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Landon Foster’s life is a contradiction.
With a self-described job of kicking “not even a one-pound ball,” he is still one of the biggest gym rats he knows. He’s a perfectionist in an imperfect sport. And he plays football even though the majority of people he sees on campus thinks he plays baseball.
Foster, Kentucky’s starting punter since he stepped on campus in 2011, is used to all of the contradictions, though, because that’s just the life of a special teamer.
“We like to joke about it, just taking on the specialist’s role,” Foster said.
That role has included contributing to the @UK_Specialists Twitter handle, where the punters, long snappers and kickers post pictures from the weight room captioned “curls for the girls” and joke about which guy should get a tattoo to improve the group’s street cred.
More than anything, the specialist’s role includes a pursuit of flawlessness. A busted offensive play can turn into something miraculous if a team has superior athletes on the field who can make something out of nothing. But if it’s a busted punt or kick, it’s busted, and fans know it.
“We have one kick and every time we go out there, we have one time to be perfect,” Foster said. “Everyone is watching. As a punter, as a snapper, as a kicker, you’re the operation. No one’s really watching the blocking or anything.”
As part of that desire (and need) to be perfect, Foster and other special teamers have reaped the benefits of Erik Korem’s High Performance program, like the rest of the team has by now too. Foster said his body fat percentage went down to 10 percent (from 15 percent).
But for guys like Foster, whose job is to catch a long snap, drop the ball at exactly the right angle and boom it 40 yards down the field, putting on needless pounds of muscle isn’t what Korem is prescribing.
Instead, Foster is focusing on hip flexor mobility and quick-twitch muscle work that can help him improve on his – imagine this – specialty.
“Obviously we’re not going to be in the trenches with the linemen so why are we going to be in the weight room squatting 400 or 500 pounds?” he said.
Foster has plenty of actual game productivity to build on. He was named a Freshman All-SEC player by the SEC coaches his first year, as well as first-team Freshman All-American by Scout.com and second-team Freshman All-American by CollegeFootballNews.com.
All of those accolades, and people still don’t recognize Foster as the all-league punter that he is. *
“When I wear Kentucky athletic stuff, I always get asked if I’m a baseball player,” he said. “I played one year of baseball and that was like my third-grade year.”
Sometimes, Foster will milk the situation, and listen to what fans have to say about the program while he’s still unidentified as part of the team. At the youth soccer games he referees on the weekends, Foster has heard from a fan how nice of a guy head coach Mark Stoops is, and how he should really meet him sometime.
“I just go along with it,” he said. “It’s really funny. I love the fans here and you really get to hear their passion for it and what they really think of it, rather than, ‘Oh, you’re on the football team. Let me tell you this and this.’”
That incognito role of not always being recognized by fans? It’s all just part of being a specialist.
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