Kicking Tryouts in High School: What Coaches Look For Beyond Distance

Tryout week doesn’t measure your best kick. It measures your worst, and how fast you bounce back from it. Coaches watch two hundred kicks over five days, and the kickers who make rosters are rarely the ones with the biggest legs — they’re the ones whose bad kicks look like flukes instead of patterns. If you’re walking into high school tryouts, here’s what’s actually on the evaluation sheet, because it is not what most kids think.

What Coaches Chart (And What They Ignore)

Your head coach is building a special teams unit, not collecting highlight plays. On a real tryout sheet, here’s what gets written down:

• Operation speed. Snap to kick, even informally. A kicker who rushes the hold or stalls the count is a risk a coach can’t fix in a game week.
• Make windows. Not “how far can you go” but “from where are you automatic?” A kicker who’s 9-of-10 from 30 looks more useful than a 55-yarder who’s 3-of-10 from 40.
• Consistency across the session. Day one versus day five. Coaches are hunting for a swing that doesn’t drift — the same steps, the same flight, over and over.
• Bounce-back. What happens after your first miss. Do you reset, or does the next three kicks follow the miss downhill? This one is remembered more than any make.
• Ball security. Kickoffs that stay in bounds, punts that don’t shank. The uncontrollable-chaos rate matters more than the ceiling.

Notice what’s missing: your fifty-yard warm-up bomb. Coaches have seen it, discounted it, and moved on. Distance is a development story; windows and operation are a week-one story, and tryouts exist to answer the week-one question.

Distance Isn’t the Bar — Range You Can Trust Is

Every tryout has a kid who launches one from 50 in warm-ups and then sprays the charted kicks. Coaches have seen this movie. What they want is a “realistic window” you can be trusted inside: the distance where you make eight or more out of ten under any conditions. Know your window before you walk in, and volunteer it honestly. Saying “I’m reliable to 40, and here’s my chart” sounds better than any boast, because it’s the answer a coach can build a game plan around.

Coachability: The Unlisted Criterion

Here’s the part that quietly decides close battles. When a coach gives you a correction mid-tryout — shorter steps, higher tee, whatever — what happens next? The kickers who nod, adjust, and show the change on the next rep get remembered. The kickers who keep kicking their way, or argue, or look lost, don’t. You’re not being evaluated only on kicks. You’re being evaluated on whether you’re coachable, because the coach already knows he’ll need to fix things mid-season, and he’s watching for someone who can take a cue and apply it within three reps.

Practical move: when you get a correction, say it back in one sentence — “so plant closer to the ball” — then execute it. That loop takes ten seconds and it’s the strongest coachability signal you can send.

Bring Film, Not Promises

Most kids show up to tryouts with nothing. You can walk in with a file. A short film cut — operation speed from the side, five or six makes from different hashes, one pressure-rep clip — does two jobs at once. It shows the coach your technique when he isn’t standing behind you, and it signals that you treat kicking like a craft. The formatting that makes coaches actually watch lives in my guide to structuring a highlight reel as an athlete, and the recruiting principles behind it are in my recruiting tips for athletes. A thirty-second film and a printed chart of your own kicks separate you from ninety percent of the room before the first ball is snapped.

The Week-of Plan

Don’t build a new swing in tryout week. Taper instead:

1. Five days out: full practice, medium volume, confirm your step count.
2. Three days out: short, sharp session — operation reps with a holder, chart ten kicks inside your realistic window.
3. Two days out: light. Warm-up, a dozen contact kicks, done. Fresh legs beat confident legs.
4. Night before: visualize the field, the hashes, the operation. No film-study marathons.
5. Tryout day: your normal pre-kick routine, executed identically every rep. The routine is your portable home field.

If you want the longer version of that week, including what coaches evaluate and how to handle nerves in front of a staff, my full tryout week guide walks through day by day.

Handling the Miss You Will Probably Have

Plan for one bad rep, because statistically it’s coming, and how you spend the ten seconds after it is the most informative thing you’ll show the coaches all week. Here’s the reset: one breath, one physical cue (tap your plant-side thigh, or squeeze your ball), one sentence to yourself about the next kick only — never the miss. That’s the whole protocol, and it’s the same one that gets kickers through the day after a big miss, which I’ve written up in kicking one field goal at a time. A visible reset routine in tryout week tells the staff you’re game-ready, because games are just tryouts where the misses cost more.

Your move now: put together that chart and film before day one. Kickers who walk in with evidence walk out with jobs. And once you’ve made the roster, keep the same discipline going — chart your season the way you charted tryout week, because the kid who tracks his kicks in September is the one kicking field goals in November.