Mention the name Sarah Fuller and anyone watching the weekend news cycle knows who you mean. Fuller made headlines for kicking two PATs for Vanderbilt Saturday, a feat recorded by history as the first woman to score points in a Power Five college football game.
Fuller isn’t the first to kick in college, but she distinguished herself by doing it at the game’s highest competitive level, a big reason the feat seemed to resonate louder than those who came before. There are plenty of likely factors for high interest in the story, however, starting with the way it punctured the ongoing pandemic gloom with a welcome dose of positivity. Fuller did something first, she did something well, and she did something cool.
But mostly, she did something hard. And that should not get lost.
Just ask Dan Bailey, whose nightmare of a Sunday for the Vikings might cost him his NFL kicking job. Better yet, ask Ashley Martin Cockrell, who converted three PATs for Jacksonville State back in 2001. She’s been where Fuller is now, a soccer player tapped to help her school’s shorthanded football team, who ignored the outside noise and calmly split the uprights.
“I was waiting in a waiting room at a doctor’s office and reading Facebook and someone posted a story about her, and in the comments, people were writing how she didn’t kick a field goal, just an extra point,” said Cockrell, now the dean of students the Florida elementary school her three children attend. “A lot goes into that one little moment. She’s a person — not only that, the guys on the team, they’re all people, too. A lot of things have to go right for that to work. That’s just a cool moment.”
The difficulty of what Fuller did hasn’t garnered nearly enough attention, overshadowed by those who think making the kick was something anyone could do, those who would diminish the quick and seamless transition from soccer goalie to football kicker.
“I think the most impressive thing she did, and It’s something I struggled with in college, was getting the ball off in 1.3 seconds,” longtime NFL kicker Lawrence Tynes said over the phone Monday. “People just see the kick, and because everyone can do that — I mean we kick at high schools locally and we see people doing it all the time, they’re having fun, making kicks from 30 or 40 yards — but from a game perspective, they would never get that kick off. Or it’s too low. She got the ball up and got it off in time, something that took me a year and a half to learn in college. That’s a long time, and I was a talented kicker.
“Kicking, to the world, has become something that everyone thinks they can do because we’re so good at what we do, we make it look easy. It’s like a golfer hitting wedges at Augusta, they hit it to 2 feet. That comes from millions of reps, thousands of hours of practice.”
But instead of simply celebrating an awesome moment of achievement and an inspiring moment of representation, Fuller’s appearance opened the door to armchair critics and keyboard warriors convinced they could have gotten off their couches and done the same thing. That somehow Fuller’s résumé of anchoring the Commodores’ women’s soccer team to an SEC championship didn’t make her an obvious candidate — Vandy doesn’t have a men’s soccer team — to fill in when the team’s depth chart was shredded by coronavirus. Or that her ability to transform that skill to football despite very limited practice isn’t a testament to her athletic ability and athletic confidence.
“Kicking is kicking,” said Tynes, a two-time Super Bowl winner who did not have a Power Five resume, having kicked for Troy State. “I think it’s awesome. It’s impressive. I didn’t get into it with people on social media, but I saw them. She put herself out there and she tried it. That’s the message. She put herself out there. She could have failed on those PATs, but she didn’t. Everyone says that they can make it. I call your bluff.”
For too many neanderthals, Debbie Downers, and downright sad sacks looking for something to complain about, Fuller’s appearance for the Commodores was a mere stunt, done only to garner positive attention for a struggling program, to capitalize on what those miserable people see as a signal of Vanderbilt’s virtue. Vanderbilt is indeed a bona fide SEC cellar dweller; its loss Saturday to Tennessee dropped the Commodores to 0-9 and was played under interim coach Todd Fitch since Derek Mason was fired after a 41-0 loss at Missouri two week earlier. With their final scheduled game cancelled due to the pandemic, this will go down as the school’s first winless season. This is also the end of Fuller’s tenure, as she has already announced a graduate transfer to North Texas State.
The Missouri loss was actually Fuller’s first game, and as historic as that appearance was, her one kickoff (a planned squib) didn’t get her on the scoreboard. But even after the team got its kickers back from quarantine, it kept Fuller, her consistency on the 20-yard PATs outdoing that of her teammates. She earned her place.
According to a story in the Tennessean, Fitch said his special teams coach Devin Fitzsimmons charted the kicks all week in practice and that Fuller was “highly accurate” on the extra points and short field goals. The story added that fellow kicker Pierson Cooke, one of the incumbents who had returned from COVID-19, was better from long range. Cooke made a 39-yarder and missed from 54 yards against Tennessee, but earlier in the season, had been replaced on short kicks because of his struggles.
“It was really, truly off statistics of the week’s preparation,” Fitch told the paper. “It wasn’t about trying to do something special.”
Fuller’s reaction? “That’s what they have done the entire time. It was [based on] if I’m good enough to do it. It wasn’t because I was a girl. That’s something I’ve really appreciated. They treated me like an athlete, and that’s the best I could ask for.”
“I heard her postgame interview where she said, ‘I just want everyone to know girls can do anything you want to,’ ” Cockrell said. “It’s so interesting for me to have a daughter with her head laid in my lap watching it, and I touched her nose and said, ‘Anything you earn, you can do.’
“You have to work hard. [Fuller] didn’t just pop right into that. She worked really hard to be a Division 1 soccer athlete.”
When Fuller scored, her teammates mobbed her in celebration. Tennessee players posed for postgame pictures with her. Funny how the ones doing the complaining aren’t the athletes on the field, but the ones who somehow think they know better, that they understand the real motivations here, that they can tell what the coaches were thinking better than the coaches can, no matter what those coaches say.
What I saw? Fuller did something first, she did something well, she did something cool. And she also did something hard.
Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @Globe_Tara.
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December 15, 2020 at 06:01AM
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Think Sarah Fuller’s kicking point-afters for Vanderbilt was easy? Think again - The Boston Globe
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