By DAVE O’SULLIVAN Publisher Being a placekicker is a lonesome existence. You spend the majority of football practice off on some side field, booting balls through the upright and looking longingly at the rest of the team, as if you were the one kid who didn’t get picked for the dodgeball game during 5th-grade recess. And if you miss a kick in a big game, well, it’s tough to find a comforting shoulder pad on the sideline. So you spend your days booting balls on that side field and dreaming about that moment, under the Friday night lights, when you blast a game-winning 45-yard field goal and leap into the arms of some burly lineman as the crowd goes wild. Although placekicking still is a very lonesome endeavor, increasingly it has become a much more valued position at the high school level. Back in the old days, it was just some kid with a strong leg, maybe grab some kid off the soccer team, give him the jersey No. 2, forget about him all week and make sure he is in uniform on Friday night. These days, however, like just about any other position in any sport, placekicking has become extremely specialized and, more and more, coaches are putting a high priority on finding a player who can at least master the extra point and occasionally hit a 25- or 30-yard field goal. When you think about it, placekicking can determine the outcome of the game even from the first quarter. Suppose you are down 7-0 and score a touchdown. You don’t have a reliable placekicker and go for the two-point conversion. If you fail, now you are down 7-6. If you fail again on your next score, now you are up 12-7, and if the opposing team with a solid kicker scores again, you’re down 14-12 when the score should be tied. If you keep trading scores you could be down by as many as six points in the fourth quarter of a game that should be tied. That’s where a team such as Mainland Regional has a distinct advantage. Junior Mike Juliano, although he has only two field goals to his credit as a varsity player, is one of the more capable and consistent placekickers in the Cape-Atlantic League. A swimmer and baseball player in the other two sporting seasons of the year, Juliano is sort of a new breed of high school kicker. A 3-sport athlete and honors student who is willing to put in the time and effort it takes to study his craft and master it to the point where it could be a ticket to a college scholarship. He’s athletic enough to play in the defensive backfield, but a nagging shoulder injury will prevent him from doing that this year. So he is putting all his focus into his job as placekicker, and has been working with kicking guru Jim Cooper for the past three years. Cooper’s son, Jim, was an accomplished placekicker at Mainland Regional and now kicks at Temple University. 
Mainland Regional junior Mike Juliano epitomizes the new breed of high school placekickers. He is a 3-sport athlete who also does extensive training with a personal kicking coach, Jim Cooper, who has been training kickers for three decades and now works with Rowan University’s kickers. (Glory Days Magazine photo/Dave O’Sullivan) “The kicking game is everything. We’ve won so many big games because of the kicking game and we work very hard on it. I’ve been lucky enough to have Jim Cooper for more than 20 years now, he’s been with us all along and he’s always grooming these young kids,” said Mustangs coach Bob Coffey. “We’ve always believed that kicking can make a big difference between winning and losing.” “Kickers now are so athletic. When you go back 15, 20, 30 years, you look at those kickers and they had a gut, they were out of shape. A lot of times the kicker was a guy who couldn’t play another position. Sure, they had a strong leg but physically they weren’t athletic and strong,” Cooper said. “Mike is an all-star swimmer, he plays baseball. He doesn’t really think of himself as a kicker, he thinks of himself as a football player. He could play multiple positions. Kickers now are athletes. They pitch in baseball, they are on the basketball team. That’s the path kickers are taking now. It’s like a new breed of athlete.” Juliano’s skills were on display early in the season last year, when just before halftime in a lightning-shortened win over Pleasantville he blasted a 44-yard field goal, just three yards short of the school record. This preseason he has routinely been hitting from 50-plus yards, and Cooper believes Juliano has the leg strength and technique to hit a 55-yard field goal if the situation presented itself. “He’s a very humble kid. He’s not one to talk about himself. We were out here one day and he dropped three in a row from 60 yards about a foot short. I said, ‘Mike, everything you are doing is technically perfect.’ From 60 yards out most guys whack the ball and it’s a knuckleball left, but I taught him to stay within his mechanics and know what his range is. Nobody is going to be impressed if you miss a 40-yarder and it’s 20 yards left. People might think, oh, he’s got a strong leg but he can’t kick straight,” Cooper said. Cooper said there are a lot of misconceptions about kickers. He said a lot of people think if you just get in the weight room and blast out a bunch of squats you can be a good kicker. But with more than 30 years of experience teaching kickers, Cooper knows that couldn’t be further from the truth. He said it’s all about technique. To that end, he carries his iPad everywhere and said he shoots 50-75 videos during each lesson with the more than dozen kickers he trains throughout South Jersey and Delaware. Technology has really fine-tuned the kicking game, he said, and being able to show a kid exactly what he is doing wrong 10 seconds after he attempts a kick is a tremendous learning tool. “A guy who can run a fast 40, those fast-twitch muscles, usually he can kick a football. Kicking a football is about explosive energy. It’s not about getting in the weight room and doing squats with 500 pounds. It’s about being explosive and having real clean, proper technique, and that’s what Mike has. He’ll pump them through from 50 yards out and it looks effortless because his plant foot is perfect, his toe is locked down and open, and he just kind of glides effortlessly through the ball,” Cooper said. “I’m addicted to my iPad. When I work with kickers I’ll shoot anywhere from 50 to 75 videos during a lesson. I’ll call the kid over and say, ‘let’s take a look at why you missed that kick wide left.’ I’ll put it in slow motion back and forth. “That is huge because you can correct something instantly. It’s a huge learning tool. You look at the statistics of kickers now as opposed to 20 years ago and what’s different? Technology. Years ago, guys would go into a slump. For weeks a guy has been missing kicks to the right. Now, I can zoom in on a player’s plant foot and I can tell if he’s a quarter inch off. The plant foot tells the body where square is and where you want to kick the ball. If the plant foot is off, chances are the kick is going to be off. I can make instantaneous changes right there on the field. Video doesn’t lie, and literally 10 seconds after I take the video they are standing there watching it. Video has transformed the athlete to the next level. The learning and the detailed analysis is amazing.” Said Juliano, “It’s an extremely in-depth analysis of what we are doing wrong, what we are doing right. You can really break it down frame-by-frame and evaluate what’s going on in the process of the kick.” Still, with all the technology available and all the coaching a high school kicker can receive, it still comes down to the mental makeup of the athlete. Can he perform under pressure? Is he able to block everything out and
take his concentration to the next level? “There’s a huge mental aspect to it. Most people think it’s pretty simple, just kicking a football through two posts. But you have to be confident in yourself, you can’t psyche yourself out. You just have to trust in your technique and your fundamentals and believe that you’ll make it,” Juliano said. “It’s hard to explain unless you are in that situation. Your heart is pumping, you have the crowd cheering and you’re trying to impress everyone. I take my steps back and kind of just take a deep breath and think about what I have to do and try to zone everything else out. I pick out a target behind the goalpost and try to kick toward that.” “He’ll just go out there with ice water in his veins. He doesn’t put pressure on himself. He just has that real easygoing nature. When he was a freshman, I told coach Coffey to get his feet wet because Jim was going to be graduating, and he’d go out there and crush extra points and kickoffs like he had been doing it his whole life,” Cooper said. “Mentally, you have to have very thick skin. You have to be able to block things out, and if you miss a kick or shank one you better be prepared for the boos and the coach screaming in your face. But you have to be able to put that behind you and prepare for the next kick. “Some kids have it and some kids don’t. I can usually tell by the third or fourth lesson what a kid is made of and how much effort they are going to put in. It’s not all about going out and kicking a hundred balls a day. It’s about the right mechanics. You can grab a kid off the soccer team, give him a bag of footballs and say, ‘go kick.’ And he’s going to kick 100 balls a day, but if he doesn’t have the right mechanics those bad mechanics are going to build bad muscle memory. The muscle memory that is bad is going to dictate his kicks. If you practice perfect mechanics you’ll perform perfectly.” Cooper said that Juliano’s improvement since his freshman year has been off the charts, and Cooper is beginning to move Juliano down to smaller tees to prepare him for the next level, which Cooper believes will be a Division I offer from somebody. “It’s been massive. Huge, huge improvement. He’s a coach’s dream. He follows everything I say like gospel. He’s very intelligent, does very well in school. When you are dealing with a kid who is highly athletic and has the intelligence that Mike does, when you tell him to do something he can perceive it and work at it right away. You tell him and he picks it right up,” Cooper said. “Mike is absolutely Division I potential. The thing with the kickers nowadays, depending on who their coach is, a lot of them don’t get the opportunity to strut their stuff. So there are a lot of different camps and things that kids participate in. He had a couple field goals last year, so his name is out there. I have some things with Mike that we can market, like the 44-yarder he kicked last year,” Cooper added. “We’ve moved him down from the 2-inch tee to the 1-inch tee, which moves him closer to the ground, where they kick from in college. So it’s things like that you can use to market a kid’s abilities. By the time a kid is a senior I like them to be kicking off the ground because it gives college recruiters a great insight.” Cooper also constructed a goalpost at Mainland that is just 12 feet wide to force Juliano to kick the ball straight down the middle. There isn’t much room for error with such a skinny goalpost. By comparison, college and NFL goalposts are 18 feet wide while high school goalposts are 22.5 feet wide. Also factoring into the equation are the long snapper and holder, and Mainland has an advantage in that department as well. Snapper Ty Coffey, coach Coffey’s son, and holder Sam Jackson both have been working with Juliano for a long time and that synergy has helped the Mustangs build one of the best special teams units in the CAL. “We’ve been getting out here, me and my holder and long snapper. It’s just about reps. The more you do it you become a well-oiled machine. It has to become a routine. You have to trust your long snapper and holder to get the ball down,” Juliano said. Juliano said he hopes he gets an opportunity to break the school record this season, but he knows enough not to pester coach Coffey about it. When you’re a teenage kicker you don’t bother a coach who has decades of experience during the pressure packed moments of a big Friday night game. “I try to leave him to his own thoughts when he is concentrating on the game. But I’m fortunate enough to have a coach who trusts his kicker to go out there and attempt a field goal,” Juliano said. “Coop had about 25 field goals going into his senior year, so (coach Coffey) likes to give his kickers a lot of attempts and he trusts them and believes they will go out there and perform.” “I’ll let him go for it, if the conditions are right and the scenario is right,” Coffey said. For the most part, kickers rarely get their uniforms dirty. Unless you’re playing a team like Millville. Juliano saw first-hand the downside of being a kicker last season when the Thunderbolts returned two kickoffs for touchdowns. But, being the honors student he is, Juliano has figured out a way to avoid that in the season opener against the Bolts on Sept. 12. “Last year, Millville brought a couple back on us. It’s tough because they are coming at you full speed and you’re kind of just stuck there in the middle of the field. It feels like you have bricks tied around your ankles. You just have to try to make the tackle,” Juliano said. “It feels awful when they bring one back on you. But that’s what touchbacks are for.” Contact Dave O’Sullivan: sully@acglorydays.com; on Twitter @GDsullysays [adsense]
Being a placekicker takes not only skill, but mental toughness
