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{shortcode-be29865d8a9c7908fa05930b7f2d42574eaa573c}vy League Championship on the line. Five seconds on the clock, Harvard down one point in a tense battle with Penn. 53 yards out — a kick that would mark the longest made by a Harvard kicker since at least 2009.
The fate of Harvard football’s historic undefeated season — and a possible FCS playoff berth — lies in the feet of sophomore kicker Kieran Corr. This is where legends are made.
Corr lines up, eyes fixed on the uprights. Freshman long snapper Jack Baade fires the ball back to sophomore punter Dylan Fingersh. Good snap.
Fingersh sets it down cleanly, laces outward. Good hold.
Corr takes two steps, swings, and sends the kick spinning into the wind — ice in his veins as the season hangs in balance. The kicker and the rest of his team watch in anticipation, holding their breath.
The ball has the distance, drifting dangerously toward the left upright before sneaking inside by inches. It’s good.
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The Crimson explode onto the field, swarming the team’s hero. The stadium erupts. But for Corr — the highest scoring kicker in the Ivy League — it was no different from any of his other kicks this season. These are the moments he lives for.
“When I’m going out, walking out onto the field, I’m not repeating into my head, ‘This is how you kick a football,’” Corr said. “I just kind of let my body do what it’s naturally used to, and let my muscle memory kick in.”
In the highlights of Harvard football’s undefeated run, it’s easy to remember the heroics of star quarterback Jaden Craig, the bruising runs of Xaviah Bascon and the rest of the Crimson’s backfield, and a defense that’s smothered opponents all year.
Yet Harvard’s quiet edge comes from a pair of sophomores who rarely make headlines. Corr turns every touchdown from six to seven — and adds three more when Craig and company stall — while Fingersh’s booming punts and kickoffs bury opponents deep, tilting the field in Harvard’s favor.
“What we do is just like a reflection of how the team performs,” Fingersh said. “When the team drives down the field, we’re just there to put, hopefully that extra point on after the score touchdown, or put three points on the board for a field goal. It’s really just capitalizing on what our offense and our offense and our defense is able to give us.”
And while the offense gets multiple downs on each drive to methodically push down field, kicking is an all-or-nothing game.
“You kind of get that one rapid rep during the game,” Fingersh said. “You don’t know how many times you’re gonna get to be on the field, but it’s a repeatable motion, so you basically just have to be able to do what you do really well.”
Corr and Fingersh arrived in Cambridge as “kicker-punter hybrids,” but their responsibilities solidified early in the season. Corr has handled nearly all field goals and kickoffs, while Fingersh stepped into the punting role after freshman Brian Checkley suffered an early-season injury.
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Their operation depends heavily on the chemistry the two have with each other and Baade, whose consistency as a freshman long snapper has stabilized a pro-style scheme.
“We’re only as strong as the unit,” Corr said. “If one of us is off, all of us are off. And if we’re all good, we’re all good.”
During regular practices, the kickers rarely work on the main field. Instead, they spend most sessions striking balls into a net, getting only a handful of field-goal and punt attempts.
“We’ll get a few field goals, like on the actual uprights while the whole team is, like, on the sideline getting a drink of water,” Corr. “We always try to stay fully prepared and treat it like a game as much as possible.”
Still, the specialists maintain close ties with the broader roster, even if they don’t share every drill.
“We’re completely meshing with the rest of the team, even though we don’t necessarily like to do everything with the rest of the team, like physically in practice,” Corr said.
“We’re just trying to develop as much trust as we can in the team, and the more they view us as fellow football players, the better for us. We go to every single lift, every single run in spring ball, so we’ve done everything with the team,” Corr added.
Perhaps the hardest part of the job, according to the duo, is staying mentally sharp for hours at a time.
“One thing that’s hard about kicking is that you always do have to be ready for, three hours,” Corr said. “Two hours before the game, you have to be equally as ready as you are half an hour later as you are, four and a half hours later in overtime, you have to stay ready for every single moment.”
Then comes the weather. Corr’s previous season-long of 38-yards against Dartmouth barely snuck inside the upright, and was just one example of how bad weather can turn a routine kick into something far more scary. But Corr and Fingersh said they’ve had plenty of practice.
“Harvard Stadium is always going to be windy,” Fingersh said. “We’ve had a lot of practices that are a lot windier than any game we’ll play. If there are, we’ll handle it. We’ve gotten experience in a lot of different elements, which I think is advantageous.”
All of the hours of quiet work ultimately funnel into just a handful of game-changing moments. Kickers don’t get many chances to demonstrate months of preparation — which is exactly what both sophomores love about the position.
“It’s a weird moment in sports where you have very few opportunities to show the result of so much hard work, which I really, really like,” Fingersh said.
“You can also flip it and talk about how that gets really stressful. But I think both Kieran and I kind of live for that pressure,” he added.
—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar.
