Long snapping is one of those little-understood specialties that usually goes unnoticed in the course of a typical football game. But to Chris Stoll, it’s been a preoccupation since he first tried it as a high school sophomore, and it’s taken him further than he could have imagined when he was asked to give it a shot by the coaching staff at St. Francis DeSales in Westerville, Ohio.

Stoll, a 6-foot-2, 252-pound redshirt junior, is in his second season as the Nittany Lions’ snapper on placements and punts. He made his debut in last year’s opener against Idaho and went on to snap in all 13 games.

Snapping might seem like a straightforward task, but even straightforward tasks can feel overwhelming when there are millions of people watching. While the 2020 season is being played in mostly empty venues, there are typically more than 100,000 fans on hand in Beaver Stadium and many more watching from home.

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“Sometimes when I’m warming up in practice, linebackers [and others] will come up and snap a ball and be like, ‘This is easy, I can do this.’” Stoll said. “But if you’re going to go do it in front of 100,000 in a stadium, or however many millions on TV, it’s [a matter of] having that mental strength to do it over and over again. It’s all about consistency for me. Doing that under pressure is definitely one of the hardest things.”

One other consideration is that snapping is not quite as straightforward as it might seem. For example, snapping for placements is different than snapping for punts. Stoll has to put less velocity on the ball on field goals and PATs – “You don’t want to snap it a thousand miles per hour,” he said – and his stance is different. On placements, he’s looking between his legs at the holder; on punts, he’s looking up.

When Stoll first took up snapping in high school, he had been a quarterback on the freshman team, while doubling as a holder. When he returned for his sophomore year, the team’s senior snapper began having problems with his consistency, and the coaches asked for volunteers to take over. Stoll, a talented all-around athlete who also played lacrosse, hockey and basketball, won the job. He had a few bad snaps at first, but the season mostly went well. “It really just took off from there,” he said.

Stoll began attending kicking camps and became convinced that he was good enough to play at the college level. He went on to win All-America honors from Prokicker.com as a junior and senior. During a visit to one of Penn State’s football camps, he picked up an offer to join the Nittany Lions as an invited walk-on.

Stoll accepted that offer and arrived at Penn State 2017. While he had known when he got to University Park that there was a place for him on the roster, he hadn’t fully committed to the lifestyle of an athlete at college football’s highest level. “My freshman year, I enjoyed the late night pizza, Creamery-type lifestyle and got a little overweight,” he said. “I wasn’t playing, and I didn’t expect to play. It was all kind of new to me coming from high school.”

If he was going to change that, Stoll knew he needed to get in better shape. Long snappers have coverage responsibilities just like everyone else on the punt team, so he rededicated himself to the physical and mental demands of the position.

“I just wanted to cover better,” he said. “I’m a good athlete, but with the athletes we have around here, I’m on the bottom of the totem pole. I wanted to be able to go down the field, make plays, be a little faster in coverage and not look too silly out there.”

That work was rewarded recently when Stoll was put on scholarship. He said he felt “complete shock, complete excitement” when he found out. “I always said I wouldn’t cry if it ever happened, but the emotions kind of took over at that point,” he recalled.

He was still emotional when he called his parents to tell them the news. As an Ohio native, he had been paying out-of-state tuition, so the move by Penn State’s coaching staff lifted a burden from his shoulders.

“That was one of the reasons I worked so hard to get where I am today,” he said. “My family has been blessed to be able to put me through college and my sister through college. Knowing that I can give that money back a little bit, help pay for things that I wasn’t able to pay for before and take that financial burden off of them, that was one of the main reasons why I was so overcome with emotion when I was surprised with that scholarship. It’s super important to me that I’m able to pay them back a little bit and show them that the work paid off and all of their hard work paid off for me as well.”

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