DEEP THINKER
After averaging
37.4 yards as a
junior, Butterworth
has gotten stronger
and has refined
his technique.
Steve Manuel
|
lex Butterworth got some
of his first lessons in the
fine art of punting from a
world-renown expert: Coach
Google.
He had become the starting punter at Heritage Christian High
in Indianapolis pretty much by accident. His coach had seen him goofing
off before practice one day prior to his
freshman year and asked him if he
wanted to try kicking for real. Butter-
worth had played soccer as a kid and
had a strong leg, but he'd never punted
before. So after claiming the starting
job, he began scouring the Internet to
figure out what he'd gotten himself
into.
"After I saw that I could actually kick
the ball pretty well, I began thinking,
'What's involved in this whole kicking
thing?' " he said. "The first thing that
comes up when you Google that kind
of stuff is Ray Guy and some of the
other famous kickers. When you watch
them, you're kind of in awe. You're
thinking, 'How'd they do that?' "
Butterworth tried to reverse-engineer
the techniques he saw on those old
video clips and apply them to his own
game, but he wasn't satisfied with his
punting as a freshman. So before his
sophomore year, he attended a Ray
Guy Kicking Academy camp in Ohio.
"That really helped me out," he said.
"Within 15 minutes of learning the
