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BT Potter article on The Athletic (subscription required)
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BT Potter article on The Athletic (subscription required)


Jun 24, 2019, 8:21 AM

https://theathletic.com/1037016/2019/06/20/hes-got-a-gift-the-big-leg-that-gives-clemson-confidence-in-b-t-potter/


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Re: BT Potter article on The Athletic (subscription required)


Jun 24, 2019, 8:22 AM

What's the basic story?

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Your guess is as good as mine***


Jun 24, 2019, 8:32 AM



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Re: Your guess is as good as mine***


Jun 24, 2019, 9:42 AM

Sounds positive.....whatever it is.

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Re: BT Potter article on The Athletic (subscription required)


Jun 24, 2019, 10:15 AM [ in reply to Re: BT Potter article on The Athletic (subscription required) ]

Basic story....Potter has a heck of a leg. Played soccer, moved to football in middle school. He's small, but has a God given talent in a powerful, crazy fast leg swing. Works hard. Has had excellent coaching. Had to learn to slow his leg swing so that he can watch his foot hit the ball. 5'10" and can dunk a basketball.

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Someone w/ a subscription will you please post it***


Jun 24, 2019, 10:12 AM



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Best Is The Standard


Copy pasta


Jun 24, 2019, 10:15 AM

Bob Potter can’t remember all of the details, but some important ones stand out.

It’s a Tuesday evening in June as the father of Clemson kicker BT Potter takes a phone call in his Rock Hill, S.C., home to talk about his second-born son. About 10 minutes in, a thought sprints into his mind and he lets out an innocent giggle.

“Let me give you a little story,” the 63-year-old father of two says.

Bob Potter explains that a few years ago, his son Benjamin Thomas Potter (nicknamed BT) was on an unofficial visit to Clemson as a high schooler. Thanks to his status as a top kicker recruit — the No. 3 kicker in the 247Sports Composite — BT was given a field pass to spend some time on Death Valley’s sideline before a game while Dabo Swinney’s staff recruited him.

Many of Clemson’s highly regarded 2018 signees were there, too, also lined up on the sideline. BT joined them. A few moments later, one of the Clemson security guards stole a glance at the 5-foot-10, 150-pound baby-faced Potter.

“You’ve got to move back, you’ve got to move back, you’ve got to move back!” Bob Potter remembers the security guard telling BT, assuming he was just another face with a Clemson sideline pass on the field breaking the rules.

“You’re too close!”

Right as he said so, another recruit looked at the mistaken security guard and set the record straight. BT was, in fact, allowed to be on the sideline, the fellow recruit explained.

“That’s our new little kicker,” Xavier Thomas said, as the security guard naturally backed off.

“I thought that was kind of funny,” Bob Potter says now. “BT doesn’t look like a football player.”

That “new little kicker” is now primed for the most important season of his life. With All-American Greg Huegel gone, the Tigers’ starting job belongs to BT Potter, who is entering his sophomore season.

How will he handle it? The Tigers feel good about his chances.

And there’s a specific reason.

Potter enters the season with some valuable experience as a kickoff specialist, and that’s important to keep in mind.

Having earned the starting kickoff role immediately upon arrival last year, Potter ran with his niche role as a freshman whose average of 63.76 yards per kickoff tied for the No. 24 in the nation. He ranked 18th in touchback percentage (69.3), even producing seven of eight in the national title game against Alabama.

As he prepares for his new role, that experience Potter has with kickoff duties will serve him well.

“He’s an anomaly on kickoffs with regard to when he mis-hits the ball into the wind, he’s still putting the ball five-deep, which is a game-changer,” said Potter’s private kicking coach, Dan Orner. “It helps coaches sleep well at night knowing that, ‘Hey, these guys are starting on their 20 or 15 every time.’”

It’s the field goals and PATs that Potter will need to get used to as someone who kicked only one field goal in 2018. Even then, it was a 24-yarder in a Clemson blowout that became the worst home loss in Florida State history. He also kicked seven PATs, making them all, to Huegel’s 76 makes out of 78.

It’s a massive role Potter is stepping into, but the Tigers take comfort in their knowledge about his greatest weapon. If you’ve seen it, you know.

“He’s got a gift. And we knew that early,” Bob said of his athletic son, who can even dunk a basketball at 5-10. “I don’t know (where it came from). It didn’t come from his dad. I can tell you that.”

The gift that gives Clemson so much relief is the sheer power in BT’s right leg. It’s as booming as it is confusing coming from a player of his size — there are only three weights on the Clemson roster lighter than his 175 pounds — and yet for Clemson, it’s better to just appreciate it than to question the contradiction.

“You see this little-bitty guy Potter running out there and just, ‘Pow!’ He’s just booming the ball to the back of the end zone,” Swinney said last fall. “Even when he mis-hits it, he still nails it … that’s why we recruited him and gave him an opportunity to compete and he won the (kickoff) job. He beat out a senior (Huegel).”

The power of the right leg started to form when BT was an elite childhood soccer player who played at such a high level that one of his former teammates is now a goalie at Michigan State, while another is bound for Clemson’s men’s soccer team. But it was a random day during middle school recess that started to take Potter down the football path.

Potter played organized football only once before middle school, and that was in second grade. He was tiny, and he curiously became an offensive tackle after many of the skill positions had already been filled. He hated it, bowed out after one season and decided to stick to soccer.

Six years later, the football coach at Saluda Trail Middle School saw a young phenom wreaking havoc on the kickball field one day during recess and decided he would try to recruit the kid based on the potential he saw. The young Potter went back home that afternoon and declared to his father that he wanted to give football another go.

“I said, ‘What position are you going to play?’” Bob recalled. “He says, ‘I’m going to be the kicker.’”

That day changed everything.

After sitting out the first week upon joining the team, Potter handled every kickoff for an eighth-grade team quarterbacked by Clemson wide receiver/cornerback Derion Kendrick. They went undefeated.

As Potter started to show more promise, his eventual high school coach reached out to Orner to see if Orner could take this 130-pounder with so much raw talent and turn him into someone who could consistently and under control hit the ball inside the 5-yard line.

By the end of ninth grade, Potter was working with Orner, who has been a private coach for elite talent in the Carolinas, including Alabama punter Skyler DeLong, Wake Forest kicker Nick Sciba and former Clemson kicker Chandler Catanzaro, now with the New York Jets.

Potter was becoming a quick star.

“I always tell guys, ‘If you’re gifted with a great work ethic and you’re naturally gifted, it’s kind of a perfect storm,’” Orner said. “And really, that’s when BT kind of took off.”

As the years passed, Orner and Potter started to take the natural talent and refine it.

While many of the young kickers Orner sees could benefit from speeding up their leg swing, Potter needed to do the opposite: Slow down so that he could give himself enough time to see the ball and make correct contact.

“I think initially the goal was to get him a great foundation,” Orner said. “Once he kind of headed into his junior year (of high school) and his leg swing really developed, it was a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because he had such raw power and such fast leg speed. But now, it’s a matter of controlling that, and that’s one of the biggest things we’ve done this offseason.”

Potter was a four-year starter at South Pointe High School and has never lost a championship. His high school team with Kendrick won four state titles, and Clemson is coming off a 15-0 season that culminated in a blowout win against Alabama for the national championship.

His football IQ, in addition to the work ethic Orner speaks of and the power everyone sees, is also high, as demonstrated by the most impressive play Bob ever saw his son make.

As Potter’s high school team was trading leads back and forth against a powerhouse opponent his senior year, he took his place for a routine punt when his snapper sailed the ball over his head.

Potter then ran to pick up the ball around the 5-yard line, snagged it, turned to his left side and started to run up the sideline. When he sensed his opponents were catching up to him, he dropped the ball, kicked it with his left foot — remember, he’s a righty — and sent a line drive to the 50-yard line, where there was no one there to receive it.

“It was just amazing that he had the frame of mind to do that instantly. And his opposite foot while he’s running,” Bob said, laughing. “It was crazy.”

Combine Potter’s raw talent with those kinds of instincts, and you get plays like that. It gives his father — and Clemson — the comfort of knowing Potter should be just fine if Clemson finds itself with the game on the line and needs a winning kick through the uprights.

If anything, it’s Bob and Tammy, BT’s mother, who get more nervous in the stands. Bob tends to go silent, and Tammy talks out loud to manage stress. Every time her son kicks off, she stomps her foot out of habit.

“He had one field goal in high school where it was a tie game and he kicked it with a little bit of time left on the clock, but he’s never had a field goal that made the difference in a game,” Bob said, acknowledging that he, too, has never seen his son in a high-pressure situation and is eager for the 2019 season.

“But he likes that pressure. He likes being out there. He does so much better than I do. … He deals with it. I don’t know how he does it. We don’t really talk about that. But he’s got a way of dealing with it.”

Sophomore kickers historically have performed well for the Tigers, and Clemson expects Potter to be next in an impressive line. According to Clemson records, provided to The Athletic by longtime sports information director Tim Bourret, there have been eight sophomore kickers in Clemson history since freshman eligibility began in 1972.

Four of those eight have made either the first or second All-ACC teams: Chris Gardocki in 1989, Nelson Welch in 1992, Catanzaro in 2011 and Huegel in 2016. Together, the eight kickers have combined to hit 74.3 percent of their field-goal attempts and 96.9 percent of their PATs. Gardocki was also a third-team AP All-American. The eight of them together scored a total of 715 points in their sophomore years, with Catanzaro leading the way with 118.

As for Potter, there has been no one of his stature who has been more of an anomaly to Orner in terms of kickoffs.

The two have spent a lot of time this summer talking about how Potter will approach PATs and field goals differently than he does kickoffs. When he’s not at home in the offseason to work with Orner directly, he’s sending his coach videos of himself working alone in the indoor facility to then get some feedback. A lot of work goes on behind closed doors for Potter, and Orner has reminded him that field goals require more precision than kickoffs, just like chess requires more precision than checkers.

If Potter can remember that and apply it with the powerful leg he already boasts, he should be just fine.

The stage is now his. As a lifelong Clemson fan who went to his first Tigers game in 1969 with his uncle, then watched Clemson football as a highway patrolman working the games, Bob Potter is just as eager as the rest of the Clemson fan base to see how this all plays out.

“He can do anything,” Bob said. “BT, he’s got a gift. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

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