Socci’s View: Even as he works for more opportunities, a Patriots’ specialist has gotten ‘more than I can ask for’

The carry-on sat in a corner of a closet, out of the way but always at the ready, waiting on a call that could come at any time or never at all. Half of the suitcase was packed with football pads and cleats, leaving room for a couple of outfits and toiletries that Tucker Addington could hastily stuff inside in case the phone rang and he had to zip off to the airport.

No stranger to the quick getaway, Addington knew the drill well. If and when a team beckoned, he would likely have little notice to catch his plane, probably out of Austin-Bergstrom International. San Antonio was closer to home in New Braunfels, but Austin offered more direct flights. He would need  about an hour to get there by way of I-35 North. So he wouldn’t have long for ‘goodbye’ – and they for ‘good luck’ – before leaving wife Kensie and their three kids. 

This is what life is like on stand-by for the NFL, longing for an audition on the league’s ‘workout circuit.’ You wait and wait for teams to come to you, understanding that they can’t wait for you to get to them.

“Sometimes it’s a last-minute notice kind of thing. Somebody’s either (injured) or somebody’s not performing well and (teams) are trying to do a lot moving around,” Addington says. “So you have to always be ready.”

Once out the door, he might return almost as soon as he left. Teams are always bringing guys in for a brief look. Sometimes to update their Rolodex, in the event of injury. Sometimes for an actual tryout. Last year alone, Addington reckons, he  whisked off to “eight or nine workouts.”

Of course, he also might be gone a little longer. There was 2022, when he spent the spring in the upstart USFL, followed by a week in October on the Dallas Cowboys practice squad. And then, best and longest of all, there were his extended stays in New England and Washington, including six games played in back-to-back winters of 2022-23.

If the uncertainty and all the coming and going were enough to turn his world upside down, it was more than okay. In fact, it was exactly how he wanted it.

Addington is a long snapper. Upside down is literally how he yearns to make his living, performing a singular skill unique to football. Bending over to grip a ball out of a wide stance, he can fire it backwards between his legs, hitting a target as tiny as a holder’s hand being held out eight yards behind him, or a punter’s belt buckle fifteen yards away. 

In the more than four years since graduating from Sam Houston State University, he’s become one of the best in the world at it. Unfortunately, there have almost always been at least 32 others considered more worthy of full-time NFL gigs. So for most of that time, Addington has kept his half-packed bag close by at home in South Central Texas, while honing his quirky craft, eager to answer the call whenever and from wherever it originated across the league.

Earlier this month, his phone rang and a familiar area code popped up on screen — 508. The call was from Foxborough. The Patriots had dialed his number before. In fact, they had given Addington his first pro workout several years ago. They got in touch again the following season, when Joe Cardona, their long snapper since 2015, got hurt.

Addington was signed to the practice squad, then promoted to the active roster. He debuted on Christmas Eve of 2022, played in the final three games of the season and remained in the organization through mid-August of 2023. Let go, he later joined the Commanders and appeared in three more regular-season games.

On Aug. 5, the Pats brought Addington in again to relieve Cardona, who was dealing with a minor injury, and serve as a long-snapping equivalent to a (training) ‘camp arm’ at quarterback. While they have split snaps on punts, field goals and extra points in practice, Tucker has delivered 17 snaps to Joe’s three in two preseason games.

Yet, almost certainly, Cardona will be in Cincinnati when the Patriots play their first regular season game on Sept. 8 while Addington will go back to playing the waiting game. That’s not to imply that he hasn’t been competing for a job.

Past impressions on teammates, coaches and front-office types led to Addington’s latest opportunity in New England. By performing and (equally important) handling himself well, this one can lead to another.

“The ability to get around might help me out in the long run,” Addington says. “I’m getting to meet these guys and create relationships and bonds, whether it’s with front office people or players.

“I’ve met some awesome people, had some great times and just continued to be disciplined, working on my craft. (I’ll) see where it takes me. If the right team comes, the time will be there and I’ll be ready.”

Specialists are a subset within each NFL team. There are only three of them during the regular season – the kicker, punter/holder and long snapper. The Patriots currently have five, including Addington, Cardona, kickers Chad Ryland and Joey Slye and punter Bryce Baringer.

They usually practice separately from teammates, and often are inseparable outside of practices. When a new member is introduced to their small circle, he must earn trust and create chemistry instantly. 

Addington has done it with veterans like ex-Pats kicker Nick Folk and Washington punter Tress Way, who’ve combined for 28 NFL seasons; Ryland and Baringer as rookies in New England; and Slye as both a Commander and Patriot. He also gets along great with Cardona.

“We add Tuck in and it’s like nothing really changes,” Baringer says. “We’re friends, we work really well together and it’s just fun to be able to go through this process with one another.”

Beyond personal feelings, Baringer sees this summer in particular as a benefit to Addington’s professional prospects. Though very familiar with his fellow specialists, he’s had to adapt to a different scheme under new special teams coordinator Jeremy Springer and assistant Tom Quinn.

“The fact that he can come here, play, get a good amount of film and also still be able to talk and learn from Joe is huge,” Baringer says. “I think it’s also good for him that he’s learning a different type of scheme with different coaches than were here in the past, because this year compared to last year is a little bit different, especially from a snapper’s perspective.

“(He) understands why he’s here, understands his ‘why,’ and he’s taking full advantage of it. And he’s snapping really well.”

No one on the team works more closely and extensively with long snappers than Baringer. Since his rookie spring of 2023, he’s handled hundreds, maybe thousands of snaps in practices and games – enough to instantly discern a delivery by Cardona from one by Addington.

“It’s not saying one’s better than the other, but you can just tell the difference, you can feel the difference,” Baringer says. “The timing is a little bit different.”

That timing is roughly equivalent to the snap of his fingers on a field-goal try. Between the snapper’s release and kick of the ball, Baringer must catch it, spot it exactly where and how the kicker prefers and ensure that its laces are facing the goal post. The entire operation averages 1.3 seconds.

 “Our job is so attentive to details, even just the little things,” Baringer continues. “We do a lot of snap (and) holds. We do a lot of just punt snaps. We do a lot of work together, so you build that connection.”

Snaps reach him at different spin rates and, thus, a varied number of rotations. For efficiency’s sake, Baringer wants to receive the ball with its laces already out. Knowing – really knowing – the snapper tells him where his hands should be relative to his body when he catches the snap. Any adjustment he makes can be a matter of centimeters.  

“(One guy’s) miss is in this spot with these laces, where another guy’s miss is in a different spot with a different type of laces,” he explains. “And then you get into the real-nitty gritty of catch location for me, where depthwise at eight yards I have to catch this guy’s snap for him to have perfect laces. Because it’s all based on his rotation.”

Every time he spins a ball to Baringer, Addington is aiming for what can be most elusive to aspiring pros and underappreciated by the general public: consistency.

“I think consistency is probably something that’s hard to explain to people. They’re kind of like, ‘Oh, you’re just throwing it between your legs,’” he says. “But with variations in spots, especially on field goals and even punts, you can take punters off their line (and) you can mess up a kick. At the end of the day, (people) say, ‘Oh, this guy missed a kick’ or ‘he went 2-for-4.’ That’s when we have to either step up or the people that are actually watching the position understand that was the long snapper’s fault.”

Before he started tossing footballs backwards, Addington was a junior high quarterback in New Braunfels, a growing city of 104,000 deep in the heart of Texas. Devoted solely to the state’s unofficial official sport, as a football-only athlete at Canyon High School, he moved to tight end on offense and played linebacker on defense. 

As a sophomore, his coach JJ Sierra assigned him a third position.

“(He) said, ‘Hey, you’re going to be the long snapper,’” Addington smiles. “I said, ‘How do you do it?’”

Sierra demonstrated the basics and advised him to simply “Let it loose.” The more he did it, the more he liked it, especially after realizing that long-snapping could be his means to an education. Addington is a triplet, raised by a single mom.

“Going into my junior year of high school I found out about scholarship availability,” he says. “I thought, ‘Let’s try to get to college somehow.’

“Obviously, I love the game of football. But I fell in love with the art of long snapping.”

The owner of the gym where he trained, Aldo DeLaGarza, introduced Addington to a former linebacker and long snapper at Sam Houston State, Doug Conrey, who founded the Texas Long Snapping camp in 2011. Addington snapped for Conrey at Aldo’s Gym. Impressed, Conrey took Addington on as a client.

They drilled down on techniques, from hand position to follow-through, transforming Addington from an accidental snapper to a college prospect. Training under DeLaGarza and Conrey, he eventually grew to 6-2, 230 pounds and followed the latter to Sam Houston State in Huntsville “on a full athletic scholarship!” as his mother Heather Addington wrote in a testimonial for Aldo’s website.  

Addington played 48 games for the Bearkats, earned a bachelor’s degree in Kinesiology and enrolled in a master’s program at Texas A&M Corpus Christi. He also interned in physical therapy at a hospital in Huntsville, before taking a part-time job as a patient care technician at the New Braunfels Regional Rehab Hospital. 

Married with children – oldest daughter, Payton, was born when Addington was a college sophomore – he kept snapping and started teaching too. If he wasn’t running patients through exercises, Addington was working with youngsters at Texas Long Snapping or practicing in the backyard, where he snapped into a net while Payton and her sister Presley retrieved the footballs.

Well over a year after his last collegiate appearance, Addington heard from the Patriots. 

“It honestly kind of kick-started my transition back into football,” he recalls, noting that he left the rehab hospital to commit more time to football. “I said, ‘Maybe they didn’t forget about me.’”

But without a callback from the Pats or overture from anyone else into 2022, Tucker and Kensie did some hard thinking. He came close to giving up on a possible playing career. Then the USFL came along.

His agent persuaded Addington to buy a ticket to San Diego and take one more shot at a league tryout camp. He nailed it and on March 10, 2022, while alongside Kensie and their two girls, learned that the Houston Gamblers had chosen him in the USFL’s supplemental draft.

Nine months later, he was summoned back to Foxborough. Cardona had reportedly suffered a partially torn tendon in his foot at Arizona, so the Patriots signed Addington to the practice squad as insurance. The following weekend, amid Cardona’s 127th consecutive game at Las Vegas, his condition worsened. His season was over.  

Promoted to the active roster on Dec. 23, Addington dressed out the next day for a matchup with the Bengals. He was the first player to emerge from the locker room in full uniform for warmups and went on to snap eight times in a heartbreaking 22-18 loss; six on punts by Michael Palardy and twice for PAT tries by Travis Vizcaino. That night, he flew home for Christmas.

Tucker and Kensie have since welcomed son Luke to the family, as Dad has continued to go where needed as a part-timer in hopes of full-time duty. Just in the past year, he’s gone from Foxborough to Jacksonville to Washington, paying other visits in between, to Foxborough again.

“I think a lot of people slide under the radar, but if you keep pursuing things and (are) grateful for the opportunities you get and keep working, keep training…” Addington’s sentence pauses, as his thoughts shift to his young family. “I’ve got three little kids at home, my beautiful wife at home, so it’s been a little different road for me than others. It’s not for the faint of heart.”

Speaking softly through his well-groomed, light brown beard after practice on the final Tuesday of training camp, Addington credits the so-called workout circuit for hardening his resolve. He also believes each experience transitioning between holders only makes the next one more seamless. 

But more valuable than what he gains professionally is what he reaps personally. 

“Man, it’s gotten me more than I can ask for: friends, relationships and where I’ve been now, a couple of different teams, floating around here and there,” Addington says. “I’ve been able to play six games in my career thus far and I’m excited to see what the Lord has in store for me going forward. 

“If you prepare and stay consistent, you’ll be amazed at what actually happens. I think some guys get down sometimes and, as you’re away from a (team), kind of start to wonder and think, ‘What comes tomorrow?’ In all reality, tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, so let’s work today and see what happens next.”

The following afternoon, at the end of a Wednesday practice, Addington and Baringer got together for some extra snaps. The next day, they made time for more of the same during individual-drill periods. 

Flanked by one group of defensive backs reacting to passes and a second group refining technique for jamming receivers at the line, Addington put his head down and hands on the ball and fired away to Baringer.

In the middle of a practice field, they looked like a pitcher and catcher in the center of a diamond. Addington stuck with fastballs, trying to locate within Baringer’s strike zone, from mid-thighs to right in the ribs. They continued for a good 10 minutes. 

Chances are, Addington will soon be snapping again into his backyard net in New Braunfels, his carry-on stored in its corner of the closet and his phone’s ringer turned up to its loudest volume. Like every time before, the next time it sounds, he’ll be ready to go.

“Whatever comes my way, opportunity wise, I’ll be grateful,” Addington promises, “and take all I can from it.”

Bob Socci is in his 12th season calling play-by-play for the Patriots Radio Network on 98.5 The Sports Hub.