Time On Our Side

A lot of what a Long Snapper does is behind the scenes. Countless hours of work are put in during the summer in extra snapping workouts and pre practice perfecting our technique and fixing the finest details and movements. Because we (the specialists) do most of our work outside of the allotted practice time, we have a lot of “free time” at actual practice. Don’t get me wrong, when we work, we work hard; but we work hard for a 7 second rep and then stand on the sideline for 40 minutes.

A specialist must be educated on the following topics to keep the conversation up for the 20 some practice hours we are at football a week:

•  Current events (Who the picture was of on the sports page in the school paper)
• Classic movies (Dumb and Dumber, Anchorman, etc.)
• New movies
• Reality TV (this is a big one, but more on that in future posts)
• Girls (90% of conversation)
• Whats happening on Facebook
• Whats happening on Twitter
• What other positions on the field we would not be good at (turns out its all of them)
• Celebrity gossip 
• Your text conversations with Rubio (“the #1 authority in Long Snapping”)
• Touch down dances we will never get to perform
• The girls in your classes
• How bad it sucks that we are only Long Snappers
• How much it rules that we are only Long Snappers
• Call of Duty
• The reasons why we need to be famous
• Where we are going for the specialist dinner on Thursday night after practice
• High school glory days of sports (long gone)
• Weekend plans 
• What happened over the weekend
• Why we need to be on The Real World, Bachelorette, Bachelor, Coach Hope's TV show
• Random facts (for example: what is the state bird of Texas?)
• Wondering if people know the tattoos they get now will last forever
• The girls that looked at you during that day

During down time, I recommend trying to become more versatile. And by that I mean, try some kicking, punting and holding. Why not? We’ve got the time. Aside from being the Long Snapper, I’ve also got my eyes on the back up onside kicking job.