LINCOLN — A good sign to Alex Henery that he handled things right last season was that the Nebraska kicker and punter thought he did some of his best work in the Huskers’ last few football games.
That also took care of any concerns that the increased workload might be too much for him.
“I finished strong and my leg wasn’t dead,” Henery said. “I think I had pretty good games at the Big 12 and bowl game, so I was pretty happy with where my leg was at.
“I thought it was a pretty successful year, actually. It went a lot better than I thought it was going to.”
There was just a touch of trial-and-error involved last spring and fall as Henery added the NU punting chores to his place-kicking duties.
Henery hadn’t done both since his senior year at Omaha Burke, and this was going to be on a much bigger stage and over the course of a longer season.
“There was a little bit of experimentation going on, in terms of how many reps he needed and how much we really wanted to work him,” NU assistant coach John Papuchis said. “But I thought by the end of the year we got a pretty good regimen for him, and he figured it out.”
Henery had enough left in his right leg to kick four field goals in both the Big 12 championship game and Holiday Bowl, including six of 40 yards or longer. He finished his junior season at 24 of 28, missing just once from inside 50.
One of Henery’s best punting games came in the regular-season finale at Colorado, when he averaged 50.7 yards for six kicks and placed four inside the Buffaloes’ 20. Henery then put two more inside the 20 against both Texas and Arizona in the postseason games.
Looking back, Henery said he felt he was too inconsistent with his punting, which he hopes to fine-tune through spring practice and into next season. But his 41.4-yard average was still the best by a Husker since Sam Koch in 2005.
Papuchis said he’ll continue to be a little more hands-on with the punting, because NU is a very technique- and directional-oriented team.
The kicking? It’s best to largely leave Henery alone after three seasons in which he has made a combined 50 of 57 field goals and 139 of 140 extra points.
“Not only because he is extremely talented, he’s also a self-corrector, very introspective,” Papuchis said. “He knows what he did right and what he did wrong, and what he needs to work on.”
The work can add up in practice and games. That’s why Henery spent some of the winter just resting his leg.
The balancing act will continue if Henery handles kicks and punts again in 2010, and he even worked on some kickoffs this week as the possibility remains that NU might consider a redshirt season for Adi Kunalic.
“Alex is a mature guy and I’ve always taken an approach with him that he’ll know when it’s time to kind of pull up on the reins a little bit,” Papuchis said. “I let him kind of legislate himself, as long as he’s ready to play on Saturday.”
LINK
