Tolsma a top tier punter

By Padraic Duffy, Journal staff | Wednesday, October 15, 2008

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RAPID CITY — Dakota Wesleyan punter Nick Tolsma isn’t the first guy you’d expect to be leading the nation in punting. The idea hadn’t really even crossed his mind until fairly recently.

“Originally in high school, I wasn’t getting a whole lot of interest,” Tolsma said of playing at St. Thomas More. “I wasn’t even thinking about being a college punter in high school, but then the coach down here (Brad Pole) told me that I’d be the starting punter right when I got here.”

That proved to be a prescient decision by Pole, now in his fourth season at DWU.

Tolsma, a junior, has averaged 43.3 yards per punt so far this year, putting him second to Ohio Dominican’s Mitch Croy at 43.5 yards per punt in NAIA football. Tolsma was up over 44 yards per punt until last week, when a cold, rainy game against Doane made for some rough kicking conditions. Tolsma’s average of 43.3 yards per punt would put him in the top 20 in the nation in NCAA Division I football as well.

“I went down a little bit last week,” Tolsma said. “It was really cold and rainy and the ball was a little waterlogged.”

The improvement Tolsma has seen in his punting over the past few years has, like most things, coincided with an increase in practice time. The 6-foot-1, 194-pounder is also a reserve defensive back for the Tigers, but the majority of his practice time focuses on punting.

“I practice punting every day,” Tolsma said. “That’s really one of the main things that I do and I spend a lot of time on that. I get in

every so often (at defensive back) depending on the score and other situations, but I mostly concentrate on punting.”

Tolsma, a product of the Post 22 baseball program, also gave up playing for the Dakota Wesleyan baseball team after his freshman year, something that has also helped his football career, but at a cost.

“I do miss it (baseball) a lot,” Tolsma said, “especially in the summer. But it’s pretty time consuming

just playing one sport and going to school. Since I’ve quit playing baseball I also get to go to spring football practice, so that helps out a lot, too. It’s purely football all the time now, and that makes a difference.”

Tolsma, a pre-med major at Wesleyan, hopes to go into the medical field some day as an orthopedic surgeon, something he first started thinking about after suffering a knee injury when he ran into a bleacher during a basketball practice in high school. He still has six screws in his left knee from that injury, but it obviously hasn’t hampered his ability to blast a football.

“I’m just trying to get everything as consistent as I can, all the time,” Tolsma said of perfecting the craft of the punt.

Part of finding that consistency was spending a day last summer in a day-long punting camp that concentrated on things such as stretching and strengthening, to where and how to drop the ball.

Tolsma has seen an increase of nearly 4 yards per punt this season and if he continues to progress at that rate he might have to start thinking about putting med school off for a little while.

“That’s everyone’s dream,” Tolsma said of playing football after college. “If there’s anything I can do to get there, I’d do it.”

Who knows? If the progress he’s made in his two-plus seasons in college is any indication, there just might be a future for Tolsma in punting the pigskin beyond college football.