now, start with the structure in the 12-week offseason kicking plan rather than trying to out-leg a college schedule in one summer.
The Parts Nobody Puts on Social Media
Travel eats a chunk of your week. An away game can mean a Friday of missed classes and makeup work, a bus or a flight, a hotel walk-through, a wake-up call that fights your routine, and a stadium you have never kicked in. Some guys love it. Some guys never settle into it. Either way, you are a student carrying a full course load while doing it, and the semester does not pause for football season.
Then there is competition — the part of college kicking nobody misses. There is almost always another kicker on the roster. Some weeks you get exactly one kick. Every rep you take in practice is charted, and every chart is being compared against the guy behind you. That pressure is not a villain; it is the environment. You either build a routine that runs without your emotions or you white-knuckle it, and the second option does not survive a season. The chart decides, not the highlight.
One more reality check: plenty of specialists arrive as walk-ons, redshirt a year, and earn everything from there. The redshirt year confuses a lot of families, so if you have questions about how the four eligible seasons actually work, start with what redshirt actually means. And before you build your recruiting expectations purely around numbers, look at the distances and hang times colleges actually ask for so you know which gaps are real.
Build the Week Now, At Your Level
You do not need a college facility to train like this. You need the structure. Take the skeleton above and shrink it to your reality: two or three scheduled kick days with a written count, one full-tempo operation day where a snapper and holder actually run with you, one film block where you chart your own kicks honestly, and a lifting plan your hips can survive. Write it down Sunday night. If your week has no plan, your leg has no budget, and you will spend the season guessing.
That is the honest picture. It is meetings and charts and rationed reps, with a handful of moments that make all of it worth it. The kickers who thrive are the ones who decide, early, that the boring 90 percent is the job — and who show up for it the same way every single day. If you want the full system I use with specialists on building that structure, the technical and mental framework lives in The Art of Kicking — and code KOE takes 10% off.
Then go run your own week. Write it out, hold yourself to it for a month, and see who you are on the days it gets tedious. That answer tells you more about your college future than any camp leaderboard will.
