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| Iowa's Tory Taylor is the latest Australian import to win the Ray Guy Award |
On the day of our conversation, Nathan Chapman is wearing an Indiana State football hoodie. It makes the interviewer think that maybe there is a cold snap going through Chapman's Australian hometown, so he inquires about it. When told that it's "only 82 or 83 degrees right now," the interviewer chuckles, and asks what temperature he prefers. He says 95, and adds "I like it hot."
That's the perfect adjective to use when talking about the impact Australian punters have had on college football in the last 10 or so years. Similar to the influx of Polynesian players that began in the 1990s, Aussies coming stateside to punt footballs has become a regular way of doing business.
There were 81 punters from Australia on college football rosters in 2023, most being starters. That's a far cry from 2009, when the first of the Aussie imports hit the United States. The University of Hawaii welcomed Alex Dunnachie into its program, and he handled punting duties all four seasons, averaging 42.0 per boot. That was the foot in the door for the next generation of punter, and ProKick Australia and Punt Factory have since helped players kick the door off of its hinges.
“When I laid out my plan this is what it looked like," Chapman said. "What I didn’t realize is that it was gonna take 15 years to get it. My business plan vision is that this is how it starts, that the numbers would be bigger earlier on. I didn’t realize it was going to be two and three a year, twos and threes, fours and fives, seven, 10. In a weird way I always thought this was how it would be, but it was just a lot of hard work to get to this point.”
That hard work has paid off, with Aussies dominating the Ray Guy Award over the last decade. Beginning in 2013 with Memphis' Tom Hornsey, Aussies have won seven of the last 11 honors, including this most recent season when Iowa's Tory Taylor took home the award.
Aussie Mitch Wishnowsky -- the 2015 Ray Guy winner from Utah -- played in the Super Bowl for San Francisco (with Chapman in attendance) so it seems almost surreal that the operation began with such a limited roster. Getting prospects not only interested, but also willing to sign up, was a bit harder than it looked.
“They had no idea," Chapman said. "We’re talking 2006, when the idea came about. Football on the TV was not as prevalent as it is now. It was quite the sell. There was some knowledge, I guess, but it wasn’t all over the place. It was twofold for me – It was hard to convince parents to pay money to teach someone that kicking a ball could get them a scholarship to America. When our first conversation was had with our first three college guys – Alex Dunnachie, Jordan Berry (Eastern Kentucky) and Thomas Duyndam (Portland State) – the parents asked ‘how long have you been doing this?’ I told them I had just started, so let’s go. It was also not easy convincing coaches that ‘we’re going to train some guys in Australia and we would hope you could give them a scholarship.’ It started kind of organically, pretty small with our numbers. We had some really good initial networks, we can reference videos, and had people vouch for us and got us in the door.”
And they have been coming through ever since.
Chapman wasn't just some guy who figured he had a better way to do things. He was actually in the fray, going through mini-camps with Green Bay, and it was there that he made associations that would change his life and give him the confidence that he could pull off this wild idea.
While Chapman was in Green Bay, John Dorsey became the GM, and veteran special teams coach John Bonamego charged the Packers specialty units. Even though he didn't make the team, Chapman was able to foster the relationships he had made into something he could use later.
“I felt connected to the sport, I just didn’t know what it would look like," he said. "It came about like, "I’ll go back and train players and make them better aware of the level required, would you look at them?" They were positive about it and pointed me in the right direction with things. I felt if I trained the right kind of players and get them seen we could be successful."
Laying The Groundwork
Darren Bennett was the first truly successful Australian punter to break through and make a name for himself. He spent 10 seasons with the San Diego Chargers and two more with the Minnesota Vikings, and now he runs something of a support system for Australian punters playing football in America.
He is in charge of Punt Factory, a partner of The Gridiron Company, and is able to communicate and work with players while they are in college. They may not be able to get home for break between semesters, so Bennett is kind of a way station where they can refocus mentally, refine their skills and know they have someone in their corner should things get difficult.
“We’ve just made ourselves a bit of a base for the boys if they get a bit homesick," Bennett said from his home in Tulsa. "It’s a centralized location, it makes it easy for us.”
Bennett runs Punt Factory with former Philadelphia Eagles punter and fellow Aussie Sav Rocca, and he says that their similarities make things easy for the players.
“The great thing about Sav and I, we have similar journeys,
so we coach the same way," Bennett said. "We feel like the boys come to us, my wife feeds them
some Aussie food and we put a group together and the boys will all bond. When
they get spring break, we’ll get six or 10 guys here, in and out, because they
have varying spring breaks. I get three or four guys at a time and work with
them.”
Bennett knows Chapman and enjoys seeing any and every Aussie punter succeed in the states.
But he modeled his business differently on purpose, and feels that it achieves a specific goal.
“It’s not that there’s a rivalry, it’s more that if a kid wants a more personalized coaching thing they can get it," he explained. "We only have six guys in Melbourne and six guys in Perth, and we do that on purpose.”
Bennett averaged 43.3 yards per punt in his NFL career, placing 31.3 percent of his boots inside the 20, with just over seven percent of his punts resulting in touchbacks. His best year was 2003, when he placed 28 punts inside the 20 and had only three touchbacks.
Being raised in a culture where Australian Rules Football is the biggest sport on the continent has its advantages, and it makes the move to punting a football fairly easy.
“Americans throw the ball to each other as kids. We get in trouble if we throw it, you’re usually doing pushups after," Bennett explained. "The way to transfer the ball from one person to the other is either to hand pass it or to kick it. We have a different connection to it."
Bennett has been mentoring players since 2004, and it's a source of great pride when someone he has trained ends up making it big, or when they simply send a text saying how thankful they are to have made the connection and learned a few things along the way.
“The parents say to us that it’s great to have an Aussie
support system," Bennett said. "It’s kind of like the surrogate family over here. In their
short breaks they know it’s a long way to get back to Australia, so the
families like the fact they have US support. We’ve put them together, we have
sort of a fellowship and we feed them up and send them back to college. They go
back with a nicer disposition than when they first get here. It’s not so
isolating when you know you have support here.”
It Pays To Be Versatile
There's a common misconception that Australian punters do nothing but rollout a few steps and then boot the ball toward the sideline, looking to get a big time roll or pin the opponent near its own end zone.
Oh, that happens. But not exclusively.
Both Chapman and Bennett know the value of versatility, which is why their academies focus on spiral (traditional) as well as drop (rollout) versions.
“The funny thing is that we spend probably 80 percent of our time teaching them to take two steps and kick it as high as you can, with a spiral, outside the numbers," Chapman said. "Our game of Australian Rules and rugby and soccer, we’re utilizing skills and talents of someone who can do stuff on the run. That rollout Aussie punt is a form of that. You still have to get rid of it in a certain amount of time. It changed where the defense set up and where they’re going to rush from because you can make adjustments. It just gave you the ability to make changes, and therefore made the defense more aware of potential fakes, how do we press up on this. The playbook had to get bigger. There were coaches who had never seen it and they’re saying let’s set up like this, hard right, let’s go opposite. They could get more creative which means you could have an advantage in special teams and give them a punter who could do multiple things.
"The skill itself, having a punter who can kick on the run, and deliver it where you want it downfield, that's big. In Aussie Rules you’re kicking it to the other person down at the other end. The skill here is now to kick it down but away. When they do the rollout it’s a bit more instinctive. There’s plenty of training that goes into all of it, with the spiral and the rollout, and coaches will use all of that as they see fit. We send our guys over to spiral, with the ability to rollout, and then the coaches decide what they want to do in games. I would say the narrative over the years is that Aussie guys, all they do is rollout. No. We want to go over there and spiral. We go over with the ability to do both. The coaches determine how it will best suit their teams, to get an advantage to win. If that means rollout, rollout. Whatever is best for the job.”
Most of the trainees come in more well-versed in rollout, so learning the skills of the spiral punt takes some work. There are some who take to it quickly while others need more time.
“We let them do what’s comfortable, what we call a ladder," Bennett said. "An example of the ladder is that, we have a kid (Lachlan Wilson) at Cal-Berkeley, he was here at Tulsa, and his first year he redshirted and we had him work only on drop punting. There was no pressure on him. His first year playing at Tulsa he probably hit only eight or nine spirals the whole year. Then in his third season, he did whatever he wanted to do. If the coach told him ‘we need a spiral,’ he could do that. I think that’s a logical way to have these boys use their advantage as a drop punter when they first start, and then if we teach them those foundational skills as they get more experience and get more comfortable in the American game, they can implement that spiral. It also becomes a surprise for the returner because if you’re only hitting one every now and then, he’ll creep up on the drop part and you blast one over his head.”
The drop punt has pretty much become a required part of a punter's arsenal, to the point that American kids are learning it.
Some even excel.
“It makes me prideful watching an American kid who has no connection to us learning how to drop punt successfully in a game," Bennett said. "A lot of them understand that it’s a skill you need to have nowadays to be recruited. All of the guys in the NFL, everyone can do that drop punt. Johnny Hekker is one of the best you’ve ever seen at it, and he’s American.”
Conversely, the Aussies have also figured out that having a two-pronged approach is a good thing.
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| Mitch Wishnowsky (Photo by Joe Glorisio) |
More Than Just Physical Preparation
The physical aspect of punting is definitely driven home, but both Bennett and Chapman realize that there is more to success than just having a big leg or being able to drop the ball inside the five-yard line. A player must have the proper mental approach and understand how success might impact them. There are a ton of outside influences that could derail their aspirations.
“They put themselves in the forefront of social media, and whether they have a good kick or a bad kick there are forms of social media pressure come on them," Chapman said. "It’s a lot to take, for a young man to move across the other side of the world, in a game he’s never played, to have the same expectation of performance as a professional sports person. Some really lean into it, some really enjoy what they do and the journey. The whole thing is a success no matter how many games you play. If you’re prepared to do that you’re on the winner’s list.”
Bennett, who went straight from Australia to the NFL, says nearly all of the kids at the academies decide to go the college route first, and it's an invaluable experience.
“We like our boys to have a two-part journey – guys who come over with just the goal of going to the NFL, they bypass a lot of the great experiences of being in college," he said. "Now with NIL, guys will look at college as their first career. If they’re good enough someone will tell them they can play at that next level."
That college experience impacts not only the players involved, but future players.
“We’ve had 270 scholarships over the course of those years, and now the players who have played have come back and spoken about it," Chapman said. "So their friends now know about it, or they know someone who know they can do it. Fathers watch their sons, and there are cousins and nephews go across, it’s on the TV now. We get commentators speaking about our guys and we watch on TV. They have mates of mates and mates from players from our teams. One player who used to be on a football team with 50-60 kids on it, they all get access to that kid who is now playing on their TV. They tell their friends.
"Organically it stretched out really quickly. There is a good conversation about what we do, it’s a good opportunity for guys who want to get educated and can kick a football. We do it for the education. Some guys will go to the NFL, some will have really good college careers and that will be it. Some will have tough college careers. But they have also come out of their comfort zone, put themselves in a position to potentially fail into an unknown, on the other side of the world."
Whether a player makes All-American and ends up getting drafted into the NFL or finishes punting in college -- or simply makes a roster but doesn't get a lot of action -- they are all considered success stories. They have taken on the ultimate challenge of leaving home, going to an unfamiliar country with no friends and precious few contacts and putting in the work to play American football. All while getting an education.
That counts for something in Chapman's book.
“There sort of is no failure, no matter what level you get
to," he said. "We’re really impressed by young men who come up and say ‘I want to come
down here and be around this program and I do not know what the outcome is
going to be.’ I think that’s pretty cool.”
