PISCATAWAY, N.J. — Two Australians have influenced Flynn Appleby, helping the Rutgers football punter through a year of transitions. Not surprisingly, one of the influences is Adam Korsak, a fellow Australian.
Like Appleby, Korsak left Australia to pursue a dream to play college football. The two are close and speak almost daily. Korsak, who won the Ray Guy Award last year as the nation’s top punter, helped Appleby on the field with his technique. The Rutgers legend would also mentor his countryman, whose world had turned upside down from the life he had down under.
The other influence on Appleby is a former PGA star who helped the Rutgers punter with his mental transition to a sport that was foreign to him in a land that was also equally foreign to him.
Appleby has been nothing but impressive for Rutgers through the first two games of the season, showing not just his much-advertised strong leg but also the ability to accurately place his kicks. Through eight punts this season, Appleby has yet to have a touchback. Five of his punts have landed inside the 20-yard line and he is averaging 40.5 yards per punt.
Last year he spent on the sidelines and in the weight room, learning a game he practiced but had never played.
“I think it was good to spend more time around at Rutgers and just being over here in general, just sort of – you’re always gonna be more comfortable,” Appleby told Rutgers Wire.
“But I was super fortunate to be able to learn off Adam and just be able to see him put together the season that he did and well deserving Ray Guy. I was very lucky to get to spend some more time with the coaching staff who’ve been really supportive as well. So many great folks and great relationships with coaches and players here now. I was just really eager to get out there and get into it this season.”
In carrying on the tradition of Korsak, his predecessor, Appleby is certainly carving his own path at Rutgers. Which is fitting, because Appleby’s path here was far from conventional.
Appleby is 24 years old, which makes him among the oldest players on the Rutgers roster. Having grown up in Australia, he didn’t watch the NFL or any American football for that matter.
Instead, he played Australian Rules Football, which combines some elements of soccer with rugby. Add a heaping dose of mayhem, in a field shaped like an oval, and it is easy to see why a nation founded by convicts and criminals would love the game. It looks like an organized jailbreak played with bone-crunching hits and a violence that would make Quentin Tarantino blush.
No, seriously, Australia was a penal colony.
And although the mild-mannered Appleby is a strong scholar-athlete (he flirted with a 4.0 G.P.A. last semester), he also excelled at Aussie Rules, turning professional in the sport in 2018. He played in the league for several seasons but eventually sought another opportunity.
After tuning into some NFL games in the fall of 2021, Appleby would hook up with Prokick Australia, an organization that mentors and trains Australians to try the American version of football. He landed at Rutgers last spring and after a year of apprenticeship under Korsak, he won the punting job at Rutgers.
And what a year of learning it was to see first-hand the meticulous Korsak piece together a season that culminated in the Ray Guy Award as the nation’s top punter.
For Rutgers, in the fourth year of a rebuild under head coach Greg Schiano, having a punter the quality of Korsak and now Appleby is quite the luxury. The Rutgers offense has shown signs of improving this year, but still it remains a work in progress.
That Appleby has shown the ability to change field position for the defense is a big asset, to say the least.
“I think last year was hugely important. Spending the year as Adam’s under study – they’re close friends. Adam shared everything with him from traveling across the world to being a foreign student to being a punter in our system,” Schiano said on Wednesday following practice.
“And they worked a lot together and he and Adam still talk – I think daily – about what he’s doing. But Flynn is really improved. He is he’s a mature guy, he’s an older guy. And he’s a lot of fun to coach just like Adam, he really is fun. He’s into it. He studies it. He makes suggestions that I usually listen to because they know – they’re the ones doing it. So yeah, I enjoy (Flynn) and he’s getting better and better. You know, our punt team set a record last year and we’re trying to chase that same one. One punt at a time. I don’t know if we can attain that level again, but we’re going to try.”
Appleby’s gains last year are certainly noticeable, and he has pieced together quite a nice start to the season. He cautions that despite his start to the season there is room for improvement and to find greater consistency.
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There is a quiet determination to his talk, a focus that speaks of his desire to daily improve as a specialist.
“That’s always what I’m just focusing on, what we can control and I know what my job is,” Appleby said.
“It may not might not be the most glamorous, but I just really enjoy it. I was just excited to get out and do it. The whole team has been great. They’ve always been supportive of me. And it’s great having my teammates around you that care about what you care about, and they’re willing to put the effort and time into special teams as well. So just really fortunate that it’s valued and let’s just focus on executing from here.”
He was drawn to American football in large part, he says, due to the American higher education system that allows him to play football and earn a college degree.
And yet American football is very different from the game he grew up with, from the uniforms (Aussie Rules doesn’t have padding or helmets) to the game’s flow. The game Appleby grew up playing and loving is far more free-flowing, with similarities to soccer and rugby in some respects.
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Whereas American football is punctuated by a brief flurry of action followed by a break to re-set the lines of conflict.
And for Appleby, there is plenty of downtime.
If Rutgers is moving the ball well offensively, he might be on the field just a couple of times a game. Even if he is busy and punting multiple times each quarter, Appleby is still on the field for a few moments before trotting off.
That’s a lot of time spent stretching or chewing on sunflower seeds.
The mental adjustment from the frantic sport he called football to the one he now plays took a drastic mental adjustment, one helped he says by his cousin who played on the PGA Tour, Stuart Appleby.
“I guess it probably felt like the most similarity to me of golf to be honest with you,” the Rutgers punter said.
“My cousin’s played on the PGA Tour for a few decades…And he’s on the Champions Tour now so He lives down in Florida. So I’ve been down to see him in the spring,
“I was down there and spent some time with him. He was preparing for a few tournaments so it’s interesting just to tap into his mindset and stuff when he’s going around to to play tournaments and stuff like that – he’s playing some big tournaments. So it’s that sort of atmosphere that you’re in as a punter and sort of trying to keep pretty calm because that’s what it is like and for punting and field goal and that sort of stuff. Keep pretty low-key. So yeah, it’s just interesting to hear what his thoughts were.”