The ball already told you what broke. Pushed right or pulled left isn’t a mystery — it’s a receipt. Flight is honest in a way that memory isn’t, and if you learn to read it, most accuracy problems are fixable in one practice instead of one season.
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Everything below is written for a right-footed kicker. Lefties, mirror every direction and you’re covered.
First: separate the start line from the curve
This distinction saves more kickers’ seasons than any drill I teach. Watch two things on every miss, in order:
- The start line: where the ball was pointed in its first few yards of flight. That’s the direction your leg was actually traveling at contact.
- The curve: where the ball bends after that. That’s spin and swing path arguing with the target line.
A ball that starts right and stays right is a push: your swing path and contact sent it there. A ball that starts right and bends back left is a different animal — over-rotation with a path swinging too far inside-out. Same miss location, different cause, different fix. Diagnose the flight before you touch your technique.
Reading a push
The pushed ball starts right of target and generally keeps drifting. The usual suspects:
- Plant too close to the ball. No room for the leg to travel down the line, so it wraps around your body and the strike sweeps right. This is the most common push cause I see in young kickers.
- Hips opening early. Your chest rotates toward the target before contact, dragging the swing plane to the right with it.
- Stance lined up crooked. If your approach angle aims right of your intended line, no amount of clean contact saves you. Sometimes a push is just geometry.
The fix for a wrapped, cramped swing is space, not effort. Move the plant a couple inches farther from the ball and re-test before you change anything else.
Reading a pull
The pulled ball starts left and stays there. Common causes:
- Plant too far from the ball. You reach across your body to make contact, which puts the inside of your foot across the ball’s path and sends it left.
- Swinging across the ball. An outside-in path — often from over-striding or chasing contact instead of driving through it.
- Shoulders closed at contact. Your upper body never opens toward the target, so the swing crosses your line.
Notice the symmetry: push and pull are usually the same problem in opposite directions — your plant and your path don’t agree on where the target line is. That’s why the fix for both lives in the same drill below.
The drill that fixes both: the corridor
You need a narrow corridor, and the easiest way to build one is a couple of training cones set about four yards apart on the target line, ten yards out. Every kick must fly through the corridor before it reaches the goal.
- Set the corridor dead straight at your target from 25 yards. Hit ten kicks. Count how many pass through.
- If most misses start outside the corridor, your problem is the start line: plant spot, stance, or aim. Fix geometry first.
- If most misses start inside the corridor and curve out, your swing path is the culprit — now you’re working on shape, not aim.
- Narrow the corridor a yard once you’re passing 8 of 10. Tight windows teach tighter swings.
This is the drill I demo in the video below, and it’s the one I’d keep if I could only keep one accuracy drill.
When it’s not your mechanics
Before you rebuild your swing, rule out the three freeloaders that cause pushes and pulls without your leg doing anything wrong:
- The hold. A ball leaning the wrong way changes your contact geometry on every kick. Compare your flights off a tee versus with a holder — if they differ, the hold is a suspect.
- Wind. A 15 mph crosswind moves a ball several feet over 40 yards. Read the flags before you blame the swing.
- Panic steps. Rushed approaches in games produce rushed, crooked plants. If your misses only happen late in close games, that’s a timing and nerves issue, not a mechanics one.
Sometimes the fix is smaller than you think. I keep a shortlist of these in a quick fix for better accuracy on field goals — worth ten minutes before you touch your plant foot.
How to practice the fix
One adjustment at a time, and give it a real sample size. Change your plant width and take 30 kicks across two sessions before you judge it. Kickers abandon good fixes after eight reps because the ball didn’t behave immediately — then stack three “fixes” in a week and end up worse than they started. If the flight pattern doesn’t move after two sessions, the diagnosis was wrong. Re-read the flight, not your feelings.
Aiming discipline matters here too, because a corrected swing needs a precise target to prove itself against. Vague targets can’t tell you whether your fix worked.
Your homework
Chart ten kicks this week. For each one, write start line, curve, and where it crossed. You’ll have a diagnosis in one session. Then run the corridor drill until the start line is boring, and go deeper on the shape of your flight with my post on how to stop curving your field goals. The full kick, in order, lives in my ball contact breakdown when you’re ready for it — and if you want a library of more drills like the corridor, I’ve collected them in these kicking drills.
