How to Get More Height on Your Field Goals (Without Losing Distance)

Your distance is fine. Your trajectory is the problem. The ball flies flat, gets batted down at the line, and every gust turns your 45 into a 35. I wrote a short version of this a while back — how to get more height on field goals — and it’s still a good quick read. This is the full build: every lever that controls launch, in the order you should pull them.

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First, the counterintuitive part. Height is not something you kick “up into.” You don’t scoop the ball with your toes or lean back like you’re hitting a driver. Height is the natural result of three specific things done right, and when you chase it with hacks you usually lose distance in the process.

The three levers that create height

1. Where you hit the ball

Clean field goals are struck slightly below the ball’s equator, through the lower-middle panel, with a locked ankle. That single detail is most of your launch angle. Hit the equator dead-on and the ball flies flat. Strike too low with an open, floppy foot and you get wobble instead of lift.

The key is that contact stays bone-on-ball. Toes down, ankle locked, and the hard ridge on the top-inside of your foot drives through the lower half of the ball. If you’ve never felt that exact spot, that’s the first rep of your next session — not a fix, just a feeling to hunt for.

2. Your swing plane

The leg has to be traveling up through contact, not level with the ground. That comes mostly from the plant. If your plant foot sits slightly behind the ball and your hips stay tall, the swing rises through the strike naturally. Kickers who plant level with or ahead of the ball tend to hit through the equator and drive flat line drives.

Same reason a low approach hurts you: a heavy, flat-footed plant keeps your chest down and your swing path low. Land soft, stay tall, swing up.

3. The lean at the hold

The ball isn’t kicked standing straight up. Your holder tips it slightly back, and that angle is part of your launch. A ball leaning a touch toward the target presents the lower sweet spot to your swing and helps the ball climb. If your holder spots the ball dead vertical or leans it away from the posts, you’re fighting a tilted setup on every kick.

That’s a conversation with your holder, not a technique fix on your end. Bring it up calmly, show them the flight, and get the lean consistent before you change anything else.

The height-distance tradeoff, handled honestly

Here’s where kickers overcorrect. They chase apex, start scooping the ball, and their carry drops off a cliff. You don’t need 50-yard height on a 35-yard kick. You need enough launch to clear the line and your defender’s reach with margin, and you want the ball arriving on its way down at the uprights — not gliding in flat, not floating so long that the wind owns it.

A useful rule: if your kicks from 35 in are getting blocked or batted, add height. If your kicks from 45 are landing five yards short and floating, you’ve traded too much. The fix for the first is contact point and lean. The fix for the second is usually stopping the scoop and getting back to bone contact.

Tee height is a legal cheat code — until it isn’t

If your league allows tees on field goals, use that. A taller tee — a 2-inch kicking tee like these — raises the ball and shortens the distance your swing has to travel upward, which makes clean high contact much easier for developing kickers. Moving down to a 1-inch tee and then to the ground is a progression, not a prize to rush.

Every time you drop tee height, expect a few weeks of adjustment while your contact point recalibrates. Don’t make that move in October.

Drills that build height without stealing distance

• The window drill. Set up a low obstacle — a hurdle, a rope between two cones — about five yards in front of the ball, at knee height. Every kick must pass over it and still reach the uprights. This teaches an upward strike with a real target behind it.
• Half-speed height reps. From 15 yards, swing at 70% and focus only on striking the lower half of the ball clean. You’re training the contact point, not power.
• Flight charting. Ten kicks from one spot. Mark where each one crosses the uprights — low, middle, high. Most kickers discover they’re consistently two feet lower than they think.
• Arm check. A collapsed chest kills launch, and your arms are what keep your chest tall. My post on using your arms to kick better covers that side of it.

The order to work on this

Do not try to fix contact point, swing plane, lean and tee in the same week. Contact point first — it’s the lever with the biggest effect and the fastest feedback. Then hold lean. Then, only if you’re still flat, look at your plant and your chest height.

All of this sits inside the bigger kick, obviously. If you’re rebuilding from scratch, work through the complete field goal guide and slot height work into the contact section. Height is a detail, not a separate sport — and once your flight stops being a line drive, you’ll wonder why you waited.