For Flesher, who must perform on an island with everything on the line, the mental approach is perhaps most important.
“If you’re a kicker, you tend to be a perfectionist of some sort,” Flesher said. “You’re used to just operating on your own, so I think that’s something that’s pretty key. But other than that, it’s really just practice.”
Indeed, Flesher, Bicknell, and Harvard coach Tim Murphy understand that practice is absolutely essential—not only for establishing muscle memory and routine, but also for imbuing confidence.
A typical training day for kickers and punters involves arriving well before the official practice start time. After a brief meeting, the players head to the field and stretch out. For about a half hour until the rest of the team arrives, Flesher practices field goals and Bicknell works on punts from a variety of distances.
The full-team practice typically begins with the field goal unit and punt team training independently, often executing drills and practicing different coverage schemes.
Many of the team’s best defensive players—including last year’s leading tackler junior Eric Medes and senior lineman Obum Obukwelu—play a significant role on special teams.
“We spend a little more [time on special teams] at the first part of practice just to emphasize that it’s just as important as any unit,” Murphy said. “From our standpoint, it’s really important. We have nothing but good athletes on special teams, so we take it seriously. The kids know we take it seriously.”
When the offense and defense take over for the remainder of practice, Flesher and Bicknell leave the field to either stretch or lift in the Palmer-Dixon Weight Room.
But the day is by no means over. For Flesher, some of the most valuable moments of training come at the end of practice when Harvard runs full-team situational drills.
At a moment’s notice, the special teams unit needs to spring onto the field, assume formation, and coolly execute a kick or a punt with a hundred players screaming in their ears.
You can never simulate the conditions of a game-winning kick, but these drills mimic Saturday afternoon pressure moments more closely than solitary practice ever could. If the preparation is there, the gameday challenge ultimately comes down to confidence and trust in your mechanics.
“When you go into a game, it happens so quickly that you’re not really thinking about anything else,” Flesher said. “So you just have to have the process down; you have to be comfortable with your snappers and holders. And when you go out there, your brain will just want to kick with your natural ability.”
On special teams, one thing is for certain: everything happens fast. Flesher learned that lesson firsthand last year. In a matter of days, he went from not even being on the travel roster to winning an Ivy League game for his team.
Quarterbacks will drop back to pass 30 times a game. But for kickers and punters, one moment often makes or breaks your performance—and dictates whether the postgame locker room is filled with shouts of “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard” or thick, dead silence.
For these players, the only choice is to embrace the pressure.
“Yours is a thankless job,” Murphy tells his special teams players. “When you do a great job everybody loves you. But they’ll jump off the bandwagon just as quickly.”
—Staff writer David Steinbach can be reached at david.steinbach@thecrimson.com.