Most kickers lose field goals in the dead time, not in the swing. The forty seconds between the previous play whistling dead and your field goal unit breaking the huddle — that’s where the kick actually gets decided. Spend that window staring at the uprights and hoping, and you’re not preparing. You’re rehearsing anxiety.
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The fix isn’t more positivity. It’s a routine short enough that you’ll actually run it every single time. Mine is three breaths, one picture, one word. Once it’s wired in, it travels with you from a Tuesday practice rep to a tie game with eleven seconds left.
Why the Dead Time Decides More Than Your Swing
Watch a high school kicker between kicks and you’ll see one of two things. Either he’s locked onto the goal posts running a highlight reel of everything that could go wrong, or he’s chatting with the guard next to him like it’s a water break. Both are untrained responses, and both cost kicks.
The first kicker is rehearsing misses. A vivid mental replay of a bad kick is a rep — just a rep for the wrong outcome. The second kicker has no lane at all, so when the moment arrives his brain grabs whatever is loudest, and what’s loudest is usually the scoreboard.
A routine fixes both at once by giving your mind one job, in order, every time. That’s what consistency under pressure really is: not a calm feeling, but a fixed sequence you can run while your stomach is doing somersaults. I go deeper on the thinking side in my post on what to think about when kicking field goals — the short version is you get one job, not three.
The 3-Breath Reset, Step by Step
Here’s the whole protocol. It takes about twenty seconds, it works between punts as well as field goals, and nobody on the other side of the ball can even see you doing it.
- Breath one — the body. In through the nose for four counts, out through the mouth for six. The long exhale is the whole trick; it’s the fastest lever you have on your own heart rate. Drop the shoulders on that exhale and let your plant leg soften.
- Breath two — the picture. Eyes soft or closed, run the exact kick you’re about to take: ball spot, aim line, ball flight — with today’s details in it. The wind, the hash, the hold. One rep, full speed, in your head.
- Breath three — the word. One cue on the exhale. Then open your eyes and walk in. Nothing else gets a vote now.
Three breaths isn’t magic. It’s just long enough to interrupt the spiral and short enough to survive a punt team sprinting off the field. If the breathing itself feels awkward at first, steal the rhythm from my quick breathing exercise — the tempo matters more than the count.
Picking a Cue Word That Actually Does Something
Cue words fail when they’re wishes. “Make it” is a wish. A good cue points at a feeling in your body, not an outcome on the scoreboard:
- “Through” — for the kicker who stabs at the ball and quits on the swing.
- “Low” — for the approach that gets tall and hurried when the crowd gets loud.
- “Smooth” — for timing that turns choppy under pressure.
- “Plant” — for eyes that drift to the ball instead of the plant spot.
Test two or three in practice, keep one, and don’t rotate it mid-season. A cue works because it’s boring and familiar, not because it’s clever.
Mental Rehearsal Is Not Daydreaming
There’s a difference between visualizing and fantasizing, and it’s specificity. A useful rep includes the operation and the conditions, not just a ball floating through a blue sky. Where’s the ball? Which hash? Is the wind pushing your aim line left? How fast is snap-to-kick running today?
Then make the reps honest. If your home field funnels a crosswind from the right, rehearse the correction, not the fantasy. Picture a slightly bad snap and your reset. Picture the gust and the low drive you’d hit into it. You’re building a library, and pressure has a way of handing you whatever you filed away.
When the Routine Gets Blown Up
At some point a coordinator will ice you, a penalty will stretch the dead time to two minutes, or the chain crew will park a truck in your sight line. The reset doesn’t prevent any of that. It survives it. If the window grows, run the sequence again — breaths four, five and six are free. The routine is your home base, and a timeout is just a longer walk back to it. I broke down that whole timeout game in my piece on handling getting iced, because the routine matters more than the kick for exactly this reason.
Rep It Like a Technique, Not a Feeling
Most kickers drill the swing all week and freeload on the mental side. Flip that this season:
- Every practice kick gets one reset. Walk in behind the ball, three breaths, then kick. No skipping on the easy reps — the easy reps are where the habit gets built.
- Log the word. After each rep, write down make or miss plus the cue you used. Two weeks of that shows you which cue actually travels to game day and which one stays home.
- Train the break. Once a week, have a teammate whistle right as you start your approach, then run the full reset and kick again. You’re building recovery, not just execution.
- Slot it into a bigger structure. The reset is the between-kicks layer. The full frame — how you walk in, where your eyes go, what you touch last — lives in my guide to finding a pre-kick routine that works for you.
One honest warning before you go: the reset only holds if the technique underneath it is sound. A routine can’t rescue a swing that changes shape every week — it can only make a good swing repeatable. If you’re not sure which one you have, that’s exactly what I look at in one-on-one coaching: film your operation, fix what’s leaking, then build the between-kicks routine around your actual kick.
And if you’d rather work through the whole mental framework on your own schedule, my book covers it end to end: The Art of Kicking — code KOE takes 10% off.
Three breaths, one picture, one word. Run it on every rep this week, then tell me the next kick doesn’t feel different.
