11/05/2009 - Al Featherston, GoDuke.com

DURHAM, N.C. – A lot of college kickers began their athletic career as soccer players.
   
Although Duke’s Will Snyderwine did play a lot of soccer growing up, his real background was in a different sport.
   
“My Dad started playing rugby when he was in grad school at Duke,” the junior placekicker said. “He’s been around it his whole life and I guess I kind of grew up with it. My Dad took me to all his games. He played in adult league – in fact, he still plays. He started me when I was maybe 12 years old, playing on his team with the old guys.”
   
Snyderwine, selected for U.S. 19-and-under National Rugby Team in the summer after his senior year at Landon Prep in Potomac, Md., has put the skills he learned on the rugby pitch to good use on the football field. The once reluctant walk-on is emerging as one of the ACC’s best placekickers in his junior season – converting 11 straight field goal attempts, including five successful 3-pointers in last Saturday’s victory at Virginia.
   
“He’s been tremendous,” Duke coach David Cutcliffe said of Snyderwine. “We felt like he had talent. I like the ways he kicks the ball. He’s not erratic. [Special teams coach] Zac Roper has done a tremendous job of zeroing in his technique and training Will in the finer arts. And Will’s done a tremendous job of putting all that in practice.

“He’s got a tremendous work ethic. He’s got great focus and concentration skills.”

Snyderwine, who stands 5-foot-11 and weighs 185 pounds, never planned on playing football. As a junior at Landon Prep, he played soccer and organized a rugby team with several other enthusiasts on campus.

“There were a couple of guys who played with me out of school and we ended up forming a team,” he said. “We had a good team actually – we only lost one game over two years.”

But fate lured him to the gridiron.

“The way I started playing football was similar to what happened here,” Snyderwine said. “The kicker on my high school team got hurt and they went to the soccer team and asked, ‘Who can kick the ball?’

“I went over there and kicked a few and the coach said, ‘Great, we can use you.’ I only kicked maybe two field goals that year.”

Snyderwine argued that rugby is actually a better preparation for football than soccer.

“The biggest part about the rugby is I do the kicking almost exactly like football,” he said. “Every time I score [in rugby], I have to go out there and kick it. It’s a little different because you’re all by yourself – everybody’s looking at you. You just put it down and kick it. I think part of it is being in the game, running around, getting tired. A ‘try’ is like a touchdown in rugby. I’d run in and score the try, then I’d have to kick it. That got me used to kicking under pressure.”

Snyderwine didn’t plan on playing football at Duke. He played intramural soccer and joined Duke’s rugby club.

But a little more than five weeks into his freshman season on campus, the football fates came calling again – this time in the guise of several friends who had seen an e-mail from the Duke coaching staff asking if anybody on campus had any placekicking skills.

“They had seen me kick a little bit in rugby,” he said. “When we got the e-mail, I didn’t think much of it, but they dragged me over [to the tryout]. Maybe 10 or 15 guys were trying out – some guys from the lacrosse team and some from the baseball team, a couple of guys from club soccer. There were a couple of other guys who were pretty good.”

Snyderwine was invited to walk on the team. He joined scholarship kickers Joe Surgan – whose struggles had prompted the e-mail asking for kicking volunteers – and Nick Maggio.

“Maggio had just taken over when I got there,” Snyderwine said. “It was his first week. That season, I didn’t feel like I had any chance, looking at them compared to me. I really got a lot better over the course of my sophomore season. Then this past summer, Kevin Jones helped me a lot, and I went to his kicking coach, Chris Sailer.”

While Snyderwine was polishing his kicking skills, Maggio was establishing himself as a solid ACC kicker. He hit 11 of 14 field goal tries in 2008, including 3 of 5 from beyond 40 yards. He ran his string of successful extra point tries without a miss to 41 straight.

But when Maggio suffered a broken jaw playing softball last summer – an injury that prevented him from eating solid foods for weeks and sapped his strength – it created another void at the placekicking spot – a void that Snyderwine had prepared himself to fill after his off-season work.

“[Working with Sailer] really refined my form,” the Duke kicker said. “Before that, in the spring, Kevin helped me a lot. He knows a lot about it. He helped me with my form over that spring. I really developed a lot – the spring and summer is when I really started to get pretty good. I think spring ball was the first time I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ve got a pretty good shot.’”

Snyderwine’s leg strength earned him the kickoff job going into the season. Maggio still had the placekicking duties, but after he missed two sub-40 yard field goals in the opener against Richmond, Cutcliffe turned to his rugby player.
  
“I knew I was I going to be handling kickoffs coming in the first game, and longer field goals,” Snyderwine said. “I got to kick an extra point in the Richmond game, which was really exciting – to be able to go out there and score a point for the school. The Army game, I had to start getting used to doing everything.”

It wasn’t an auspicious beginning – he missed his first field goal try at Army – just a 28-yard chip shot.

“The first one ... I guess I would say I was nervous,” he admitted. “You never want to tell anyone you’re nervous, but since then, I’m not any more. The first kick was a big moment for me and, I don’t know, I got distracted.”

Snyderwine did hit five extra points without a miss in the Army game and a week later, at Kansas, he converted a 37-yard field goal try. Two weeks later, against Virginia Tech, he cemented his place as Duke’s primary kicker by converting four field goals in four tries, including a 43-yarder and a 47-yarder.

“The Army game was really the first game I was really invested in,” he said. “Back in high school, I’d show up to the games. I didn’t practice. It was the first time I was really committed to something. It was a big deal for me to go up to Army and handle everything.

“I think by the time Virginia Tech rolled around, I felt really, really comfortable being out there. All the butterflies were gone. Since then, I’ve been very solid and very comfortable.”

Snyderwine added a 35-yard field goal in the victory over Maryland, then hit his quintet against the Cavaliers – from 44, 28, 34, 25 and 43 yards. The five kicks were the second-highest single game total in Duke history – one short of Vince Fusco’s six field goal performance against Clemson in 1976.

Snyderwine is ninth nationally in field goal accuracy at .917 percent. Not only has he hit 11 of 12 field goal tries, but he’s also converted 18 extra point attempts without a miss.

Of course, that kind of success rate doesn’t belong to Snyderwine alone. The kicker is part of a combination that includes holder Kevin Jones and long snapper Jackson Anderson.

“Coach Roper was telling us before the summer that the best operation he’d ever been around were these three guys – snapper, holder, kicker – who are best friends and always hanging out,” Snyderwine said. “Kevin and I are best friends and Jackson is one of our good friends ... we’re hanging out together all the time, trying to get close.

“I think that really helps. If you like the guy you’re working with – Kevin holding for me, Jackson snapping the ball – then it’s something subconscious that he wants to do well for you. Kevin and I are really close. We go out there and its business as usual. We do it all summer. He knows my rhythm and I know his rhythm. Jackson too. We all work a lot together and we have a great thing going ... a great rhythm.”

Earlier in the season (other than the Army game), Cutcliffe allowed Maggio to continue to kick extra points, while Snyderwine handled kickoffs and field goals. Going into the Virginia Tech game, he changed that, piling all the kicking responsibilities on Snyderwine’s shoulders, explaining that allowing him to kick extra points should help his rhythm for field goals.

“I like doing field goals, extra points and kickoffs,” Snyderwine said. “It really gives me an opportunity to be more or a part of the team. It puts me in a better rhythm.”

While Snyderwine’s longest kick so far is 47 yards, he claims that he can hit from at least 10 yards deeper on a calm day – longer with the wind at his back.

“I get a little wind behind me and I can get in the 60s,” he said. “Over the summer, I felt pretty strong and had a couple of 65/66 yarders. Right now, on a good day, 58 without any wind. With the wind, a little further.”

There’s one test that Snyderwine hasn’t faced yet – he hasn’t gotten to attempt a game-winning field goal in the final seconds. His 43-yarder against Virginia essentially clinched the game by turning an eight-point lead into an 11-point margin with just over a minute left. But that’s not the same as the last-second kicks Duke failed to convert in losses to Wake Forest in 2008, UNC in 2007 and Wake Forest in 2006.

Snyderwine is pretty confident that if he’s given that chance, he will convert.

“Every Thursday, we work on it,” he said. “Right at the end of practice, they have a game-winning field goal. And the whole team will come stand right next to me. It’s probably more pressure than I’d ever have in a game. I’ve got people running around me, I’ve got people touching me, I’ve got all these things going on that can really throw you off. I’d say that’s a lot more difficult than any pressure I could see in a game.

“That’s got me prepared for it. If it comes, I’ll be ready. I’m not planning on missing it.”

His rugby training could also play off on such an occasion.

“I think [it brings] mental toughness,” Cutcliffe said. “I had a Groza Award winner at Ole Miss and the reason I signed him out of high school was that he was a heck of a kicker, but he was also quarterback of a state championship high school team and he played defense and he would hit you. Fuad Reveiz of Tennessee was a linebacker-slash-kicker. I like those guys. I think they bring something to the table. The toughness that Will had from rugby helps him.”

Snyderwine would like to bring one more rugby skill to the football field before his career is over.

“I’m hoping they’ll let me dropkick a football one of these days,” he said. “I can drop kick it about 45 yards. Maybe my senior year they’ll let me dropkick an extra point.

“I’ve showed [Coach Roper] I can do it. He’s not too interested.”

For now, Snyderwine’s continued success as a conventional placekicker is plenty good enough for the Blue Devils.