The year is 1973 and as a dad with four young boys soon to enter a code of football I knew only as ‘aerial ping pong’, the game was simply a mystery to me as much as it would be to my boys. Within a year, like many a young dad, I somehow got roped into being the coach of one of my boy’s footy sides, and when thrown in the deep you seek desperately for a lifesaver of sorts to keep you afloat. You are faced with the reality of your lack of knowledge of the game, let alone how to teach the game, thus the search for this knowhow began. I would say in hindsight, looking back at these early years, the seed for where we are today at kick builders was born out of a futile search for an ‘Eddie the Expert’ or any item of information that would shed some light on coaching the skills of this game I had now fallen in love with.

 

 

Over the years I have pestered nearly every senior footballer who I felt had something to offer in this pursuit of the knowledge I desperately was seeking, but alas! without success.  The so called books and pamphlets published by the VFL/AFL were of little help solving the mystery of how to teach the skills of the game - plenty of photos yet precious little detail.  Fast forward to the early 1980s and by now I’m convinced that no one knows the answers I was seeking and if by some chance they did, then no one was telling. The time had come to research the area of skill acquisition for myself and so I began combing through countless footy video tapes - the process had now begun in earnest. Night after night when sane minded people should be resting between the sheets, my time for analysing the slow motion replays of the individuals who I determined had good technique was now in full swing.

 

 

Over time lasting several years, I formulated what I considered the steps needed to perform the ideal drop punt kicking technique and it was here that I struck the major hurdle in translating knowledge into application - in other words converting theory into practice. It is one thing to understand the composition of what constitutes the breakdown of the skill one is analysing, but the teaching process, and transferring this to the player, was the stumbling block to successfully translating the skill.

 

 

My trade teaching background certainly helped in demonstrating various skills to young apprentices but showing and modelling the necessary skill actions lacked the desired outcomes in many of the students. My mind wandered back and forth over the years on how best to impart any such desired physical body movement to the student and guarantee a successful outcome. I then recalled my early tennis lessons at school where the tennis coach would breakdown each small section of the complete skill action into small practised components and when all the various parts were well rehearsed, we would then rehearse the full action. With this in mind I set out devising what I refer to as ‘action drills’ for each part or sub-section of the complete skill I wished to teach. Worthy of note was that the drop punt kicking method had approximately twenty-odd sections within the complete action.  Now having identified these discreet twenty-odd body movements of the kicking action, I now also had specific mini action drills to rehearse and ingrain in the muscle memory of the trainee for these twenty-odd movements.

 

 

The scene was set to test the teaching model I had devised and as they say ‘the proof of the pudding will be in the eating’ - in this case the ideal kicking action that will turn any trainee, no matter what level he is at, into an elite performer of the drop punt kicking action. I decided that I would seek the most ungainly performer of the drop punt kicking action at my club who I knew would welcome my invitation and most of all dedicate himself in the practising of the many different mini drills I had devised. What a revelation he was and within a few short weeks the success of all the years of doubt and uncertainty had been put to rest. We now had the process to turn ‘frogs into princes’.  With this method of teaching we could now move forward, although much fine tuning and testing was now on the agenda before one could state unequivocally the holy grail of teaching the skill of the drop punt was firmly in our possession.

 

 

When you find the El Dorado you have been seeking for so long, you wish to shout for joy for all the world to hear.  Having spruiked to all and sundry of my accomplishment, I was greeted with a deafening wall of silence more fitting to a wake than a monumental discovery.  As I reflect on the past and the presentations one has made to club coaches and directors of coaching at all levels regarding the Kick Builders’ teaching process, I can now understand why I removed myself from the line of fire and the constant rebuttal from those in authority. Like the era of head bangers from a decade or so ago, who stated how great the feeling was when one stopped the music, so it was when my constant door knocking became an exercise in futility.