How Australian Punters Became Mainstays of College Football and the NFL

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

Australians aren’t generally known for being big football fans, but Chapman and Smith are exceptions. They have good reason to be interested in the national championship game, which will be played at 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 Prokick Australia products. A program founded by Chapman and Smith in 2007 to train Australians to become university football players.

“It’s very interesting to watch that battle on the field and see who can turn the field when needed,” Chapman said in a phone interview this week. It should be fun.

Thorson and Sandy are among about 75 players on the Division 1 roster who started through Prokick. Growing up outside Melbourne, Chapman had played Australian Rules Football, a physical sport popular in the country that involves kicking the ball while being defended. Chapman played eight years of professional Australian Rules Football before taking up kicking in the NFL.

Chapman signed as a free agent with the Green Bay Packers in March 2004, but he was exempt in August after appearing in two preseason games and striking out three times. He later worked out with the Cincinnati Bengals and attended minicamp with the Chicago Bears, but never kicked in an NFL regular season.

Chapman then moved back to Australia, where he met Smith, a native of the United Kingdom who was kicking for a professional soccer team near Melbourne. They decided to start Prokick after realizing that thousands of kids were playing Australian Rules Football and could adapt to kicking a football.

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

Since then, dozens of Australians have made it to major colleges, although it hasn’t been an easy journey for Chapman and Smith because they didn’t grow up in the United States and didn’t have too many contacts among college football coaches.

Still, Chapman credits two men in particular with helping him navigate the college football world early and introducing him to college coaches: John Bonamego, the longtime coach who was the Packers’ special teams coordinator when Chapman played in Green Bay, and John Dorsey, the longtime NFL executive who knew Chapman from his time together with the Packers.

They helped me connect with some coaches along the way, especially when I was starting out,” Chapman said. I am eternally grateful to be in contact with these two.

That doesn’t mean Prokick is an overnight sensation. Chapman and Smith worked with the players on their technique several times a 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 to get an American coach in 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 confidence and a lot of calls and a lot of times when the coaches didn’t take our players.

Over time, college coaches became even more certain that Prokick was a growth platform for bettors. In 2013, Prokick alum Tom Hornsey from Memphis fire the first Australian to win the Ray Guy Award for the nations best player. Since then, other Prokick alums have won the same award: Utahs Tom Hackett in 2014 and 2015, Utahs Mitch Wishnowsky in 2016, Texas Michael Dickson in 2017, Kentuckys Max Duffy in 2019 and Rutgers Adam Korsak in 2022.

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

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

“When I was 3, I was kicking a ball around in the backyard with my dad, just like 3-year-olds would throw a baseball or a football with their dad or someone in the backyard (USA),” Sackville said. It is very natural for us to adopt the (punting) skill of the American kid.

The players of the Prokick program train three days a week with punting and four to five times a week in the gym working out, working on strength and conditioning. Training often starts at 5:30 or 6:30 in the morning. They pay a fee to work with Prokicks coaches and trainers and spend 9-18 months before heading to the US to play in college.

We’re trying to mimic a college football program, Chapman said. We tried to get them used to what it’s like to be in college. It’s waking up early, doing your job, and exercising. Our job is to prepare them so that they transition to college football or college life as easily as possible.

Over the years, Prokick has enrolled more people in the program who they believe will one day be able to hit college. But the method has remained the same, with Chapman, Smith or someone else filming the players and sending the videos to the college coaches, who then decide if it’s worth continuing. Most of the time, Prokick players are offered scholarships without visiting colleges or meeting with college coaches in person.

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

We filmed me kicking the ball high and far, which every guy does, and sent it to the coaches, said Sackville, who is the founder of Athletes in Recruitment, an app that connects high school athletes with college coaches. It’s a fairly straightforward process. People think it’s really complicated. It is not. If you have talent, they will find you.

He added: The Australians have done a good enough job for long enough in college football where the relationship and reputational capital is there. You just use Coach Chapmans and Coach Smith because they’ve obviously got the record over 11, 12, 13 years.

Next week, Prokick will see another memorable moment when Thorson or Sandy become the second alum to win a national championship, joining Johnson, who was Ohio State’s punter when the Buckeyes won their first CFP title in January 2015.

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

Thorson, meanwhile, grew up in Melbourne and arrived in Georgia in January 2022 shortly after the Bulldogs won the national championship. He was considered The top punting prospect in the 2022 recruiting class, according to the 247Sports Composite. Nine other Prokick alums were also among the top 15 on the recruiting list, signing 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 legitimate, college coaches often contact Prokick looking for punters.

We still get messages out of the blue and phone calls and a request to be contacted, Chapman said. It’s always good to wake up to a text message from the coach saying: What’s up and can you tell us how it works? It is a great reward and humbling to know that you have the respect of a coach to contact you and ask about our program. We really enjoyed it.