Where were we?
Let’s get up to speed.
Brian Ferentz, my position coach, had told me in January 2015 that I would never work myself into a starting role on the Iowa offensive line - after paying my dues for three years to try and do so.
Following this news, and considering my options, the most realistic and likely course of action for me was going to be to beat out Tyler Kluver and win the starting long-snapping job for the University of Iowa football team.
Easy enough, right?
There were a few small problems with this plan…
Kluver could snap a ball on a frozen rope. Bias aside, I think if Tyler were a few inches taller and fifteen or twenty pounds heavier, he’d be on an NFL roster right now.
I hadn’t snapped seriously since high school… and although I had handled the job well in high school, at the college level, there was a lot more to it than just cleanly getting the ball back to the punter (or the holder on PATs).
Nonetheless… this was my best option.
There were people on the staff that wanted me to win the job - that definitely helped. The other thing working for me was, simply, desperation… On an almost primal level.
This was it for me. At the time, my entire identity was as a member of this team, and it was all I wanted to be, do, and associate myself with. I’d do anything to become a starting member of this football team, at whatever position was my most likely route to getting on the field.
Long snapper, it is.
A Complete Transformation
Making the team as a long snapper was not going to be easy - as I already mentioned, Kluver was damn good at his job.
How could I find an edge on him?
Well, I was bigger and stronger - no question about it - but I’d need to be drastically more athletic, capable of running down the field after a snap and attempting to make a tackle on a punt returner.
At the time I decided to pursue long snapping full-time, I was around 295lbs.
I was going to have to shed some weight - and quickly. Spring Ball was only three months away, and I was going to have to look like and perform like a D1 long snapper then, if I wanted to show the coaching staff that I was a serious contender for this position.
I’d also need to snap a whole hell of a lot faster, and more accurately.
In high school, getting the ball to the punter - no matter where, or how fast - was a huge accomplishment, and all that the job of a long snapper really required.
In college, your snap back to the punter was expected to take around .70 - .75 seconds, and to be snapped directly for him to catch around hip-level of his punting-leg side.
Every time.
I knew that if I worked at this enough, I could probably get an edge on Kluver with my snap speed, too - just simply by being a bigger, stronger body and being able to generate more power than he could.
The other kind of snap that long snappers handle, in addition to punts, is for PAT/Field Goals. It’s a shorter snap, around seven yards, and snap speed isn’t quite as important - but you’re expected to snap this ball so accurately and consistently that the holder can catch the football with the laces of the football facing away from the kicker. The timing of this snap is a thing of beauty when done correctly… and can be the difference between a game-winning field goal and Dan Marino’s life being put in jeopardy (If you know, you know).
The accuracy and consistency were what I was going to have to really work at, and what Tyler had a huge advantage over me with, having had thousands of reps over the preceding year to dial in the art and the science of long-snapping.
I had a lot of work to do… but I was no stranger to work. I knew the uphill battle that was in front of me, but I was used to playing from behind. I began to put my plan in motion to win the job, and make the team.
Putting the Plan into Motion
With my mind made up to long snap, I started making calls, and setting up meetings - as did my Dad on my behalf.
The first call I made was to Casey Kreiter, a teammate of mine from my first couple of years at Iowa, who was a lights-out, perfectly reliable, and highly respected long snapper for our football team. At the time Casey was fighting for the starting long snapping role with the Denver Broncos… Now, Casey is the longest-tenured active Iowa Hawkeye in the NFL, going on year ten or eleven in the league, if I’m not mistaken. If anyone knew what it took to become the starting snapper at Iowa, it was Casey. We had a good relationship and connected over our high school wrestling days, where Casey was a standout, too.
He was living and training in Iowa City working to make an NFL roster spot, coming into the football facility almost every day to work on his craft, so he agreed to meet me at the facility most days and impart some wisdom on me. Casey didn’t have a dog in the long-snapping fight, having helped Kluver a lot in his first year as a starter, too. I respected him for that - all Casey cared about was that Iowa had the best guy for the job, and in his eyes, helping me would make Tyler and I both more competent, and help our team to win more football games.
The next thing I did was to set a meeting up with Coach Chris Doyle, our strength and conditioning coach. I needed to lose weight rapidly if I was going to be fast and athletic enough to cover punts down the field. I wanted to do this in a healthy and sustainable way, where I’d become faster and more athletic, while remaining strong and explosive. Coach Doyle was a master in this arena, and had already been briefed on my predicament prior to me walking into his office to ask for help.
For whatever I lacked on the football field as an offensive lineman, I had always made up for in the weight room. Like I mentioned in the first article in this series, I was so bought in to what Coach Doyle was selling, and consistently worked myself well beyond my limits in the weight room for him, because I believed in his philosophy, methodology, and long-game strategy. I knew that Coach Doyle recognized how committed I had been to his program over the last few years, and I felt like Coach Doyle was going to support me as best as he could to get down to a competitive weight and compete with Kluver for the job. He put together a plan for me that was a little more calorie-restrictive and a little more cardio-intensive… all I had to do was execute the plan, and I’d be at a healthy fighting weight by March.
Meanwhile, my Dad was doing everything he could to help me compete as a long-snapper too. He called around to many of his football contacts in Northern Illinois, and several people referred him to a guy named Nolan Owen, who was a highly-revered long-snapping coach in Northern Illinois.
Nolan had started every single game that he was eligible for in his career at Northern Illinois University, and had a spotless long-snapping record. Every punt, PAT, and field goal - Nolan had handled the snap on perfectly. He was as talented a snapper as the game of football has ever seen… only cursed by the same genetic disadvantages that Kluver faced, coming in at around 5’10”.
When Nolan’s chances to play in the NFL dissolved, he redirected his energy into teaching others the art of long snapping, and realized that his true talent was in coaching this skill, rather than performing it. Nolan’s track record of getting high school kids into college as snappers, and from college to the NFL, speaks for itself.
Nolan’s coaching was going to be an instrumental part in me dialing in my snapping and closing the gap on Tyler.
With the plan in place, there was only one thing left for me to do: Execute.
Putting in the Work
Things for me got rigorous and grueling, very quickly.
This was my last shot.
I couldn’t keep anything in the reserves - I had to give everything I had to this period of development as a long snapper over the next few months, if I was going to remain an Iowa Hawkeye.
During this time, a typical day for me from Monday to Friday went something like this:
0600-0800 morning lift with the team
0800-0830 breakfast
0900-1000 snap with Casey
1000-1100 snapping on my own (doing drills from Nolan)
lunch & rest for a few hours
1400-1600 “practice,” with Kluver, other snappers, punters (there was some NCAA rule for why we couldn’t call these practices… it had something to do with not wearing full pads, or being primarily player-led. I don’t remember)
1600-1900 shower, film, dinner
It was grueling… and that was just during the week.
On weekends, I’d drive the 2.5 hours back home to Northern Illinois, then another hour from my hometown into the suburbs to train with Nolan most every Saturday and Sunday.
These sessions were pretty brutal too, as we would try to cram as much as we could into them before I drove back to Iowa City for the week. Nolan would send me off with a bunch of drills and points to refine over the coming week that I would implement on my own in Iowa City. I remember filming hours and hours of myself snapping in Iowa City and sending these videos to Nolan to critique and offer pointers on my technique.
Effort doesn’t guarantee results, but you can’t see results without effort.
And, sure enough, slowly but surely… things started to click for me.
I was shedding weight.
When I made the decision to exclusively long snap, in January, I was around 295lbs. I was set to begin Spring Ball, just three months since making that decision, at around 255-260lbs.
My snaps were getting more and more accurate. I still wasn’t as honed in as Kluver was, but whereas at the beginning of this experiment I was just happy to deliver a catchable ball to the punter, now, almost all of my snaps were being caught between his waist and his chest. I still had a little ways to go to narrow in to his punting-leg side hip, but we were getting very close.
My snaps were getting back to the punter faster than Kluver’s were. I knew this was going to be something that I could attain, just purely due to our difference in strength and size. Some of my snaps we were clocking in at the mid to high .6 second mark - which was very fast - NFL caliber fast. But, speed wasn’t everything if it wasn’t accurate enough for the punter or holder to reel in and control.
We still had a little ways to go.
The first real test, and measuring stick for my progress, was going to be our Spring Game.
Spring into Summer
The Spring Game was going to be the first real opportunity for me to showcase my newly-developed skill in a game-like environment, in front of our complete coaching staff, to include the head coach, KF.
This brought about an entirely different and totally critical component to the skill of long-snapping, just like it did for punting, and kicking - the other two specialist positions - you have to be able to do it when the pressure is on.
Nailing 100 perfect snaps on the practice field means absolutely nothing if you can’t nail one perfectly when you’re backed up in your own endzone and the other team is trying to block the punt and delivering your snap to the punter is suddenly the most important task at hand in the entire game.
The Spring Game was going to be an opportunity to simulate those kind of environments, so the coaching staff could find out which of us was going to be clutch when it counted.
Kluver, obviously, had a leg up on me here - having already performed well in a full season of games the year prior. He’d snapped in tough environments, and been serviceable enough to get the job done.
Not only was I lacking the game-time experience, but I also had a shit-ton more riding on my performance than Kluver did. My entire football career to date hinged on my snapping performance now.
If I couldn’t snap, there was no place for me on this team.
I had to put the weight of my predicament out of my mind though, if I was going to snap worth a shit at all. Nolan and Casey were both really helpful with the mental side of snapping, for me. They’d both snapped in critical, high-pressure games in their careers, and knew exactly what it took to lock in and deliver.
Both of them, essentially, tried to diminish the magnitude of the situation as much as they possibly could - to make the situation, no matter how important, as routine and typical as possible… at least in their own heads.
I would imagine that their internal monologue during these clutch snaps is something like this…
“This is all that I do, and I’ve done it thousands and thousands of times. This is just one time, where I’m being asked to perform the skill that I’m best at. What’s the big deal?”
In the Spring Game, I did the best that I could to adopt the same casual confidence that these professionals did, and… it worked.
Maybe it’s because, ultimately, it was still just snapping in front of my teammates, like I’d already been doing all winter. My snaps in the spring game were all generally pretty good - I may have had one or two that were slightly wobbly, but considering the short runway that I’d had to completely transform myself as a football player, it was a hugely successful showing, and I felt really good about where I stood with the Iowa program after the Spring Game.
In my eyes, Kluver was probably still the slight favorite to win the job, but I wasn’t just a body taking up space, anymore - I was a serious contender for the starting long snapping job for the Hawkeyes.
One Last Shot
Spring rolled into summer, and my foot stayed on the gas.
The previously mentioned lifting-snapping-film routine didn’t stop. If anything, it ramped up.
I was practically living at the facility, spending more time here than I had in my previous years as an offensive lineman. The thing with snapping is that it’s not nearly as physically demanding on your body as playing offensive line is, so you can essentially do it all day long. Sure, there’s a point of fatigue where you start to see some diminishing returns, but even then there’s some value in being able to snap when you’re tired, or you’re not at your best.
Every day, I was getting better - and with that, my confidence was growing, too. The gap between Tyler and I was narrowing, and I felt like he recognized that, too. Kluver was a generally happy, go-lucky guy, but it seemed to me like he was starting to take snapping a lot more seriously now knowing that there were coaches in the building who wanted to see me win the job that he had held last season.
Everything was trending in the right direction for me, until one day in early July.
That month, on a Monday, our special teams coach and my position coach for the past six months, Coach White, casually told us that he wanted to see our snapping on display that coming Wednesday. Coach White didn’t make a big deal of it, but Tyler and I both knew what this was - it was our tryout.
Fall Camp was right around the corner, and the Iowa coaching staff was honing in on their camp roster. The players that got invited to fall camp were generally all of our scholarship players (with a handful of exceptions) and walk-ons that the staff felt would be contributors on the field that season.
Tyler was a walk-on, but had been the starter the year before.
I was on scholarship, but hadn’t proven anything.
We both knew that only one of us was going to get invited to camp, and it all hinged on our performance that Wednesday in July.
No pressure.
The Tryout
I woke up that morning feeling… off. I couldn’t shake it.
I was trying to trick my mind into that state of casual confidence that Casey Kreiter and Nolan Owen embodied so well - the “just another day at the office,” mindset that allowed specialists to stay cool, calm, and collected, and execute their job.
But, I just couldn’t.
I hate to admit that - that I wasn’t the “cool character,” that everyone thinks they’re going to be in these high pressure moments. Everyone thinks they’re going to be the Steph Curry draining a deep three buzzer-beater, or the Tom Brady marching down the field late in the fourth quarter… but, that’s what makes those guys Steph and Tom.
There was simply too much riding on today’s events for me to go about my day business as usual.
Out on the practice field, we started warming up. I got a little bit looser and more comfortable, but when Coach White asked us if we were ready, it kind of rattled me again.
My snaps were generally fast enough, and accurate enough, but almost all of them had a wobble to them that could cause issues for a punter or holder to catch cleanly.
It didn’t help that I was alternating snaps with Tyler, and his were fantastic. Seeing him deliver snaps right where they were supposed to go only amplified the pressure, and my snaps started going even more and more haywire.
Each inconsistent snap compounded, and I just couldn’t get myself back on track.
Eventually, Coach White had seen enough.
“Let’s wrap it up guys - good work today. Let’s meet in the film room in fifteen.”
I knew then, on the field, that I hadn’t performed well enough to make our team as a long snapper.
Camp Invites
The following week, I would guess that about 90% of the players on our team walked into our facility and opened their lockers to find an envelope with a typed letter formally inviting them to fall camp.
When I entered the facility that Monday, I did find an envelope in my locker, but when I opened it to read it, the words I read were not as pleasant.
Typed out on Iowa Football letterhead was a message that began something like:
“Reid,
This morning, we invited 105 players on our team to attend Fall Camp, beginning on August xx. While you are not one of those players invited to camp…”
I didn’t, or rather, couldn’t read much past that, as my eyes were beginning to well up. I knew what this meant. For many of our walk-ons, it wasn’t necessarily a surprise to receive this camp non-invite.
For a scholarship player, like I was, it was the kiss of death.
The letter may as well have said,
“Reid,
Your career here is done. You no longer have a role with this football program. Clear out your locker. Best of luck in whatever comes next, and thanks for your contributions in your time here.”
Just like that, my time at Iowa was over. Definitively.
There were no other options, like the ones that Brian Ferentz had discussed with me initially.
I had reached the end of the road.
I don’t know if, even today, I can find the words to describe how I felt in this moment.
It was certainly frustrating, to have sacrificed so much for this program, and to have had so many good days of performance to showcase my abilities, all come down to one poor performance on a Wednesday in July.
For this program, I had gained fifty pounds, lost fifty pounds, given maximum effort on the scout team when many scout team players opt to just go through the motions, changed positions twice (DL to OL, OL to LS), and so much more.
Blood, sweat, and tears doesn’t justify what I had given to this team, and this letter was them telling me that it simply wasn’t enough.
After a depressing phone call outside of the facility with my dad, sharing with him the contents of the letter that we ultimately expected after my sub-par performance the day of the tryout, we knew what I had to do.
I went upstairs to the head coaches office to ask him for my release to transfer.
Alright, alright, alright…
I’m as surprised as you are. I didn’t think I’d be able to write an entire article on my brief experiment in becoming a long snapper. I fully intended to wrap everything up in this article, but it looks like there will have to be one more to cover the transfer journey, how I found my next school, and getting started in a new program.
I hope you guys are enjoying this series still - one more article to go to wrap up this series, I promise!
Until next time,
Reid
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