Aidan Schneider took three steps back, two steps left and readied for his first ever Point After Touchdown (PAT) try as a junior at Grant High School in Portland, Oregon.
They faked it. Schneider, unready, was pitched the football “when [he] wasn’t open at all,” and was thrown out of bounds.
The next day he woke up to play his favorite sport, soccer. That was Schneider’s routine his final two years of high school (minus the fake PAT experience) — the soccer player’s first step towards the Oregon football team.
Schneider, who walked on last season, is Oregon’s starting place-kicker and the most clinical kicker the Ducks have had in three decades. This year, the Grant product has scored 49 points through five games — more than any other player.

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Schneider was asleep when Max Glicker, captain of Grant’s football team, texted him saying, “We need a new kicker for the team. Give me a call in the morning?”
The prior kicker left the team in the middle of football season. Five days later, Schneider was pitched a football on a fake PAT attempt.
Twice a week during his junior year, Schneider spent 15 minutes practicing football after soccer training. Schneider had never kicked with a snap and hold before practice that week.
“I was not ready,” Schneider said.
In his first attempt, he hurried the hold and the football hit the cross bar.
Schneider’s mom, Laurie Causgrove, thought he was on track to play soccer in college. If not for the text message, Schneider thinks the same.
“I’d probably be playing soccer at the University of Puget Sound, going somewhere like that for academics,” he said.
Schneider doesn’t remember when he first started playing soccer, all he knows is it was a long time ago. Though he does know why: to follow in his older brother’s footsteps.
“The thing I remember the most is Aidan as a little kid, on the sideline kicking the ball around [at his brother’s game],” Causgrove said. “He wasn’t old enough to play.”
Max Schneider is four and a half years older than Aidan. When Max, a goalie, needed to practice, Aidan would take shots for him on a turf field at a nearby middle school. It was only a bike ride away from their house.
After his first football season at Grant, Aidan traveled south on Interstate 5 to the University of Oregon, looking to get more training for senior year.
He attended a camp put on by Chris Sailer, a former consensus All-American as a place-kicker and punter at UCLA who also signed to play soccer with the Bruins. Sailer signed with the San Francisco 49ers in 1999, then played in the Arena Football League for five years.
“After that camp, he really started thinking seriously about football,” Causgrove said.
She remembers Schneider spending Saturdays driving around to different fields trying to find an open place to kick while Grant’s football field was closed for a $2 million renovation project. Schneider went to fields at Portland State and local high schools to improve his football kicking.
“A lot of the sports writers think he came out of nowhere,” Causgrove said. “He didn’t come out of nowhere, he spent a lot of time getting the training he wanted.”
His family wasn’t familiar with football, so the transfer of sports was a task Schneider took on his own. He wasn’t much of a fan of professional football either, and still says the main reason he watches the NFL is to watch the place-kickers go to work.
“There are definitely a lot of similarities with that type of movement in your leg,” he said. “With a soccer ball there is no set way to kick it, there is no form. It’s basically if you can get it there. That doesn’t really hold up with football.”
By his senior year, he was committed to place kicking. He realized that instead of running and competing for 90 minutes, he had just seconds to do his job.
“Kicking is not a position where you can make up for mistakes with effort, which is something I was used to doing,” Schneider said. “It was really new to me that you go out there and you mishit the ball and that’s it. Nothing you can do.”
Mishitting the ball is something Schneider didn’t have to worry much about. He finished his senior year with 13 field goals in 16 attempts, with a long of 40 yards. He then told his family he wanted to walk-on to the Ducks football team. His mom’s response: “Well, good luck.”
“I had no idea he’d make that happen,” Causgrove said.
He entered his freshman season behind Matt Wogan on the depth chart, a high school USA Today first-team All-American rated as the nation’s No. 2 prep kicker and punter by Chris Sailer’s academy. Wogan nailed 42-of-44 PATs and 7-of-9 field goals the season before.
But late in the 2014-15 season, during the Pac-12 Championship, the Rose Bowl and the College Football National Championship, Schneider was the one who took three steps back, lined up, took two steps left and nailed 6-of-7 field goals, his only miss coming against Arizona.
“The thing with Aidan that is so good is nothing phases him,” special teams coordinator Tom Osborne said. “He doesn’t give a hoot. We could get guys rushing off the edge that we didn’t block — it doesn’t phase him, he doesn’t flinch.”
He finished 11-for-12 on field goals in 2014 — the only Oregon kicker since 1985 who has missed just one attempt in a season (minimum five attempts). He’s currently 8-for-8 through five games.
“Sometimes I think he doesn’t really know what he’s doing,” Osborne said. “He just goes out there and goes … He’s a different cat.”
When Oregon doesn’t go for it on fourth down, Schneider takes the field with a silent mind. Then it’s three steps back, aim, two steps left and let his right foot loose — kicking with a soccer cleat, as always.
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