Senior Yannick Reyering has made many big kicks in his athletic career.
Saturday, however, the ball was not quite as round, and he had nearly 65,000 eyes on him.
In Virginia’s football home opener against USC Saturday, Reyering, a former Cavalier men’s soccer star, made his debut for the football team as the starting placekicker. Named the starter instead of fellow kickers redshirt freshman Chris Hinkebein and true freshman walk-on Robert Randolph just a week before the opening game, Reyering appeared on the field four times against USC; twice with the kickoff team, once on a field goal opportunity, and once for a successful extra point after Virginia’s lone touchdown, the first point of his career.
“Soccer final fours are a big thing, but I don’t think anything in college soccer can prepare you for what I faced [against USC],” Reyering said. “I was really excited and I didn’t want to disappoint anyone in the crowd, so that really got me pumped up.”
His first kickoff after Virginia’s only score was certainly the highlight of his afternoon. Reyering sent a knuckling line drive that landed untouched inside the Trojans’ 20 yard-line, and rolled all the way down to the 6 before sophomore returner Ronald Johnson scooped it up. Johnson managed a return of only 7 yards, earning Virginia one of its few cheers from the sold-out crowd in the 52-7 rout.
Was this unconventional — yet seemingly ingenious — kickoff by design?
“You could say that,” Reyering said with a wry smile. “They didn’t return it so far, so I guess you could say that.”
Given his history in the other kind of football, Reyering might deserve such seemingly accidental success. In his three years as a Cavalier soccer player, the 6-foot-6 German forward led Virginia in goals all three years he was with the program, accumulating 39 goals in his career. Reyering was only granted three years of eligibility in college soccer, however, as a result of his time spent on a semi-pro German team prior to enrolling at Virginia. The opportunity to play one more year of collegiate sports, perhaps combined with the setback of a torn ACL suffered at the end of last season, took him away from beginning a professional soccer career and onto the football field.
Now, on a Virginia team that lost one of its biggest personalities in Chris Long, Reyering is one of the more intriguing stories of 2008.
Reyering, however, did not win the starting kicker’s job by reputation. Though Groh has praised Reyering for his unsurprisingly strong leg, when asked what separated Reyering from Hinkebein and Randolph in training camp, Groh had a one-word answer: “accuracy.”
“We didn’t have any expectation as to [field goals], but we were impressed with how quickly and kind of unflappable he was in making the transition,” Groh said. “He strikes the ball cleanly and very evenly and he did a real nice job in camp.”
Groh also noted that Reyering uses soccer as an analogy for both kickoff and field goal situations. According to Groh, Reyering compares penalty kicks with kickoffs, and considers a kick in the run of play in a soccer game similar to a field goal.
On kickoffs, “the ball is just sitting on the ground, it’s not moving, it’s in a tee,” Groh said. “There’s certainly more timing and synchronization of different guys on field goals; you’ve got to get the snapper, holder, kicker all in the same rhythm.”
His first field goal try Saturday, a 46-yarder from the right hash mark with Virginia trailing 24-7 in the second quarter, tailed just to the right of the goal posts.
“I knew when I hit it that it was a little too far right,” Reyering said. “I don’t know what exactly the reason was for that because usually that doesn’t happen a lot from the right hash, so I’ve got to watch tape and figure that out and then improve for the next game.”
Reyering, however, will get more chances, as he continues to find his way in American football.
“It has been a great transition so far,” Reyering said. “Obviously I’m a little disappointed that I missed that field goal but I’m working on it every day and just hoping to get better.”
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