Photo by Kadin Pounders
The Shoals Kicking Camp focused on the kicking game for football athletes.

By Kadin Pounders
For the FCT

Place kickers, punters and long snappers from all over the Southeast gathered at Russellville’s Golden Tiger Stadium and practice fields June 29 for Coach Mike King’s Shoals Kicking Camp.

“The Shoals Kicking Camp is the longest and oldest privately-owned kicking camp in the Southeast,” said Mike King, the camp’s owner. “We’ve been doing this camp for 26 years now.”

King has been using Russellville as one of the venues for his camp since the early 2000s.

“Coach (Perry) Swindall asked me to come and start doing my camps here when he was here,” said King. “Russellville has such great facilities. They have access to three practice fields and a good place for us to take a break and eat lunch in the center above the weight room and locker room.”

King, aside from conducting the camp, is also North Alabama’s kicking coach and owns and operates Shoals Kicking Development. King has been in the kicking business for a long time and has worked with kickers from high school to the professional level.

King has been a kicking consultant for nearly three decades with Auburn and Georgia Tech kicking camps, and his own camps have been endorsed by many punters and college coaches including David Cutcliffe, Terry Bowden, Mark Hudspeth, Van Tiffin and Bobby Wallace. King is also the on-field director at the Tiffin/Pope Kicking Camp at the University of Alabama.

From 9 a.m. until 3 p.m., players received special instruction from King as well as from a number of former and current college kickers, punters and long snappers.

“I think we have about 45 kickers here, which for a day camp is a pretty good number because each team has, in high school, basically only one kicker,” said King. “We feel like anywhere from 40-50 is a real good number.”

The kicking game is an important part of the game of football, but it does not always get the attention on the practice field that it needs or deserves, according to King.

“If you go down and add all the plays that go on during a game, about one-third of the plays are related to the kicking game,” he said. “If you really wanted to make your team better, you would spend almost a third of your time in the week on kicking, but it’s hard to get all the high school and college coaches convinced they need to do that.”