From Aussie football dreams to the NFL: How Jordan Berry was a punting pioneer
The Vikings punter got his break by making a key connection in high school
By Sam Ekstrom
EAGAN — When Seahawks punter Michael Dickson had his punt blocked in the Week 4 Thursday night game, scooped it up with one hand and punted it 68 yards on the run, he delivered the punting highlight of the year by channeling his Australian football roots.
For those with an Aussie rules football background, like Dickson and Vikings punter Jordan Berry, that’s the type of punting they grew up with. Chaotic and improvisational.
“Handy little play,” Berry said of Dickson’s effort in an interview with Purple Insider.
Berry has reason to be nostalgic and proud when he sees a play like that. Nostalgia for the sport he grew up with that pushed him toward a professional punting career. Proud because it was his own journey that helped pave the way for players like Dickson and countless others.
As a high school student in Melbourne, Berry faced a decision point in his athletic career: Stay home and try to make it playing Aussie rules, where punters were dime a dozen, or try to forge his way to a college program in the United States and eventually the NFL.
Berry took the road that would bring him halfway around the world.
“You're essentially just standing there and someone throws you ball, you kick it as hard as you can,” said Berry of the American game, “that was pretty inviting to me.”
Aussie vs. American rules
The type of play Dickson made appears on highlight reels in the States because of its rarity. The NFL punt gets a boring reputation. It represents surrender, in a way, and the only punting highlights usually involve a punter getting his punt blocked or trying to chase down a much faster kick returner.
But zany punts in the Australian Football League are commonplace. All players develop the skill because punting the ball is primarily how you advance the ball and how you produce points.
Watch a highlight reel of Australian rules football and you’ll quickly see the appeal. Thirty-six players running around an oval-shaped field with no apparent boundaries, high-flying punts that resemble Hail Mary passes with bodies running at each other full speed, players punting from impossible angles trying to make it through the goal posts, and scores that resemble college basketball games.
It looks awesome.
The problem for a natural punter like Berry is that Australian footballers often need other skills to be a well-rounded player, whereas American punters can specialize in their craft. Berry, who had his sights set on reaching the professional level, questioned his own endurance as an Aussie rules player, so he made the decision in 2007 to start shifting his focus.
Berry was aware of Australian NFL punters Sav Rocca, Ben Graham, Darren Bennett and Matt McBriar, who received extra attention in the Australian sports media. Rocca, Graham and Bennett had been established Australian Football League athletes before shifting overseas to play in the NFL, while McBriar took the more non-traditional path, earning a scholarship from the University of Hawaii thanks to his success at a handful of kicking competitions, and eventually getting a foothold with the Dallas Cowboys.
Even if the NFL wasn’t in the cards yet for Berry in his teen years, the college route had its perks.
“I sort of learned about college football and the opportunities that had in terms of getting school paid for, rent, food, all that covered, which was a pretty good opportunity,” said Berry, “and realistically getting what you would as a rookie practice squad spot on an Australian football team, so I thought that'd be a great way to go and started researching it as best I could and decided to take that path.”
That’s when Berry met Nathan Chapman.
‘A billion emails, a billion phone calls’
Mention Chapman’s name today and you’ll be told he’s the connection that produced 98 percent of the American football punters that hale from Down Under.
Almost two decades prior, he was looking to make the difficult transition from Australian football to the NFL after an up-and-down playing career. Chapman played for the Bears and Lions in Brisbane but couldn’t gain much traction, so he networked his way into a tryout with the Green Bay Packers.
Bears, Lions and Packers… that’s pretty much the whole NFC North.
Chapman gave it a run in the 2004 preseason for Green Bay and couldn’t land the full-time job, but he returned to Australia with a vision and an appetite for the American game.
“I tried to have a go myself, I didn't quite make it, but I wanted to still be involved in the sport,” Chapman told Purple Insider, “and we knew that there were people in Melbourne or Victoria or Australia where we lived that could kick a football, so it was almost like wanting to help other guys do it a little better. There was no real pathway back then.”
Chapman says he sent “a billion emails” and made “a billon phone calls” to create the organization ProKick Australia, an eventual haven for young Australian punters with an eye toward college football in the United States.
But creating the infrastructure for ProKick was a challenge. American coaches had no awareness of ProKick, which made networking difficult since ProKick hadn’t established any credibility, and video technology also wasn’t as good as it is today, so sending clips to potential recruiters wasn’t as feasible.
In 2008, ProKick accepted its first group of trainees. Three showed up, including a Jordan Berry that was smaller than his current listing at 6-foot-5, 205 pounds.
“He would've been 160 pounds wringing wet when he turned up,” said Chapman. “He was skinny and he wasn't 6-5 when he turned up with us, so to watch him get taller and stronger and then explode it was quite the transformation over 10 years.”
But his slenderness didn’t detract from the obvious skill that Berry possessed.
“We had a nickname for him, and it was in essence Team Jordan,” recounted Chapman. “Team Jordan, meaning, it was almost like this kid's going to make it no matter what, because everything he did was about him getting better and working his ass off to go as far as he could with it, and it was a real serious nature to the way he went about his training.
“We could see that in his eyes from Day 1,” Chapman continued. “It was like a boxer going into a fight who had his team around him. It was like, this is the team that's going to help Jordan get to where he leads himself. You could literally see that from Day 1, and not necessarily that he had an NFL leg when he came down as a 17-year-old, but also the amount of work that he put in and the attention to detail that he put in to just get to college, and he certainly didn't let up when he left college.”
Getting to college required a trip to the United States to attend a pair of camps in California and Las Vegas, where Berry made a key connection with some alumni from Eastern Kentucky University. They met Berry, secured his tape and gave a recommendation to the EKU coaches.
Berry was in.
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