A Gatorade bottle balances on top of Andrew Payne’s head, as freshman long snapper Jake Hale inhales and grips a football with both hands from about 15 feet away.
Hale is lunged in a four-point stance with his right hand on the nose of the ball — his left cushioning the bottom.
With a simple, smooth motion of the wrists, Hale snaps the ball between his legs and the ball projects toward Payne’s head.
“It’s impressive,” special teams coordinator Brian Haines said of Hale’s long snapping ability. “There’s some downtime for special (teams), so they’ve got time to think of a lot of stuff."
Hale, who was offered a full scholarship from Ohio this fall for his long snapping ability, said he has been mastering the art of long snapping since he was in seventh grade.
This summer, Hale videotaped his craft on Twitter — knocking bottles of his teammate’s heads from yards away, long snapping off the top of Peden Stadium into a trash bin — and garnered some attention locally.
“Our Long Snapper @jakehale30 is THE best. #OU,” freshman kicker Louie Zervos tweeted Aug. 12 with a video of Hale zipping a football between his legs with ease.
Four hundred-thirty retweets, 594 favorites and a few mentions to ESPN and Bleacher Report on social media later, and Hale has brought light to a position that is rapidly growing in importance to the Bobcats.
“You see everybody else do it ... then watching him do it, that was something else. It was awesome,” punter Mitch Bonnstetter said. Bonnstetter has seen first-hand how impressive Hale’s skill is. “That was actually his first time doing the tricks. It was just spur of the moment. He’s that good.”
Hale isn’t the only one either.
He is a part of a rapidly growing position, which has become a specialized skill across all levels of football since the early 2000s.
As of the 2014 NFL season, every team had a specialized long snapper — 13 of which didn’t even play another position on the field. The median salary is $730,000 for specialists, according to SB Nation’s The Phinsider. Hale, as the long snapper, snaps the ball a longer distance exclusively for punters and kickers on specials teams for punts and field goals.
Camps specifically for long snapping fill entire pages of Google search results, as Hale's traveled as far as Las Vegas for a long snapping camp. When “Long snapping” is searched on Youtube, close to 51,600 results are shown.
“The Buffalo long snapper (Corbin Grassman) posted a video,” Hale said of how the trick shots started. “The first one, I snapped the bottle off of Louie’s head and then later that day, we started coming up with ideas, and we started snapping off the top of the stadium.”
Hailing from Powell, Ohio, Hale said his passion for snapping the football began early in his career, but he didn’t start taking the art seriously until he attended camps his junior year of high school and started talking to coaches about potentially long snapping.
“(Long snapping) is just a way to get on the field. When I started snapping I never thought about that,” Hale said. “It was a way for me to get on the field in seventh grade, so I kept sticking with it. When I figured I could play in high school, I fell in love with it.”
Hale will replace former long snapper Miles Chapman this season. With Chapman as long snapper, Bonnstetter and kicker Josiah Yazdani saw solid production — something Hale can hopefully equate to.
In 2014, Yazdani made 17 of 26 of his field goals and Bonnstetter punted 63 times for 2,631 yards with 14 punts over 50 yards.
Yet, the job of a long snapper might go unnoticed. Crammed in between the hulking bodies of lineman, Hale probably won’t captivate his peers with his arm strength or speed. Instead, his meticulous attention for perfection is something even the coldest Bobcat fan can appreciate.
“It’s a thing where he’ll start getting some snaps when second down is up. Third down he’ll be snapping a few times to make sure he’s ready to go,” Haines said of Hale preparing for his first season. “And it’s staying in the game mentally because there could be some down time. As an offense, you don’t want to punt a whole lot, so when it does happen, he’s got to be ready when his number's called.”
Hale exhales and with a flick of the wrists snaps the ball between his legs, aiming for the Gatorade bottle on top of Payne’s head. The football soars just above Payne and connects with the bottle, sending it tumbling to the ground.
All in a day’s work for a long snapper.
@Lukeoroark
Lr514812@ohio.edu
