

Paul Woodside, left, has helped numerous kickers clear their minds during pressure-packed moments thanks to unique tactics developed during his career. His pupils, including Lake Braddock’s Jack Rawlins (17), are thriving with his guidance. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)

As Pittsburgh senior place kicker Chris Blewitt lined up for a 48-yard field goal attempt in the closing seconds at No. 2 Clemson, some 80,000 fans — and millions of college football viewers across the country — held their breath.

Paul Woodside grooms his kickers to handle moments precisely like this.

When Blewitt was honing his skills at West Potomac High, Woodside, his kicking instructor, would go to great lengths to break his concentration. Woodside would throw his keys at the kicker or clap behind Blewitt’s head as he approached the ball. Anything to make Blewitt uncomfortable.

A typically chaotic college football season indirectly owes some of its most memorable moments to Woodside, a 53-year-old UPS delivery man in Alexandria with an unconventional knack for helping young men thrive in one of the most stressful roles in sports.

On Nov. 12, Blewitt drilled the game-winning field goal in a hostile Memorial Stadium to hand Clemson its first loss. Woodside also counts among his pupils North Carolina’s Nick Weiler, whose 54-yard field goal stunned Florida State in October, and Tyler Durbin, who has made 16 of 17 attempts for No. 2 Ohio State.

Kickers come to Woodside seeking more consistency putting the ball through the uprights. He responds by offering some reading material and a path to peaceful focus. It stems from a life of discovery and evaluation, the kind that takes decades to sink in, then gets distributed in platitudes.

“You don’t know what you don’t know,” Woodside tells his pupils.

“A lot of times,” Blewitt said, “you understand that you don’t understand him.”

Yet somehow, it clicks.



Pittsburgh place kicker Chris Blewitt (12) celebrates after nailing a 48-yard field goal to knock off Clemson earlier this month. Blewitt was a student of Paul Woodside’s during his high school years at West Potomac. (Rainier Ehrhardt/Associated Press)

North Carolina’s Nick Weiler (24) provided one of the most memorable moments of the 2016 college football season when he drilled a 54-yard field goal to beat Florida State in Tallahassee and then ran down the field doing the Seminoles’ “tomahawk chop” celebration. (Mark Wallheiser/Associated Press)

Woodside started kicking at age 5 in Annandale’s youth football program. It led him to kick in high school at Falls Church, then in college at West Virginia, where he set the NCAA record for single-season field goals (since broken in 2003) and records for most games with two field goals and best kicking percentage within 40 yards.

Kicking was something he could do in isolation. Woodside struggled with a debilitating stutter well into college, one that got worse the more he thought about it.

He would grasp in his head for another word, or another letter easier to pronounce. He would ponder what classmates thought as he fought with each syllable. That made it worse. Peers made jokes at his expense, and he laughed sheepishly and went home to kick.

[Durbin goes from Lake Braddock soccer to kicking for the Ohio State Buckeyes]

In college, that made him weird, and he embraced it. “I go against the social norm,” he told The Post in a profile in 1982, his sophomore year in Morgantown. At a team banquet the year before, he showed up in a blue pinstripe suit purchased at the Salvation Army with “punk sunglasses” and black tennis shoes. The entire get-up cost $2.50. The rest of the team arrived in tuxedos.

It wasn’t so much that he defied the social norm, Woodside says now. That was where he fit in. He was a kicker, football’s “other.” The position isn’t as macho as linebacker; you don’t become the big man on campus kicking extra points. Peers thought he was odd, and he never did well trying to talk his way out of anything. He went with it.

“I’m literally trying to be somebody else, which means I'm a cheap imitation of them and I'm not even trying to be myself,” Woodside said.

Then a coach invited him to a Fellowship of Christian Athletes event. You know, Moses stuttered, a preacher told him. Woodside says his faith helped him conquer that stutter by the time he finished college. He tried his hand at professional football but never stuck on a roster.

So Woodside started coaching kickers, something that requires some verbal skill. He took up reading as a hobby, slowly at first, then all at once. In books, he could hang out with characters. He could see the big picture of their lives that he wanted for his own. He could look at his students and imagine theirs.

He hands out books now to kickers he works with: everything from Ben Carson’s biography to Malcolm Gladwell, John Maxwell’s essays on leadership and Bob Rotella’s “The Golfer’s Mind.”

[With his family devastated by violence in D.C., H.D. Woodson’s Jaylen Tywman is playing to get them out]

Former Washington Redskins kicker Nick Novak, another Woodside protege who is now with the Houston Texans, said he has “a whole library” Woodside has gifted him. Blewitt has close to 40 books, he estimates. Woodside is now in his sixth year working with the Lake Braddock football team, which will compete in a Virginia 6A North region semifinal Saturday at Madison. Bruins kicker Jack Rawlins is on the receiving end of Woodside’s unique instruction.



Paul Woodside was aware of his own eccentricities as a college kicker at West Virginia, and he’s channeled his experiences into lessons — and reading material — for a vast network of D.C. area native kickers. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)

More than doing drills or conditioning work between practices, Woodside looks to see whether students have read. If they’re not growing intellectually, he says, they can’t grow as kickers. It’s how they sharpen focus, he said. It’s how they approach each kick as brand-new.

The concept of place-kicking is boring by nature: Make the same kick every time you’re on the field, then go sit on the bench. Opportunities are limited, so pressure mounts. Missing one kick can yield a sea of doubt.

Don’t think about it that way, Woodside teaches.

“It’s easy to fall off track or to lose focus if it’s the same process,” said Blewitt, a 2012 All-Met. “But you get to be able to go back and look at the books and remember to stay focused.”

And that does look a little weird. Kickers don’t like being the “other,” the stereotype Woodside reinforced in his college years. But the prototypical football player doesn’t have his head stuck in a book. They don’t quote George Foreman and send each other cards full of thought-provoking quotes in the mail each week. Woodside’s kickers do.

So what?

“I’m sure people think I’m a little different,” Novak said. “I think people think Woodside is a little different, but we all have to discover ourselves and our personalities. I still have to discover myself.”