Flesher and Bicknell to Anchor Special Teams

Sometimes you just can’t simulate it. No matter how much a football player practices, established routines quickly become complicated when all the lights are on.

Senior kicker Andrew Flesher knows that feeling. Last season against Princeton, he took the field late in the fourth quarter to attempt a 50-yard potential game-winning field goal.

Flesher’s lengthy kick—just the second of his career—sailed wide left. Harvard lost in triple overtime.
“I think the Princeton field goal was one of the field goals when I noticed it was a big moment, because it was at the end of the game,” Flesher said.

But experience is the best teacher. The very next week, Flesher took the field late against Dartmouth in a tied game. With 48 seconds on the clock, the then-junior punched in a 23-yarder to seal the victory for his team.

Tasked with filling in for injured then-senior kicker David Mothander ’14 in the middle of last season, Flesher went from having never attempted a collegiate field goal to converting two overtime kicks and a game-winner in just three weeks.

“You just get a little bit more used to it,” Flesher said. “By the time the Dartmouth kick happened, I felt pretty confident.”

Special teams occupies a unique place in football. While defenders rely on speed and brute force, punters count on skill and accuracy. While quarterbacks adapt to a defense, a kicker’s ally is consistency and repetition.

Furthermore, punters and placekickers are only on the field for a handful of plays each game. Whereas position players can get into a rhythm and feel out their opponents, kickers and punters need to play 100 percent every time they step between the lines.

One swing of a kicker’s leg often goes the longest way in determining the outcome of a game.
“We all realize that special teams is [an] equally if not even a little bit more important endeavor,” captain Norman Hayes said. “We can gain and lose a lot of momentum just by one swing on special teams.”

Players on special teams arguably face more pressure on a weekly basis than any of the other men on the roster. If the offense marches down the field and a drive stalls, the kicker is instructed—nay, expected—to convert for three points.

While a kicker’s impact on a game can be substantial, the fleeting nature of the opportunity demands that special teams players remain physically and mentally sharp at all times.

“We stay warm all game; you keep your legs loose,” senior punter David Bicknell said. “As a unit we’ve been doing this our whole lives pretty much…. You [must] be ready when you’re needed.”

As a punter, Bicknell’s role is significantly less flashy than Flesher’s. No one likes to see the punter come in on fourth down; it means the offense has failed to do its job.

Nevertheless, Bicknell embraces the opportunity to pin his opponent inside the red zone and contribute to the Crimson’s success.

“Every role on the team has its own specific job,” Bicknell said. “My job is to make sure that the opponents are pinned as far deep into their territory as possible, so I do what I’m supposed to do for the team.”

For Flesher, who must perform on an island with everything on the line, the mental approach is perhaps most important.

“If you’re a kicker, you tend to be a perfectionist of some sort,” Flesher said. “You’re used to just operating on your own, so I think that’s something that’s pretty key. But other than that, it’s really just practice.”

Indeed, Flesher, Bicknell, and Harvard coach Tim Murphy understand that practice is absolutely essential—not only for establishing muscle memory and routine, but also for imbuing confidence.

A typical training day for kickers and punters involves arriving well before the official practice start time. After a brief meeting, the players head to the field and stretch out. For about a half hour until the rest of the team arrives, Flesher practices field goals and Bicknell works on punts from a variety of distances.

The full-team practice typically begins with the field goal unit and punt team training independently, often executing drills and practicing different coverage schemes.

Many of the team’s best defensive players—including last year’s leading tackler junior Eric Medes and senior lineman Obum Obukwelu—play a significant role on special teams.

“We spend a little more [time on special teams] at the first part of practice just to emphasize that it’s just as important as any unit,” Murphy said. “From our standpoint, it’s really important. We have nothing but good athletes on special teams, so we take it seriously. The kids know we take it seriously.”

When the offense and defense take over for the remainder of practice, Flesher and Bicknell leave the field to either stretch or lift in the Palmer-Dixon Weight Room.

But the day is by no means over. For Flesher, some of the most valuable moments of training come at the end of practice when Harvard runs full-team situational drills.

At a moment’s notice, the special teams unit needs to spring onto the field, assume formation, and coolly execute a kick or a punt with a hundred players screaming in their ears.

You can never simulate the conditions of a game-winning kick, but these drills mimic Saturday afternoon pressure moments more closely than solitary practice ever could. If the preparation is there, the gameday challenge ultimately comes down to confidence and trust in your mechanics.

“When you go into a game, it happens so quickly that you’re not really thinking about anything else,” Flesher said. “So you just have to have the process down; you have to be comfortable with your snappers and holders. And when you go out there, your brain will just want to kick with your natural ability.”

On special teams, one thing is for certain: everything happens fast. Flesher learned that lesson firsthand last year. In a matter of days, he went from not even being on the travel roster to winning an Ivy League game for his team.

Quarterbacks will drop back to pass 30 times a game. But for kickers and punters, one moment often makes or breaks your performance—and dictates whether the postgame locker room is filled with shouts of “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard” or thick, dead silence.

For these players, the only choice is to embrace the pressure.

“Yours is a thankless job,” Murphy tells his special teams players. “When you do a great job everybody loves you. But they’ll jump off the bandwagon just as quickly.”

—Staff writer David Steinbach can be reached at david.steinbach@thecrimson.com.