How do you tie kicking shoes?

I remember my very first NFL game like it was yesterday.

I remember the hugeness of the stadium in San Diego, the perfect grass, the hard, slick preseason game in-field dirt I had to learn to kick on for the first time ever.

I remember the wind whipping around the uprights and the fact that my former college coach was coaching the Chargers.

In the middle of all of this, I remember most a conversation I had with a referee just before the start of the game.  It was a conversation that threw me off mentally right before the game, just before my first ‘ever’ NFL field goal attempt of any kind.

Of all things, he asked me if I always tied my shoe laces the way they were tied for that particular game!

I told him that I’d been tying my shoe laces that particular way for many years through out college.

I thought he was just making small talk, but as it turned out there was a slight problem that needed my attention before I was even allowed to play that day.

My shoe laces were not tied properly?  This is the big leagues!  I really couldn’t believe what he was saying.

The ref told me that I was going to have to tie my kicking shoe “a different way” or I wouldn’t be allowed to kick in the game that day.

The issue he had was some sort of NFL uniform regulation that had to be adhered to.  For years I had taken my extra long soccer shoe laces and wrapped them around my ankle (on my kicking shoe) once before tying them off on top of my shoe.  He wanted me to keep the laces on the shoe instead.

No big deal, right?  Just tied the laces a different way and move on.

To me at the time, it was a huge deal!  It was a complete change in my equipment, an unfamiliar modification that I wasn’t used to right before the biggest game of my life.

He said, “I don’t care how you tie your shoes but the laces can’t touch the sock the way they are now.”

Thinking back on the experience made me wonder how many other kickers today have challenges trying to figure out what to do with those extra long soccer laces.

How do you tie your shoelaces to kick footballs?

The change that I made on the spot that day stuck with me permanently.  I still tie my laces today the same way I did that day after the quick adjustment.

For the years that followed, I began wrapping my extra long kicking shoe laces around my foot.  That is, I began pulling the laces straight up nice and tight, then wrapping them around the shoe (not the ankle) so that they looped UNDER two of the cleats on the bottom of the shoe.

The wrap around served two purposes.

First, it got all that string out of the way! 

Secondly, and most importantly, and really molds the kicking shoe to the foot and snugs the kicking spot (the sweet spot of the shoe) down to create the perfect kicking surface.

As we’ve discussed on this site, we are trying to target the ‘Navicular’ bone when we kick and wrapping the laces down tightly just over the top of this bone ensures clean contact with your kicking show!

See the colored bone in the diagram of the skeleton foot here?  That’s the sweet spot on the kicking foot (or should be if you are not doing this!) and THAT is the bone we want to wrap the laces around.

Again, we don’t want to be on top of this bone, just north of it.  We’ll upload the video soon to show exactly how to tie using the wrap around method.

Until then, keep kicking bombs no matter how you tie your kicking shoes!