The Situation

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You’re down after just scoring, 17-14, with a minute to go in the first half. As you line up to kickoff, the coach signals in for an onside kick. Rolling the dice, you feel that if you recover the kick, your three time outs will pay dividends as you try to at least gain some yardage and kick a field goal before the first half ends. It would be great to go into the locker room tied (or ahead) since at one time you trailed, 17-0. What formation would you use for the onside kick and what responsibilities would each player have?

How would you fake the long kick for the short one?

Joe Schotland, Assistant Coach, Westwood HS (MA). AFM subscriber since 2006.

We’d go for the onsides and our onsides kickoff starts off by looking just like our regular deep kickoff. Our regular kickoff begins without a huddle (M.O.F.) but with two lines, each with five players, who are facing the kicker. He is in front, calling the depth, direction and kind of kick. In this case we’re going for it, so he’d call, ‘onsides middle short.’ The front line of five would run up and approach the ball on the tee as they always do. They sprint straight ahead as if they are going to try a middle onsides, but they peel off to the right and spread out across their half of the field. They get into ‘stacks’ of two-three players and they face the kicker so that the kickoff return team can’t see their jersey number. Therefore they can’t determine whom to block. Again, all that is just like our normal kickoff.

The second line of five, the back line, is the key. Those five are our best players. They are usually seniors. Three of them will have great ball skills. Two of them will be the aggressive ‘hit men’ who smash the opponents trying to field the ball or block them and prevent them from fielding it. As the first line of five peels off, those five studs in the second line turn and watch them go – an important piece of ‘acting.’ As soon as the first five have cleared out, the second five runs up to the ball with the kicker leading ‘the charge’ and executing the kick. Instead of the second line peeling off as they do in a normal deep kick, in our onsides kick, they charge the middle. Remember: the middle of the kickoff return, at least in high school, is where many teams place fewer athletic linemen who don’t have good hands. Again, the ‘hit men’ lead and will jar the ball loose or block people out of the way so our ‘ball hawks’ can scoop and score.

Westwood’s (MA) Onsides Kick

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Andy Szatkowski, Defensive Coordinator, Heritage High School, Conyers, GA. AFM subscriber since 2005.

If we were going to go with the onside kick after a score right before the half, we would use our ‘Birthday’ call. This is the call that lets our TKO (kickoff team) know that we are going with a surprise onside kick. Since we normally kickoff from a bunch huddle and explode to our assigned lanes as the ball is kicked, the other team would have seen this kickoff formation already.

The key to recovering this onside kick is the kick itself. The kicker will kick the ball above the top stripe into the ground which will send it on a roll. If kicked properly and with enough force, the ball should take a high, hard bounce between nine and ten yards. We would then recover it right as the ball gets to ten yards. Our kicker practices his onside kick about 100 times a week since we have the potential to do one on every kickoff. The assignments:

K: Supply the great kick – the star is where we want the ball.

#1 and #2: Will blow up the first player on the left of the hash (A).

#3: Run one yard left of the hash without touching the ball and blow up anybody coming for the straight-on recovery.

#4 and #5: Will blow up the first player to the right of the hash (B).

#’s 6, 7, 8, 9, 10: Get the Football!

Birthday

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