Kicking Camps vs Private Lessons: Where Your Money Actually Helps

Families spend real money on kicking every winter, and most of them spend it without a clear idea of what each option is actually good at. A camp and a private lesson are different tools with different jobs — buy the wrong one for your situation and you’ll leave with a great experience and no progress.

Disclosure: this post contains affiliate links and product mentions. Buying through them may earn me a commission at no extra cost to you, and it keeps this site publishing. I only recommend what I’d tell a teammate or my own family to buy.

Let me be clear about my position up front: I coach kickers one-on-one, so read this with that filter on. But the honest answer to “camps or lessons?” is that they do different jobs, the best developmental path usually uses both in the right order, and the worst answer is the one that assumes more money always means more progress.

What a Camp Does Well

A camp puts you in a field with dozens of other kickers and a staff watching every rep. That environment produces things solo practice can’t:

• Competition. You chart kicks next to other specialists, with a leaderboard and consequences. Most kickers have never kicked under that kind of pressure until they walk into a camp — which is exactly the pressure a Friday night game delivers.
• Calibration. You find out, quickly and honestly, where you stand. Not against your teammates, but against the other kickers in your region and recruiting class.
• Volume of feedback. Different coaches see different things. One coach’s one cue might unlock what three months of guessing didn’t.
• Exposure, at the right camps. At camps with college staff or respected instructors, someone watching matters. Not every camp is an exposure camp, though — a lot of them are just instruction with a T-shirt.
• Operation reps. Many camps provide snappers and holders. If your high school program can’t give you a real operation, this is where you get it.

What camps don’t do well: fix a specific technical problem in depth. A coach seeing forty kickers a day has minutes, not hours, for your individual swing. You’ll leave with a diagnosis and a drill, not a rebuilt kick.

What Private Lessons Do Well

A private lesson is the opposite trade. You get depth instead of breadth:

• Your swing, specifically. One coach, one kicker, one problem at a time, with film to prove the changes.
• Continuity. The same eyes on your technique across weeks, which is how real change gets installed instead of just noticed.
• Honesty in private. Some truths about your ceiling, your habits and your recruiting reality land better one-on-one than in front of a crowd.
• Homework that compounds. A good coach assigns drills you run between sessions, then checks them. That loop is where actual development happens.

What lessons don’t do well: show you where you stand against the field. No private coach can replicate the calibration of being charted next to thirty other kickers your age.

The Cost Picture, Without Fake Numbers

Prices vary by region and level, so I won’t quote figures that may be wrong by the time you read this. But the structure of the math matters more than the numbers:

• A camp is a one-time event cost — you pay once and get a concentrated dose of reps, feedback and exposure.
• Lessons are recurring — the real cost is the total of a season of them, not the price of one.
• The useful comparison is value per hour of individual attention, and lessons win that comparison almost every time.
• The useful comparison for recruiting value is exposure per dollar, and the right camps win that one.

So the question isn’t “which is cheaper” — it’s “what am I buying?” If you need correction, buy depth. If you need calibration and exposure, buy the event. Confusing the two is how families spend camp money on a problem a lesson would have fixed for a fraction of it.

How to Evaluate a Kicking Coach

Before you hand anyone money — camp director or private instructor — run this list.

Green flags:

• They ask to see your film before they promise you anything
• They chart your kicks with real numbers instead of eyeballing
• They explain the why behind a fix, not just the cue
• They give you homework and check on it
• They tell you when something won’t work for your body

Red flags:

• Guaranteed results, yardage promises, or “I’ll get you recruited” talk
• No film review — ever — at any level of coaching, this is the core skill
• One-size-fits-all mechanics taught to every kicker identically
• More hype than instruction, and a sales pitch before a first session

Coaching comes in more flavors than most families realize — our breakdown of the types of kicking coaches maps the landscape, because “coach” means several different jobs in this niche.

This video is the honest version of what finding the right help looks like:

When to Do Both

The strongest plan I’ve seen families run, in order:

1. Winter: private lessons to fix the two or three things your season film exposed
2. Late spring: one or two camps, chosen for competition and calibration — you go to find out where you stand and collect film against real pressure
3. Summer: back to lessons to fix what the camp exposed

Camp as diagnosis, lessons as treatment. Run it that way and every dollar is doing a job.

The Cheap Tier Nobody Mentions

There’s a middle option that costs almost nothing and gets skipped: structured self-coaching. A phone on a tripod, a charting sheet, and a book that explains the technique in order. My Art of Kicking book was written for exactly that kicker — the same material lives in the ebook edition on Gumroad, where code KOE takes 10% off. It won’t replace eyes on your film, but for the price of a camp T-shirt it gives you a curriculum instead of vibes.

And when you’re ready for real eyes on your film — that’s the core of what coaching actually is:

Where This Leaves Your Decision

If you’re deciding whether a coach is worth it at all, start with our post on whether you should consider a kicking coach — it walks through the questions that matter before the money leaves your account.

Here’s my honest recommendation. If your film shows specific fixable problems and you’re driven enough to run homework between sessions: lessons, and run them consistently. If you have no idea where you stand and recruiting is real in your future: a well-chosen camp this winter. If you have the budget for both: lessons through the winter, one camp in late spring, and film from that camp back to your coach for the summer plan.

And if you want to find out what a focused session on your own film is worth before committing to either — I do exactly that. Book a coaching session, send your film, and we’ll figure out together whether you need a coach, a camp, or just a better plan.

One last thing for the families in the middle of the recruiting process: whichever path you choose, the film and the follow-up matter more than the logo on the camp shirt. Our recruiting tips for athletes covers how the exposure you collect actually gets used.