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Penn Football defeated Georgetown 42-13 in a strong outing on Saturday, October 6, 2007. PENN Coach Al Bagnoli prowls the sidelines. G'TOWN Credit: Ryan Townsend

Quakers football coach Al Bagnoli knew he had a problem to solve when he pieced together this year's recruiting class. In this case, he didn't mind a bit of overkill to get the job done.

The result was three freshman kickers on the 2007 Quakers, including starting placekicker Andrew Samson.

Well, that tends to happen when a team goes 7-for-15 on field-goal attempts and ends up delegating its kicking duties to a wide receiver. But far from awaiting Bagnoli's response to the problem, the question had to be asked as the Quakers literally kicked themselves out of Ivy League contention - why?

Why did Derek Zoch, lauded out of high school as a key recruit, not pan out? Why is it so darn hard to spot a kid capable of finding the uprights two or three times a game?

Well, it turns out there's a thing or two to spotting kicking talent out of high school.

Take a look at a success story.

Wagner coach Walt Hameline is lucky enough to have picked up a stud in the special teams game. Senior Piotr Czech handles punts, kickoffs and placekicking for the Seahawks, and is tied for third in Division I-AA with two field goals per game. He's missed just one out of 11 field goals on the season, and is 3-for-4 from over 40 yards with a high of 49.

But as much as Hameline might want to take credit for landing such an asset, his honesty tells a different story.

"I think it's like anything," he said. "We got lucky."

Now, one might think that judging kickers based on their high-school performance would be a piece of cake. It's not like any other position, where players have to adjust to bigger, faster and stronger opponents on the college level. For a kicker, it's just your foot, the ball and the uprights.

And the snapper. And the holder. And a healthy heap of anxiety in arguably the game's most pressure-packed position.

According to Bagnoli, the business of recruiting kickers brings with it "a few nuances that you've got to get used to."

High-school results can only tell a coach so much. The rest takes some special consideration.

"It's a high-risk, high-reward type of thing," Bagnoli said. "A kid may have great ability, but he may have a so-so snapper in high school. Or, their protection may be flawed and he's just not getting enough time. So there's a lot of factors that go into it."

And one of them leads to inflated stats for high-school kickers. Before college, players are permitted to use tees on both kickoffs and field goals. Once they make the transition, tees are only allowed on kickoffs, and shorter ones at that. So, a booming kicker in high school has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Add in the wild card of the requisite mental fortitude, and the line distinguishing big-time prospects from small-time also-rans blurs even more.

"You want someone who's a competitive, mentally tough guy, because you could be running him out with three seconds left to win an Ivy League Championship," Bagnoli said.

He sees the recruitment of kickers as more formulaic than does Hameline. It's too early to tell, but he and Quakers fans everywhere are hoping this year's freshmen prove his formula correct.

Ilario Huober is a senior International Relations major from Syracuse, N.Y., and is former Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is ihuober@sas.upenn.edu.

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