How One Kick Helped a Super Bowl Champion Pave Trey Smack’s Path to Packers

GREEN BAY – Trey Smack’s path from a lacrosse field in Maryland to Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers, started with a conversation between former NFL kicker Matt Stover and his excited son.

“Joe came home one day after practice and said, ‘Dad! You should see Trey Smack kick the football! Holy crap!’” Stover told Packers On SI this week. “So, I kind of cracked up. I went, ‘All right, well, first of all, who’s Trey Smack?’”

Smack’s mom, Libby, had a similar question.

Who’s Matt Stover?

Trey Smack was a lacrosse player, first and foremost. He had played soccer, too, growing up, but decided to give football a shot as a sophomore at Severna Park (Md.) High School. As Libby said at the time, Stover recalled, “He just kind of kicks.”

When another dad mentioned that Joe Stover’s father was Matt Stover, she replied:

“‘Who’s Matt?’ They had no clue,” Stover said.

Stover is merely one of the greatest kickers in the history of the sport. He ranks sixth in NFL history with 2,004 points and 471 successful field goals.

With Joe Stover working as the conduit, Smack reached out to Matt Stover, and they eventually met at McDonogh High School in Owings Mills, Md., during the pandemic.

One Kick Changed Trey Smack’s Future

“I gave him an option of whether or not he wanted to be evaluated with one kick or after a workout,” Stover recalled. “If you know Trey a little bit, he’s confident. He’s got a good confidence and a chip, like he should. You want him to have that. He said, ‘I want one ball.’ I didn’t tell him what to do. He goes out there and he just puts the ball down. Boom.

“I said, ‘Hey, Libby, come here, come here, come here. He’s done with lacrosse. He’s got a pro leg.’ And that’s no joke. I said that. I knew right away that he had talent.”

The talent to succeed at a place like Green Bay, one of the most difficult cities in the NFL to kick.

Florida Gators kicker Trey Smack (29) celebrates a 54-yard field goal in the second half against Georgia. | Doug Engle / Florida Times-Union / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

“He was raw, but Trey’s a pretty big guy,” Stover continued. “He’s 6-1, put together, and that’s big for Green Bay. You don’t want a kicker that’s not strong. You want a kicker that’s strong and can get the ball to the target fast, because all the elements will play with the ball. So, Trey, I knew immediately. He’s 16 and he was an athlete. They took me serious and Trey began to hone in on his skills.”

Stover knows a little something about training kickers. Among his pupils was Mason Crosby, who was only 12 or 13 when he started working with Stover.

“I tend to say, if I can get with you five different times over probably a three- or four-month period of time, you've got enough to where – if you take it seriously and you do what I say – you can be your own coach,” Stover said.

Stover worked with Smack a handful of times in 2020 before he moved to Dallas, but that’s all that was needed because Smack listened and worked.

“What I do with them is I teach them the fundamentals, the absolutes, the things you have to do with kicking, and when you miss left and when you miss right, it’s a deviation from those particular things. So, you know what to do and you know why you missed left or right, just like golf, but it’s a lot less technical than golf because you don’t have a club and you’re just dealing with your body.

“What Trey did is he got with me and he listened to me. He really did, and he worked. He listened not only from a technique perspective but how to manage yourself with the number of kicks, how to get ready for competition – all the things that are necessary so you don't get hurt, so that you manage the weight room properly, so you manage the coaches properly.”

Good Isn’t Good Enough

One important lesson Smack learned was that just because the kick was good because it split the uprights doesn’t mean it was a good kick.

“He humbled me a lot, no doubt,” Smack said at the Packers’ rookie camp on Friday. “He’s like, ‘You need to do this right.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I made it.’ He’s like, ‘That was not good.’”

It was an important lesson given the challenges Smack will face in Green Bay in December and January, when Mother Nature is more apt to steer a ball that’s not perfectly struck wide of the mark.

Told Smack’s story, Stover said: “So, there’s a particular way that you can kick a football that creates a lot of power. Oh, my gosh, it’s great. But I’m going to tell you, you’re going to start missing and you’re going to have no idea why, because you’re going against the foundation, the fundamentals of the game. It’s the same thing in golf. Yeah, you can get pretty good with it but you’re not going to be consistent enough.

“And I said, ‘Just trust me on it. Trey, you’ve got to do this. Just trust me.’ And he began to trust me. And it does limit your power a little bit, but it increases the accuracy tenfold. So, when you do miss left or when you do miss right, you know why right after you do it and you correct it for the next one. Because in the NFL, you can miss one field goal but you better not miss two. So, that’s really what it comes down to, and that’s how I made it in the league 20 years. I knew why I missed it and you didn’t go out there and miss it again.”

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