Field Goal Kicking Camps: What Happens at One and How to Prepare

5:45 a.m. A field you have never kicked on, with footballs you have never kicked, in front of forty other kickers and a few coaches with clipboards. That is a kicking camp. It sounds intimidating until you understand what actually happens, hour by hour — and once you do, you can walk in with a plan instead of nerves.

The Shape of a Camp Day

Formats vary, but most one-day camps run the same skeleton:

1. Check-in and measurement. Height, weight, class year. Some camps film a short bio segment — look at the camera and speak normally.
2. Dynamic warm-up. Group-led. Do the movements, do not skip to stretching on your own. Coaches watch who warms up like an athlete and who strolls.
3. Drill stations. Form work in small groups: plant foot, swing path, contact. You will be corrected in public. Take the correction and apply it on the next rep — this is one of the loudest signals you send all day.
4. Charting rotations. The real evaluation. Kickers cycle through live operations at increasing distances, often by hash. Your makes and misses get written down.
5. Competitions. Finals brackets, sudden-death rounds, distance events. Fun, loud, and revealing: staffs watch how you carry yourself after a miss more than they watch the make.
6. Closing. Charts handed out or posted, sometimes a short film talk, and a chance to talk to coaches for thirty seconds.

How Charting Works (And What the Numbers Mean)

Charting is the honest part of camps and the reason they are valuable. You kick live operations — snap, hold, kick — on a neutral field with supplied balls, and every attempt gets recorded. Nobody’s practice exaggerations survive a chart. What comes out of it is a clean read on where your consistency window really starts and ends, from both hashes.

Read your chart carefully: a 5-of-10 day from 45 looks bad until you notice the misses were one direction in the wind and the makes were calm. Ask for your sheet if it is not handed out. That chart is your roadmap for the next two months of practice, and it is exactly the kind of paper I break down in depth when we talk about how kickers get scored and charted at these events.

What Coaches Notice That You Cannot See

• Operation speed. The stopwatch starts before you think it does. Slow, long approaches get flagged even when the ball goes through.
• Body language after a miss. Every kicker misses something on a camp day. The ones who reset in three seconds and hit the next one get remembered.
• How you take instruction. Nodding and repeating the fault you were given, correctly, on the next ball — that is coachability on film.
• Warm-up habits and hustle. Jog between stations, hold the net for others, shag balls without being asked. Coaches compare notes on who acted like a teammate.
• Your ball setup. Consistent steps, consistent tee or ground placement, no fiddling. Repetition reads as reliability.

Questions to Ask Before You Register

Not all camps are built the same, and the registration page rarely volunteers the details that decide whether your day is worth it:

• Who is actually coaching? Staff names, not just “college coaches.” If a camp does not list who attends, email and ask — the answer tells you a lot about the event.
• Is charting on the schedule, and do you leave with your chart in hand? If nobody is recording, you are paying for a workout you could do free.
• How many kicks per kicker, realistically? Eighty kickers rotating on one field means about eight kicks each. Smaller specialist camps buy you a full day of reps.
• Is there a special teams coordinator or specialist coach on staff? A general skills camp wearing a kicking jersey is not the same product.

What to Bring

• Your own football if allowed — broken in, familiar. Some camps supply balls, so check the email first.
• Broken-in game cleats plus a pair of turf shoes as backup for hard or chewed-up fields.
• A towel, water, and real snacks for the breaks. Camp days are long and you kick worse hungry.
• A notebook or your phone for notes. Write down corrections the day you get them, because they evaporate overnight.
• Lace lock or spare laces. It is always the kid with broken laces who kicks well.

How to Stand Out Without a Monster Leg

You do not control how far you kick today. You control a dozen things around it. Show up with clean steps and a short, fast operation. Win the mid-range chart — 35 and 40 yards from both hashes — instead of losing a distance competition. Ask one good question in the film session, something about your own swing, not about rankings. Send the follow-up email the next week with your chart attached and one sentence about what you are fixing. Coaches remember the kid who treated the day like information, not an audition.

After the Camp

The camp’s value is realized afterward. Update your film with the best operation clips you got, attach the chart, and send both to any coach who saw you kick, with one line of context: “Charted 8-of-10 from 40 at your camp Saturday — here is the updated tape.” That single follow-up does more recruiting work than the camp itself. If you are weighing whether a camp belongs in your budget at all, read the honest cost breakdown in are kicking camps worth it, and compare a camp against one-on-one work in camps versus private lessons.

Then, if you want your camp chart turned into a fix list, that is where I can help directly: send your camp film through remote coaching and I will break down exactly what the chart is telling us about your swing. You worked hard for that chart — use it.