IU kicker Ewald rises as leader

Fifth-year senior kicker Mitch Ewald plays a position that can make it difficult to earn teammates’ respect.

Some kickers fight an uphill battle in order to feel like “one of the guys.”

“Sometimes kickers are a little bit standoffish,” he said. “I just think if you mix in with those guys and really try and hang out with them in the locker room and outside of football, they respect you a little bit more. They support you more, they’ve got your back.”

As he embarks on his fifth season in the IU football program, Ewald has bridged gap between him and the rest of the team. He is no longer Mitch Ewald, the kicker, in the eyes of his teammates.

He’s Mitch Ewald, an IU football player.

“At the beginning of practice every day, I run routes with the receivers and catch balls from the quarterbacks,” he said. “(I) just kind of mess around with them to lighten the mood, have a little bit of fun, show off how athletic I really am.

“I just do that for fun, try to have a little bit of fun with the guys, try and just really not be a kicker.”

Ewald said when he was a freshman, then-long snapper Jeff Sanders and kicker Nick
Ford helped teach him what it meant to be an IU football player.

“Those guys really took me under their wing and kind of showed me the ropes,” Ewald said. “I learned a lot from them, and they inspired me. I looked up to them and I still do.”

Ewald said he learned that the process of getting to know one’s teammates starts by hanging out with them off of the football field.

“My freshman year I would hang out with Duwyce Wilson,” Ewald said. “Him and guys like Lawrence Barnett were a couple of my really, really good friends freshman year,” 
“Hanging out with those guys outside of football, in the locker room, away from the practice field — that’s really how you do it. You just become more comfortable around those guys.”

Ewald said it took more than just becoming friends with his teammates. He also had to perform well on the field.

In his career, Ewald is 44-for-55 on field goal attempts and 105-for-106 on extra points.
“You got to perform on the field to gain their respect as well,” he said. “Once those things come together, it just happens.”

He said a lot of the respect he has earned as a player has come from everything “outside of actually kicking,” especially his performance in off-season workouts.

“When you’re in the weight room, how hard you’re working in the weight room, what kind of weight you put up, how hard you’re running in the running workouts — that all tells guys how hard you’re working and what kind of athlete you really are,” Ewald said. “When I’m away in practice kicking, nobody sees me but how I warm up, how I stretch, how I lift in the weight room, how I run in the running workouts — stuff like that.”

It also doesn’t hurt that he has 12 career tackles, seven of which were solo.

“I don’t think that anyone ever expected me to really make a whole bunch of tackles,” he said. “I wasn’t really expecting that either, and that kind of just happened that way in the last couple seasons at least.”

Above all else, Ewald said his role as a leader and his on-field success comes from how he carries himself.

“I walk around with confidence,” Ewald said. “I’m confident in what I do, but at the same time, I know that I can always get better, and I can always improve.”
Ewald’s role as a leader on the IU football team was evident after he was chosen to represent the Hoosiers at the Big Ten Media Days in July in Chicago. He was the only kicker present at the media days.

“It’s kind of funny because you’re the smallest guy walking around,” he said. “All these guys probably have no idea who I am, but it’s fun.”

Ewald said he was surprised when he was told he was one of the three players chosen to go to Chicago.

“We’ve got so many great leaders on this team, older guys and younger guys, that I just figured they’d grab a few offensive guys and a defensive guy,” he said.

As Ewald said, with 20 returning starters, IU isn’t short on experienced players.

However, few players have as much experience as the Hoosiers’ kicker, who redshirted his freshman season in 2009.

With more than four years in the IU football program, Ewald has learned what it  looks to pass on those lessons to his teammates.

Just as Sanders and Ford mentored him as a freshman, Ewald said he tries to do the same thing with IU’s younger kickers.

“I don’t want to overwhelm them,” he said. “I don’t want to put so much pressure on them that they feel they have to act like me or do what I do.”

Ewald said he shares what helped him in the past, especially when it comes to work ethic and how to carry oneself.

He said other times in practice, he just sits on the field and watches his teammates snap and hold so he builds trust in them.

“You can never have enough game experience or on-field experience and trust in your coaches and teammates,” Ewald said. “It builds every single year, so every single year you become more confident and you look forward to having more opportunities.”

Follow reporter Andy Wittry on Twitter @andywittryids.