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I love kicking off. Just like anyone else, after a while, you're like, 'Man, I don't want to practice this.' But I love kicking off and I want to try to do it as long as I physically can do it.
I'll watch a highlight tape of my kicks and I'll play a song that I like the night before the game and then I'll sing that song in my head to visually get myself ready and have positive thoughts.
There are a lot of reasons why guys can miss - it isn't always just black and white - but you just have to learn to move on from it. That's just the approach I take. I've missed plenty of kicks before.
I've always been able to move on and contain. I get mad, I get frustrated. No one gets more upset when they miss a kick than I do. But I have to be able to get over it for the sake of the team and my own job.
Just to keep my mind sharp. When you have like one job, you want to think about it enough to do well, but you can't over think it. It's not rocket science. It's just trying to kick the ball through the uprights.
If you are a reliever, you get one inning per game or if you are a starter you get one game per week. There is a lot of buildup for a little bit of work compared to the guys who play every down or play every day in baseball.
In New England we get awful weather and it's cold. You definitely appreciate the times where you aren't freezing your butt off, because we are always outside practicing and playing. It's nice to not have to bundle up to play.
I'm so blessed to have a chance to play 15 years in one spot. I know my position is different than most. But even in my position, guys that have played it this long, have probably already been with two or three different teams.
All I really think about is, 'Don't try to kick the ball too hard,' because a lot of times when I missed kicks, it was because I tried to kill it. I just try to think of a smooth swing, being slow and under control, and making the kick.
It's a high-pressure situation to be in my position, but I've kind of gravitated toward those positions in sports. It's nothing that I worry too much about. I'm not going to act like I have the most stressful job in the world. This is pretty darn fun.
Sometimes there are really severe conditions like super, super wind or crazy wind or something like that that you don't really get to practice for. But it's kind of you just show up and whatever you get in warm-ups, you kind of adjust to it and play as you go.
You lose weeks of sleep over a bad game, and a bad game could be one missed kick. So the ones you make, you just try to build on the confidence with it, and the ones you miss, you try to get it out of your head as quickly as possible and try to make the next one.
There was a time where I was such a perfectionist even if I made the kick, but that's no way to live. I can tell you what, that will drive you crazy. I'm very hard on myself, but if the ball goes in a little bit left of the middle, you're not going to hear me crying about it.
Pitching, if you have a bad start, a lot of the blame is put on you and then you have to sit around and think about it all week. And the same thing with kicking. You either make it or miss and no one is going to make excuses for you. The mentalities of the two are very comparable.
Two to four classes each offseason - just trying to chip away. There are times when I think, 'Man, I don't need to be doing this. Why am I doing this to myself?' But to fight through that and come out and make a good grade, it feels worth it. Hopefully something good comes out of it one day.
If I'm throwing a no-hitter and someone says, 'Hey, you've got a no-hitter,' obviously I'd be like, 'Yeah, I know.' I just try to be humble. I don't like to talk about myself. I have no problem speaking up when I screw up, but if I'm doing good, people are going to notice. I don't need to talk about it.
Soccer was probably the most fun game I've played because I never walked away feeling like I had a bad game. If you play a position in soccer where you can out-hustle or out-work or out-prepare somebody, it is a lot easier to walk away from the game and say, I gave it my all. I could always try. I could always hustle.
The hardest thing about kicking field goals sometimes is you don't know when you're going to play. You don't know what situation you're going to be in. I remember in the Atlanta Super Bowl, it's two weeks of the biggest buildup of your life, and I didn't step on the field until there was two seconds left in the second quarter.
I've made game-winners, I've missed game-winners. I've pitched shutouts, and I've given up 10 runs. You just deal with the experiences and learn how to get over the bad outings and learn from them, so they don't occur time and time again. You take what you did right from the good games and turn those into, 'How do I repeat that success?'