When you are a boy in Australia, you punt.
On a peewee football team in the United States, perhaps one or two kids are trained as punters. But all 18 players on an Australian rules football team have to be able to punt on the run, from a variety of angles and distances.
“All growing up I was kicking the ball in the park,” said Tom Hackett, a native of Australia. “If you can’t kick, you’re not going to make it very far.”
Hackett, like many of his young countrymen, had the dream of being an Australian rules football player. But, “I didn’t grow as much as I would have liked — I’m 5-11 3/4 — and the drinking age was 18 in Australia. That might not have helped me lose weight and run fast,” he said with a laugh. So Aussie rules, which requires almost continuous running for four 20-minute quarters, was out.
But Hackett could still punt.
So he turned to U.S. football. He joined Prokick, an academy in Melbourne, Australia, that seeks to turn Australians into American football punters. Now a 23-year-old senior at Utah, Hackett won last year’s Ray Guy Award as college’s punter of the year.
He is part of a growing number of college players who got their start in Aussie rules before becoming punters in the United States.
Michigan’s Blake O’Neill, an Australian punter, got unwanted attention last week when he muffed a snap leading to a last-second loss to Michigan State. (He blamed the error in part on his instincts from Australian rules: “I tried to sort of kick it over my head, and that didn’t work out,” he said this week.) But in the same game, O’Neill boomed an 80-yard punt that landed inside the 1-yard line.
Nick Porebski started playing Australian rules football at 9 in Melbourne, but was set back by injuries and spent six months learning American punting at Prokick as a 20-year-old. Now, at 23, he is the starter at Oregon State. Just a few years ago, “trying to pull the jersey over the pads was difficult,” he said.
Other starting NCAA punters with Australian rules backgrounds include Cameron Johnston of No. 1 Ohio State, Jamie Keehn of LSU and Michael Dickson of Texas, who also had an unwelcome moment in the spotlight this season when he bobbled a late snap leading to a loss to Oklahoma State last month.
But there has been more success than failure among the Aussie rules graduates in recent years. The year before Hackett won the Ray Guy Award, it was won by another Australian, Tom Hornsey of Memphis.
In Australians among the pros, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Jordan Berry, has the season’s longest punt, at 79 yards, while the New York Giants’ Brad Wing is in the top 10 in punting yards. They are following in the footsteps of NFL punters Darren Bennett — who paved the way for his countrymen by playing from 1994 to 2005 for the San Diego Chargers and the Minnesota Vikings — Mat McBriar, Ben Graham and Sav Rocca.
American football is growing in popularity in Australia, both because of the increasing number of Aussie punters playing in the U.S. and the arrival in the NFL of Jarryd Hayne, a San Francisco 49ers running back with a rugby league background. “It’s really taking off,” Porebski said.
But the country’s most popular league sport is still Australian rules, whose 30,000-plus average attendance rivals the world’s biggest soccer leagues.
It is a free-flowing, physical game in which players try to move the ball down a field significantly larger than a football gridiron. The ball can be advanced by running with an occasional dribble, passing with an open-hand tap or, most importantly, punting it. Goals can be scored only by the foot.
For Hackett, the hardest transition to the American game was hitting the big punt that he describes as “the traditional American spiral-torpedo thing.” Aussie rules players tend to kick their ball, which is 30 percent bigger in circumference than an American football, end over end.
“The rest is Australian Rules Football 101,” he said.
Another adjustment was the equipment. Aussie rules players wear shorts, sleeveless T-shirts and not much else. In U.S. football, even the punter’s limited padding is a sharp contrast.
A helmet “is still a little uncomfortable to this day,” Hackett said.
Porebski said he was concerned that the face mask on his U.S. football helmet could affect his peripheral vision.
Porebski also said he found that punting off just two steps in American football was tricky to learn. “In Aussie rules, you’re always kicking on the run,” he said.
Australian rules players also kick across their bodies rather than straight ahead, because they can be tackled from any direction.
Hackett and Porebski say Australian punters have a signature style that makes them easy for a connoisseur to spot.
“The way we roll out and the way we drop the ball,” Porebski said. With an American, “it doesn’t look as natural.”
It all starts in the parks in Melbourne, where natural punters are born.
