Golf and football placekicking have more in common than you think
One particular aspect of how sports psychologists can help in football is field goal and extra-point kicking, and that is because this so-called “placekicking” is so much like golf, a sport that is so dominantly psychological.
Consider that in both placekicking and golf, you are swinging an appendage of your body (a leg in football, arms in golf), and the focus is on making pure contact with a stationary ball to propel it precisely toward a target. The contact is everything, the only thing that either player can control.
Once the contact is made, the ball is gone, out of the player’s control and at the mercy of the wind, rain and whims of the respective football and golf gods.
Both swings involve form, timing and power; aim and distance are critical; and you have to train your eyes to focus intently on contact with the ball without being distracted by the target in the distance, onrushing opponents or anything else.
Mental challenges of placekicking
With kicking, it doesn’t matter who you are playing, the No. 1 team or a cellar dweller. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first game of the season or the last, or if you have a winning or losing record. The kicking game is always the same, a game within a game: just you, the ball and the goalposts.
The kicking mental game is similar to putting in golf. On the long kicks, just get it somewhere between the goalposts; on putts, near the hole. The proper length of a long kick or putt is imperative, while you have a little latitude on direction based on the width of the goalposts and a couple of feet to either side of the hole.
But when it comes to extra points in football, like short putts in golf, the kick should split the uprights and the putt had better be center cut, even though sometimes you do get away with a kick or a putt on the edges.
The mental game similarity goes further when you think of the circumstances of both the kicker and the golfer. Both have a lot of stressful time to think about the action they are about to take. Then, when the time comes to take action, all eyes are on the player and their ability to execute.
Both the kicker and the golfer are all alone: No one can help them out, no one can do it for them, and no one can make up for their mistakes.
Even when it comes to blocking the ball, similarities exist between football and golf. It is certainly evident that blocking can happen in football when a defensive edge player comes swooping in from seemingly out of nowhere and dives across to block the path of even a good kick. And in golf, a spike mark or some other imperfection in the surface of the green can emerge unexpectedly as an obstacle that ruins even the best of putts.
Dr. Tom Dorsel is a clinical/sport psychologist practicing on HHI. A Notre Dame alum, his best selling book is “GOLF: The Mental Game.” Tom can be reached on Facebook or his website, Dorsel.com.
