How Australian Punters Became Mainstays In College Football, NFL

On Tuesday afternoon in Melbourne, Australia, Nathan Chapman and John Smith plan on gathering together and watching the College Football Playoff national championship game between No. 1 Georgia and No. 3 TCU.

Australians aren’t normally known as huge football fans, but Chapman and Smith are exceptions. They have a good reason to be interested in the national title game that takes place in SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, a 19-hour time difference from Melbourne.

Georgia freshman punter Brett Thorson and TCU senior punter Jordy Sandy are both products of Prokick Australia, a program that Chapman and Smith co-founded in 2007 to train Australians to become college football punters.

“It’ll be extra interesting to watch that field battle sort of play out and see who can flip the field when they need to,” Chapman said in a phone interview this week. “It should be a lot of fun.”

Thorson and Sandy are among the roughly 75 punters on Division 1 rosters who got their start through Prokick. Growing up outside of Melbourne, Chapman had played Australian Rules Football, a physical sport that is popular in the country and involves kicking the ball while being defended. Chapman played eight years of professional Australian Rules Football before setting his sights on punting in the NFL.

Chapman signed as a free agent with the Green Bay Packers in March 2004, but he was released that August after appearing in two preseason games and punting three times. He later had a workout with the Cincinnati Bengals and attended a minicamp with the Chicago Bears, but he never kicked in a regular season NFL game.

Chapman then moved back to Australia, where he met Smith, a United Kingdom native who was kicking for a professional football team near Melbourne. The two decided to start Prokick after realizing there were thousands of kids who played Australian Rules Football and could adapt to punting in football.

In 2009, the first three Prokick-trained Australians signed scholarships with U.S. colleges: Alex Dunnachie (Hawaii), Thomas Duyndam (Portland State) and Jordan Berry (Eastern Kentucky).

Since then, dozens of more Australians have made their way to major colleges, although the journey for Chapman and Smith has not been easy as they did not grow up in the U.S. and didn’t have too many contacts among college football coaches.

Still, Chapman credits two men in particular for helping him navigate the college football landscape early on and introduce him to college coaches: John Bonamego, a longtime coach who was the Packers’ special teams coordinator when Chapman played in Green Bay, and John Dorsey, a longtime NFL executive who knew Chapman through their time spent together with the Packers.

“They were huge in helping me get connected with some coaches along the way, certainly when I was starting out,” Chapman said. “I’m forever thankful for connecting with those two.”

That’s not to say Prokick was an overnight sensation. Chapman and Smith worked with players on their technique several times per week, trained them for months and made tapes of their punts that they sent to college coaches, who had never seen the kickers in person and knew little about them.

“It was very, very difficult convincing a U.S coach at a college to take someone who’s on the other side of the world that they haven’t seen,” Chapman said. “There was a lot of trust and a lot of phone calls and a lot of times when coaches didn’t take our players.”

Over time, college coaches became more confident that Prokick was a breeding ground for punters. In 2013, Prokick alum Tom Hornsey of Memphis became the first Australian to win the Ray Guy Award for the nation’s top punter. Since then, other Prokick alums have won the same award: Utah’s Tom Hackett in 2014 and 2015, Utah’s Mitch Wishnowsky in 2016, Texas’ Michael Dickson in 2017, Kentucky’s Max Duffy in 2019 and Rutgers’ Adam Korsak in 2022.

Four former Prokick athletes are currently in the NFL: Wishnowsky (San Francisco 49ers), Dickson (Seattle Seahawks), Arryn Siposs (Philadelphia Eagles) and Cameron Johnson (Houston Texans). Berry, meanwhile, spent seven seasons with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Vikings from 2013 to 2021.

James Sackville, a Prokick alum who punted at SMU from 2016 to 2019, said Australians are natural at punting because they’ve played Australian Rules Football since they were young children.

“By the age of 3, I was kicking the ball in the backyard with my Dad, just like a 3 year old’s throwing a baseball or throwing a football with their Dad or someone in the backyard (in the U.S.),” Sackville said. “It’s very natural for us to pick up the (punting) skill relative to an American kid.”

Players in the Prokick program train three days per week on punting as well as four to five times per week in the gym with cardio and strength and conditioning. The workouts often begin at 5:30 or 6:30 in the morning. They pay a fee for working with Prokick’s coaches and trainers and spend 9 to 18 months before heading to the U.S. to play in college.

“We try and mimic a college football program,” Chapman said. “We’re trying to get them used to what it’s like being in college. That’s getting up early, getting your work done and working out. Our job is to prepare them so they transition into college football or college life as easy as they can.”

As the years have passed, Prokick has accepted more people into the program whom they deem as being capable of one day punting in college. But the method has remained the same in that Chapman, Smith or someone else films the punters and sends the videos to college coaches, who then decide whether it’s worth pursuing further. Most of the time, Prokick punters are offered scholarships without visiting the colleges or meeting the college coaches in person.

Sackville remembers the Prokick coaches filming an unedited, 4 ½ minute video of him punting to show college coaches how he could consistently kick the ball with ease.

“We filmed me kicking a ball high and far, which is what every guy does and sends it over to coaches,” said Sackville, who is the founder of the Athletes in Recruitment app that connects high school athletes to college coaches. “It’s a pretty straightforward process. People think it’s really complicated. It’s not. If you’ve got talent, they’ll find you.”

He added: “Australians have done a good enough job for long enough in college football where the relationship and reputation capital is there. You just take Coach Chapman’s and Coach Smith’s word for it because they’ve clearly got the track record over 11, 12, 13 years now.”

Next week, Prokick will notch another memorable moment when Thorson or Sandy becomes the second alum to win a national title, joining Johnson, who was the punter for Ohio State when the Buckeyes won the inaugural CFP title in January 2015.

Sandy and his friend and former co-worker at a paper mill, Tom Hutton, traveled two hours per day from their home near Victoria to train at Prokick. In 2019, they each earned scholarships, Hutton to Oklahoma State and Sandy to TCU, and became two of the Big 12 Conference’s top punters.

Thorson, meanwhile, grew up in Melbourne and arrived at Georgia in January 2022 shortly after the Bulldogs won the national title. He was considered the top punting prospect in the recruiting Class of 2022, according to the 247Sports Composite. Nine other Prokick alums were among the top 15 of the recruiting rankings, too, and signed scholarships with West Virginia, Boston College, Arkansas, Western Kentucky, USC, Boise State, Pitt, Florida International and Tennessee.

Now, far from the early days when Chapman and Smith had to develop relationships and prove their program was legit, college coaches often contact Prokick when they’re looking for punters.

“We still get messages out of the blue and phone calls and a referral of someone who wants to get in touch,” Chapman said. “It’s always good to wake up to a text message from a coach saying, ‘What have you got and can you tell us how it works?’…It’s a great reward and humbling to know that you’ve got that respect for a coach to reach out and ask about our program. We really enjoy that.”