Spring spotlight: Onside kick practice

WINSTON-SALEM – There’s a cadence to the start of every football practice at Wake Forest; a routine that can make them all look the same.

It’s an easy-going process. The first time the offense is together on one end, the defense on the other, is a walk-through. That’s Period 0 on the scoreboard, and when the horn blows, it’s one of several possible moments you could say practice officially begins.

Period 1 is a special teams segment. On one of the practice fields, returners practice fielding kickoffs and/or punts, some of them by kickers, others out of a JUGS machine.

On the other field, punter Ivan Mora and kicker Ben Morgan take turns line-driving kicks at teammates from 10 yards away.

OK, maybe not quite that dramatic. But onside kick practice is never boring for those participating (or watching from afar).

“If I want to give this guy a little bit more work, I’ll give a shorter, softer kick to him,” Mora told Deacons Illustrated after Thursday morning’s practice. “But then other times, I’m just like, ‘OK, I’ma get him.’ Since they’re rotating in, I’ll give them an easier one last time, I’m about to make a fool out of him this time.

“I just try to have fun with them, too.”

Onside kicks can be the most consequential of plays and look like the simplest, shortest, most mundane of plays.

They only wind up looking like that because of periods like this one, repped over and over again. Learning how to judge and react to the bounces of an oblong object takes time and so many reps.

To dig into the iron-sharpens-iron part of this, we see kickers both attempting to perfect the art of the onside kick and teammates making split-second decisions on them.

This is why we focus on this part of Wake’s practice. It’s Mora on one hashmark, Morgan on the other, taking turns kicking at a trio of players — usually some combination of receivers, tight ends, linebackers and defensive backs.

There isn’t a cover team; the work comes in the form of learning how to execute the kick and how to field them clean.

“I think it’s definitely more toward getting the returners some work, so we try to be more random with how we’re kicking,” Morgan said. “It’s definitely fun. Ivan and I definitely enjoy it. … Because, like you said, sometimes we do just like, nail it at them.”

Mora and Mora might both wind up with double-digit onside attempts during this part of practice.

Wake Forest attempted two onside kicks last season and faced one onside kick by an opponent.

Mastering this seldom-used play requires so much unseen work. On Thursday morning, Morgan’s kicks had a little more zip than Mora’s.

“I did see Ivan, it looked pretty easy on the other side. Ben was giving us some work,” wide receiver Horatio Fields said. “He cooked me one time, a ball flew over my head. I fair-catched it so late because I didn’t know what to do.

“I knew it was going to be a hard bounce, but it went and got me. I was ready to get the ball, but I probably wouldn’t have gotten up after that.”

But that’s the idea. If the kickers make it too easy, it’s not challenging, and the frontline of Wake’s hands team aren’t adequately prepared to recover kicks.

When recovering an onside kick can be the difference in securing a win and keeping an opponent alive, you want your team as prepared as possible.

“When we’re in special teams meetings and when we’re game planning for other teams, we’ll look at the guys on the front line and identify who’s their weak point, who we can attack,” Morgan said. “And so, we’re also just trying to make sure that we don’t have a weak point and that we can attack them.”

They sometimes get instructions from coaches.

Wayne Lineburg is Wake’s special teams coordinator, but each special teams unit has an assigned coach. That’s why it’s safeties coach James Adams and running backs coach John Hunter taking charge of this drill.

“Coach Adams, he tells Ben, and then Coach Hunt, he does (me) sometimes,” Mora said. “He even gives me signals to give them a short one, soft to the front guy. And then he’ll tell me to do a one-hop high one so they can do a fair catch. Coach Hunt tries to have fun with it, too.”

Everything about a football practice is a zero-sum operation. When Hank Bachmeier throws an interception — two of them, safeties Evan Slocum and Rushaun Tongue on the receiving end, on Thursday — it’s equally encouraging and discouraging.

Onside kick practice is such a polarization of the zero-sum factor.

If Mora or Morgan is in a game attempting an onside kick, Wake Forest needs the ball back or it’s going to lose. If Fields or somebody else on the recovery team catches the ball cleanly, it most likely means Wake Forest has won a game.

“Obviously, it’s not easy fielding an onside kick,” Mora said. “With the football being such a weird shape, you don’t know if it’s sometimes going to take a bounce early or end up going a little later.”

So, there’s sympathy. Just not empathy.

“It’s certainly tough, but since we’re the ones kicking the ball, we just take joy out of watching them try to catch the ball,” Mora continued with a chuckle.

It does, at times, lead to some awkward glances.

“Ivan and I will get a lot of bad looks after the first period sometimes,” Morgan said.

Does he give them a break in the next practice?

“No, you can’t be easy on them,” he said.

If you find a college kicker or punter who does *not* have some sort of high-level soccer in their background, you’ve found a rare player.

Mora and Morgan were both all-state soccer players in high school.

A lot of what goes into kicking field goals and PATs, and punting, is the same. The differences in punting usually come for players who have a different sport — Australian rules football or rugby — and when you boil down the fundamentals, it’s a lot of the same thing.

“Everything else, placekicking and kickoffs, there’s a lot of technique,” Morgan said. “There are similarities to soccer in kicking in general, but pretty much there’s a standard technique that’s specific to kicking.”

The one area where kickers get to show creativity is right here, in the first period of Wake’s practices, and it’ll rarely ever happen in games.

“Onsides, you can be a little more creative, go back to your roots more,” Morgan said. “That’s another fun aspect is Ivan and I were both good soccer players in high school, so it’s fun for us to not just do the same kick every time, be a little more creative.”

That’s why you see some onside kick attempts that bounce a time or two low, and then pop into the air. Some onside attempts have the ball laying horizontally, some don’t even use a tee.

This is the arena where football kickers become, for brief moments, soccer players again.

And where a couple of Wake’s kickers enjoy themselves during the dog days of spring.