Ten years ago, Teggart mastered his moment
UConn kicker booted Huskies into Fiesta
Ten years after the kick of his life, Dave Teggart let us in on his little secret. You know that age-old football coach’s head game, “icing” the kicker? It played right into Teggart’s hands that night in Tampa.
“The whole ‘icing-thekicker’ thing to me was like, ‘Thank you for giving me a second to collect my thoughts out there,’ “Teggart says.
The 10th anniversary passed last week. Teggart, who was on his way to a job near the Boston Seaport, relived it as he walked to the lab he is helping to build.
UConn was playing South Florida at Raymond James Stadium on Dec. 4, 2010, needing a win to secure the
Big East championship and the unimaginable, a major New Year’s Day bowl game. Teggart’s teammates had done the heavy lifting, fighting the Bulls to a 16-16 tie. Now he just had to put the whole team and season on his shoulders and make a 52-yard field goal.
Twenty-three seconds left, USF coach Skip Holtz called the obligatory timeout.
“I just remember the gravity of it,” says Teggart, 32. “Your team has just worked very hard, had a great comeback season, we’re at the end of the game and you’ve got your teammates who have just killed themselves all season. I had just hit a 50-yarder earlier in the game that just kind of cleared it, I didn’t get all of it, and you’re out there thinking of these guys and what they’ve been through. You don’t want to let them down.”
As was his custom, Teggart stayed apart from his teammates and remembers saying nothing. His snapper, Derek Chard, and holder, Chad Christen, knew what to do. They’d worked together for nearly two years. “I owe a lot to those guys for also staying collected in that moment,” Teggart says.
Perfect, it was. Dead, solid perfect. Right down the middle, plenty of distance to spare. As the Huskies covered
any last Hail Mary passes, Teggart’s father made his way down to the front row. “My dad always knows how to get to the right spot,” he says. They hooked up for the big hug.
“Kicking is 95 percent mental,” Teggart says. “I had been in that position in practice, by myself, in my backyard. I had been in that position in my own mind a thousand times, so whether it’s an extra point or a 52-yard field goal it should be the same kick every time. And if you’re prepared, there’s no reason you can’t train yourself to be OK in those moments.”
So there it was, the high-water mark for UConn football, a few short years into its Division I-A, FBS existence. Nothing seemed impossible anymore. If only it could have been frozen right there, for we know what the ensuing games and seasons have brought.
If Teggart’s kick seems like yesterday, it also seems like 100 years ago.
“You look at our years,” Teggart says, “we didn’t necessarily always get the five-star recruits, but we got those role players with great attitudes that had chips on their shoulders, maybe because they weren’t five-star recruits and thought they should have been. That drove the competition within our program and that’s why we were so wildly successful those years. We just had a bunch of guys who had something to prove and weren’t going to stop until they did it.”
Teggart got to UConn in
2007, redshirted, and became the regular kicker at the end of 2008. He kicked a key field goal late in the Huskies’ historic win at Notre Dame in 2009. UConn went 8-5 and won Bowl games in both of those seasons.
In the Fiesta Bowl, on Jan. 1, 2011, UConn lost to Oklahoma, 48-20, as Teggart kicked 37and 38-yard field goals. Randy Edsall left for Maryland after the game, returned in 2017, but the program hasn’t had a winning season since, canceling this season due to the pandemic.
“Every alum wants to see UConn succeed,” Teggart says, “and I’m one of those guys and I’m hopeful they can get back there. A couple of good recruiting years can change everything. You get the right recruit, it can change everything.”
Taggart was a baseball and soccer player growing up. At
Algonquin High in Northborough, Mass., he decided he wanted to play Division I football and his father encouraged him to try kicking, as it would be his only realistic route. They mapped out a two-week summer tour of kicking camps at schools, stopping first at UConn.
“I was lucky enough, I had a real good day and before I left camp I got a call from Coach Edsall and he told me they were going to offer me,” Teggart says. “My father and I paused to do a victory dance, and I accepted right away. Seeing where UConn was and the growth opportunity, it was kind of a no-brainer.”
He made 129 of 130 PATs, and 74 of 97 field goal attempts, and he mastered his moment, kicking off that magical UConn year in which Kemba Walker hit his famous shot in The Garden, the women’s basketball team broke UCLA’s record for consecutive wins, George Springer made his memorable catch in the NCAA Super Regionals. Seems like yesterday, and yet with all that has happened since, all that’s happening now, it also seems like a century ago.
When he graduated, Teggart headed to the Chicago and training camp with the Bears, to work under established kicker Robbie Gould. “I thought if I signed, I’d get to go home first,” Teggart says, “but, no, I had to stay and all I had was the clothes on my back. Ended up there for the next four months.”
When the Bears had a roster issue and needed a spot, they let Teggart go. He had tryouts in Seattle and with the Patriots.
“You have bounce around and hope to stick somewhere,” he
says. “I told myself was going to give it everything I had for a year, a year and a half. I worked with coaches in California, I went to showcases in Florida, Arizona. It’s not as glamorous as what you think when you get into it. I kind of decided if it wasn’t going to happen in football, I wanted to try to be the best at something else.”
Teggart was hired by a large general contractor in Boston as an assistant project manager. He’s nowaproject manager at Strategic Spaces, which makes pre-fabricated interiors, and he’s upagainst a deadline to get two spaces done for laboratories involved in COVIDtest kits and the vaccines before the end of the year.
He and his father ran a kicking school for a while, and Teggart still attends camps and is available to offer kicking lessons to young people who want to learn the craft.
What if an NFL team needed a kicker in a hurry? “Yes, sir,” he says, “if they give me a few days to stretch out.” But Dave and his wife, Megan, welcomed a baby girl, Devon, 10 weeks ago, so there’s plenty to do without kicking.
Dave Teggart will be in the UConn football storybook for years to come, and we joked that I’d probably be calling him in 10 years, 15 years. Someone else will be calling on the 50th anniversary of his famous kick.
“I hope somebody will come along and kick my butt out of there and they’ll have another kick to be celebrated before that,” he said.