What to Do the Day After You Miss a Big Kick

You missed. Maybe it was short, maybe it sailed, maybe it never had a chance off a bad hold. It does not matter which — this morning the weight is the same, and how you spend today decides whether that kick becomes a chapter or the whole book. Here is the 24-hour protocol.

Hour 0–2: Feel It, Don’t Perform It

Right after a miss, the worst two moves are pretending it didn’t happen and making a show of how devastated you are. Both are performances. What actually helps is simpler: let the disappointment exist without feeding it an audience.

Some rules for those first hours:

• Do not open social media looking for reactions, and do not post about it. The internet’s opinion of your kick is worth exactly zero.
• Face the team. Walk through the locker room with your chin up. Your teammates do not need an apology speech — they need to see that you are steady, because your steadiness is what makes them trust the next one.
• One honest conversation is enough: a quick word with your holder or long snapper if the operation was part of it, and a short word with your coach. Then stop replaying it out loud.

Eric has a video on the reality of missed kicks that every kicker should watch exactly once — not to relive it, but to hear a coach say out loud what a miss actually means:

The Review Window: One Cause, Not Five

Give yourself a set window to review — I tell kickers 24 hours, no more. Watch the film once, with a purpose. The rule that matters: find the one thing that broke, not five.

Work the chain in order, because the cause is usually earlier than you think:

1. The operation. Snap time, hold spot, laces. If any of those were off, your miss may not be about you at all.
2. The plant. Where it landed, how it felt. A plant even a few inches off changes the whole swing.
3. The contact. Did it come off clean, or smothered, or on the toe? The sound tells you a lot even on phone film.
4. The swing path. Did the leg finish through the target or across it?

Write down the one sentence: “The miss came from ___, and the fix is ___.” If you cannot fill that in from film, do not invent a theory at midnight — that is what your next practice is for, and sometimes it is what a coach is for.

The Correction Rep — Then Close the Loop

Here is the part most kickers skip, and it is the difference between a miss that haunts you and a miss that made you better. At your very next kicking session, your first kicks are not normal practice. They are the correction. Whatever the fix is — plant spot, staying through the ball, taller chest — the first block of reps targets exactly that, slow and deliberate.

Then, and this is the important part, you close the loop. You do not carry the miss into the following week as an open case. Once the correction reps are done and the ball is flighting right, the file is closed. Reviewed, corrected, archived. That closure is not denial — it is the mechanism that keeps your memory clean for the next kick.

If the miss has friends — two, three in a row — that is a different situation with a different plan. The six-letter guide to getting out of a slump is for that week, not this morning.

The Next-Kick Rule

Whatever happened, the next time you line up for a kick you are not allowed to bring this one with you. Easier said than done — so here is how it actually gets done. Your routine does the work. The same steps, the same breath, the same one thought, every kick, because a routine that only exists when things are going well is not a routine. The pre-kick routine guide is where you build that if it does not exist yet.

There is a reason specialists live by the idea of kicking one field goal at a time, and it is the whole frame behind the best mindset for kicking field goals. Your record is not one kick. It is every kick, and the next one is the only one you control.

What the Ups and Downs Actually Look Like

Every long career in this position is a line of ups and downs, and the specialists who last are not the ones who avoid the downs. They are the ones who metabolize them fast. This video is worth ten minutes for exactly that reason — the honest shape of a kicker’s career:

Teammates, Coaches, and the Locker Room

Saturday morning you will get two kinds of people: the ones who say “forget it, shake it off,” and the ones who say nothing. Both are being kind. What you need from them is normal treatment — and what they need from you is the same. The fastest way to reset a locker room’s belief in you is to be the first one laughing at practice and the last one leaving the drill work.

If your coach pulls you aside, listen for one thing: whether he is worried about the next kick or the next month. Then answer with your work, not your words. Kicker culture gets built in these weeks — the way you handle a miss in front of 40 teammates teaches them who you are.

What Not to Do

• Do not double your practice volume in response. Overcorrecting turns one bad kick into a tired leg and three more bad kicks.
• Do not rebuild your technique from scratch on Monday. One miss is a data point, not a verdict on your technique. If the review showed a real flaw, fix the flaw — do not renovate your whole swing.
• Do not hide from the field. Avoiding kicking this week teaches your brain that the place you kick from is dangerous.
• Do not promise yourself you’ll “never miss again.” You will. The goal is a clean next rep, not perfection.

And when the loop is closed — reviewed, corrected, archived — the move that rebuilds belief fastest is putting pressure on purpose again. Game-winning kicks in practice, with consequences, so the next real one feels like a rep you have already taken. That is the plan in how to practice game-winning kicks — go read it and turn this week into the week your trust got deeper.