Inside The Huskies

UW Offers Arizona Kicker Who Rarely Misses

Grady Gross played for a different set of Huskies from Horizon High in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Dan Raley

Grady Gross played football for the Huskies, the Horizon High School version in Scottsdale, Arizona, where the green logo on his white helmet resembled something more like a wolf.

Giving him the option to try a different look with the same mascot, the University of Washington football program has made a scholarship offer to Gross, considered one of the nation's top kicking prospects.

At 5-foot-11 and 195 pounds, he used his powerful right leg to connect on 20 of 23 field goals in his schoolboy career, was perfect on all 120 of his extra-point kicks and registered touchbacks on 82 of 126 kickoffs. He also averaged 45.7 yards as a punter.

This past season alone, in which Horizon captured the Arizona 5A state championship, Gross was good on 12 of 15 field goals, with a long of 52 yards.

As added reward, he appeared this past weekend in the Under Armour All-American Game in Orlando, Florida. He holds scholarship offers from Mississippi State, Syracuse and now the UW.

Originally a soccer player, Gross has worked hard, sometimes too hard, to become an elite kicker. As a junior, he was forced to sit out five weeks of the season to rest his leg after overdoing it in the offseason. He now appears to have great leg strength.

Should he come to Washington, Gross will be groomed to replace incumbent senior Peyton Henry, who has a final season of eligibility remaining. He'll take on a role previously held by Tim Horn, another scholarship kicker who got impatient with the wait, left the Huskies at midseason and is at Rice.

The UW has had an impressive lineage of kickers in Jeff Jaeger and the NCAA record-breaking Chuck Nelson becoming first-team All-Americans and NFL players, and Tristan Vizcaino kicking this season for the Los Angeles Chargers. 

Nelson made 81.9 percent of his UW kicks, which is a Pac-12 and school record and ranks second all-time among NCAA kickers. 

Both Jaeger and Nelson were walk-on kickers who earned scholarships after showing themselves to be elite kickers. 

The previous UW coaching staff was pursuing kicker Ethan Moczulski from Mount Spokane High in Spokane, but he signed with Texas A&M over Washington State, Oregon State and the Huskies. 

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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