Colin Phillips, left, follows through on a kick on Monday at Free State High. Chris Stogsdill is pictured in the background. Four soccer players have taken up coach Jason Pendleton’s kicking camp in order to improve their skills as place-kickers on the football field.

Chris Stogsdill, who will be a junior at Free State in the fall, participates in Jason Pendleton’s kicking camp. Stogsdill was pictured on Monday at Free State.

Phwap, thump, whack, thud.

All are sounds that can be made when kicking a football but only one matches the melody that place-kickers hope to hear.

Thanks to a newly formed summer kicking camp run by Free State High soccer coach Jason Pendleton, a handful of aspiring high school kickers now know exactly which one to listen for when putting foot to pigskin.

“If you hit it on the right part of your foot, the thump that it makes, you just know it’s going to be a good kick,” Lawrence High senior Will Burg said. “Sometimes, when you hit it wrong, you can tell by the sound it makes. But when you hit it good it just makes a deep thump and you know it’s a good ball.”

Two weeks ago, Burg and his fellow kicking camp mates never would have known that. Of course, two weeks ago, many of them never had kicked a football in their lives.

That, along with the city’s traditionally weak history of place kicking, inspired Pendleton to start the camp, which has drawn the interest of four soccer players throughout the early days of summer.

“They’ve probably kicked more in three days than all of the kickers combined in the history of Lawrence,” Pendleton said.

It’s not that Pendleton has been keeping track. He can just tell. So can Lawrence High football coach Dirk Wedd, who first talked with Burg about joining his team last season.

“He came to our (football) camp (last week) to kick and we were really impressed with his leg strength,” Wedd said. “He’d only had two days with Jason, and you could really see some improvement. That was exciting. He has a really strong leg and kicks a high ball. Without much work, he’s inside the 10 consistently (on kickoffs) and he’s been inside the five some, too.”

In high school football, that is a weapon in itself. Forget field goals and extra points. Any kicker who can pin the opponent deep in its own end has a spot on just about any team. In a nutshell, that’s the goal of this camp: To identify potential place-kickers before the fall arrives.

Start ’em early

In the past, LHS and Free State — along with so many other programs throughout the state — often have waited until the last minute to find a kicker, sometimes even borrowing an athlete from the soccer team in the middle of the season. Because of his relationship both with FSHS football coach Bob Lisher and with Wedd, Pendleton, a former place-kicker himself, decided to be proactive.

“This whole thing has been kind of a work in progress,” Pendleton said. “Instead of waiting until the week before the first game to find a kicker, we figured if we’re going to do this, let’s actually get them out and teach them some things and give them some time to practice along the way.”

The routine: Be precise

The camp — much like a good kick — follows the same routine each day.

First, the kickers warm up by sending kicks from sideline to sideline. This is akin to long toss in baseball, where players stand dozens of yards away from each other and stretch their arms and their range by launching throw after throw back and forth.

Next up, the kickers move on to set-up stations and accuracy drills that each emphasize the mantra of the camp: “Aim small, miss small.”

“Kicking a football is exactly like a golf swing,” Pendleton said. “It’s methodical, it’s repeatable and any time you speed up or slow down your motion, you can mess with the timing.”

After just a few days out on the field, the campers are starting to understand that.

“The first time I kicked a football last winter, it wasn’t pretty,” Free State senior Sam Passig said. “But I’ve come extremely far since then. My form has improved tremendously.”

An experienced mentor

While the dedication and commitment of the campers themselves — Free State juniors Colin Phillips and Chris Stogsdill also attend the camp — is largely responsible for the strides each has made, they’ve also learned under a fairly reputable tutor. For all of the soccer persona that drips from Pendleton’s presence, there was a time not long ago that the Firebirds’ king of the pitch was more comfortable in a helmet and shoulder pads.

As a prep athlete in California, Pendleton was a standout wide receiver and kicker for his high school team. That produced a scholarship to Bakersfield College, where he helped the Renegades win the Juco national championship in 1988. That year, Pendleton booted 67 extra points and was the second-leading point scorer among kickers in the nation.

After two years at Bakersfield, Pendleton moved on to Division I San Jose State, where he handled kickoffs and helped the Spartans to a 6-5 record. That stretch included games against perennial powers Miami (Fla.), Cal and Stanford.

“Heck, we’d have been bowl eligible now days,” Pendleton joked.

A year later, Pendleton left because the NCAA cut back the number of scholarships allowed from 30 to 25.

“I was buying my own shoes at a Division I college,” Pendleton said. “But even at that, it was a great experience.”

During his college kicking career, Pendleton’s longest made field goal in a game was 48 yards. The longest he ever attempted in a game was 51 yards. That one sailed wide right but the opponent was called for offsides and, on the very next snap, Pendleton drilled a kick from 46.

How’s this for distance?

Evidently, the former kicker hasn’t lost it entirely. At Monday’s session, Pendleton drilled a 55 yarder, which impressed the campers and the coach equally.

“You believe something a little more once you’ve seen it,” Phillips said. “And now that I’ve seen him kick that 55-yard field goal, I have a little more faith in him.”

Of course, all the validation the athletes need comes from their own improvement. If Pendleton’s methods weren’t worthwhile, the campers likely wouldn’t be enjoying such rapid improvement.

“We have a gold mine in Jason,” Wedd said. “He’s a soccer coach and a soccer player, yet he was a football player and he understands the difference between kicking a soccer ball and a football. A lot of kids come out and think they have a strong leg but they have no clue that kicking a football is completely different than kicking a soccer ball.”