Middlebury alumnus Steve Hauschka ’07 returned to campus just over a week ago on Thursday, April 17, to speak in front of hundreds of current students and faculty. The former Panther recently kicked for the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks and inked a new three-year contract worth more than $9 million. After a brief introduction from Director of Communications Brad Nadeau, Hauschka took the stage, ostensibly with the intention of telling his audience a little about himself. After approximately 60 nervous seconds, during which Hauschka thanked the community for bringing him back about a dozen times, Nadeau came to the placekicker’s rescue and welcomed Sports Illustrated Senior Writer Alex Wolff to the stage to begin the interview. Apparently, Hauschka forgot for a moment that he was the star of the show. He looked more skittish in front of 450 college kids than he did on the turf in MetLife Stadium last February in front of a crowd of more than 82,000.
How could that be, I wondered. How could a multi-million dollar professional athlete seize up so obviously with so little on the line, and kick an oblong ball right down the middle of two uprights placed 18 feet 6 inches apart with all of America watching?
Courtesy of Rachel Frank
Wolff started out by asking Hauschka about his years at Middlebury, and for a little while Hauschka sounded like any one of the slightly cocky, but ultimately genuine senior football players around campus with their contagious laughs and sly grins. Momentarily, Hauschka almost seemed like a kid to me, and I forgot just how great the separation between us is. For a second, he was a student again, worried about his thesis and what he was going to do that weekend.
Wolff and Hauschka talked about the kicker’s athletic achievements – or should I say “failures” – and the result was hilariously comical. Hauschka was “too slow” for the soccer team his freshman year at Middlebury, and was relegated to the JV squad. Come springtime, Hauschka was among the final cuts from the lacrosse team. While Hauschka made light of these disappointments, keeping the audience chuckling while telling the tale, it was obvious in his self-deprecating tone that the man making more than anyone else in the room just to kick a football still feels a pang of disappointment when he thinks about how he was cut from two teams in one year.
“It was one of those moments, it tested you deep down, because I put a lot into that,” Hauschka said of being cut from lacrosse, “and loved the game. And you cut me,” he said, speaking directly to former head lacrosse coach Erin Quinn, who was in attendance.
Hauschka eventually recovered from these setbacks, earning his BA in neuroscience from Middlebury with a 3.59 GPA and passing up dental school in order to kick for a year at NC State. As it turned out, missing out on varsity athletics his freshman year became a blessing in disguise for Hauschka, who still had one year of NCAA eligibility. Despite setting the record for most career field goals in a Panther uniform in just three seasons, Hauschka had few Division-I offers. He could have gone to punt at Northwestern, but instead opted for the chance to kick for the Wolfpack, where he had an “(Almost) Perfect Season.” Living next to him was a freshman with a natural ability to lead, a diminutive quarterback named Russell Wilson, who would captain Hauschka and the Seahawks to the title five years later. (“[Wilson and lineman JR Sweezy] were on the hallway, and I got to know them well. Even though I was 21 and they were 18. They may have asked me once or twice to buy them some beer. I obviously said no,” Hauschka joked). In that season at NC State, Hauschka went 25-25 on extra points and 16-18 on field goals, including the game-winner in the Orange Bowl over Miami.
“The reason I did this was so that I wouldn’t regret not pursuing it 40 years from now,” Hauschka said at the time. “I didn’t want to regret having a chance to play on the Division-I level and never pursuing it….It’s really turned out to be the coolest thing I have ever done in my life.”
Well, over five years later, Hauschka has finally done something cooler than kick in the Orange Bowl. He has won a Super Bowl championship.
But the life of a kicker never comes easy. In the kicking game, it is often a matter of timing, both on and off the field. Hauschka’s father knew this. The elder Hauschka earned a tryout with the Dallas Cowboys, but before he even showed up to training camp the Cowboys had traded him to the Chicago Bears, who then proceeded to sign another kicker, unbeknownst to Hauschka. And so one Hauschka kicking career ended.
As for Steve, he has worn six different NFL uniforms, and even won a United Football League championship with the Las Vegas Locomotives in 2010, which he called a “low point” in his life. All of his wardrobe changes occurred within a span of three years, until the Seahawks claimed him off waivers on September 4, 2011. In three years with the Seattle organization, Hauschka has improved his field goal percentage every season, posting a career-best 94.3 percent rage last year, and knocking in all eight of his attempts during the playoffs. Hauschka credited his experiences being cut at Middlebury as helping him move past all of the ups and downs in his NFL career.
Possibly the most incredible part of the hour-and-a-half session was the sneak peek of the GoPro video that Hauschka put together with raw footage from Super Bowl week. The kicker wore a camera on his head from the moment the plane landed in New York to the celebration in the locker room after the game (he did take it off to kick, of course). While TV cameras can zoom in to the action on the field during and after the game, they cannot capture every personal moment the way Hauschka did. Though the video condensed more than a week into a few minutes, I felt the anticipation and the nerves and the calm before the storm, the storm itself and the lull during the second half when the game was decided, the jubilation during the celebration after the final whistle, and the letdown that came after it was all over, almost as if I had been there myself.
Usually, I roll my eyes and scoff when I hear professional athletes say that grit and determination is all that is needed to make it to the highest level. The fact of the matter is that there are thousands of kids who work themselves to the brink of collapsing, in every sport, who can never make it to the next level because they lack the talent needed to do so. And yet, here is the story of an athletic failure, a kid that was “too slow,” a self-proclaimed late-bloomer, who went from JV soccer player to Super Bowl champion. Perhaps kicking is one of those few specialized positions in sports where that evolution is possible. Or perhaps not. Hauschka’s story gives hope to every young adult toiling away on a low-level college team somewhere. Not every athlete is a phenom as a 16-year old. Not every kid can be recruited to play football in the SEC. But thanks to Hauschka, whose sports journey materialized later than most, there remains a glimmer of hope that for the rest of us it’s not too late.