Mine has been talking about it for this fall. The kid I mentioned in my previous post is a senior this year and apparently, in discussions with the football coach during this past season, my son's name is the one he gave the coach as his possible successor. My son took most of the deep free kicks and often would take goal kicks as well as he had the strongest leg on the team. Not sure if he's ever kicked a football in his life, though.
If he's interested, have him try practicing and see how he feels. If he likes it and seems to have the ability, then he can just work at it on his own. Have him concentrate on extra points until they're as automatic as possible. Then I aslo suggest talking with whoever is in charge of the kickers/special teams for the high school. Most high schools are happy to find a player that has some kicking ability. Because my son was playing football he started kicking as soon as it was allowed (5th grade, no rush). We had an impromptu kicker try out at one 5th grade practice and he realized he could kick an extra point while most of the other kids struggled to get the ball into the air. I actually tried pushing him for a while to keep kicking (the only thing I look back on as something I did push) since it fit so well with soccer, and I told him that kickers get scholarships too. By the end of middle school, he got tired of my talking about kicking and said he didn't just want to be a kicker. While he kicked through high school, he did not have interest to stick with it.
Yes, 99.9% of the time it will be up to the individual school if a kid can play two sports in the same season. And by "school", as others have said, basically the coaches of the individual teams. It is probably more likely in smaller schools, but we've had players on both the soccer and FB teams for 3/4 of the years I think. And our school has ~1600 kids in it. ETA: One of DS' former club teammates was the kicker on his school's FB team and is (supposedly, according to his dad's twitter account ) one of the best in the state.
My son's HS is similar in size, but I wasn't thinking about small schools. Definitely possible at small publics or privates (growing up in a state where football was like a religion, I remember really small schools where it wasn't unusual for a football player or two to take off the helmet and shoulder pads at halftime to even play in the band -- I'd guess that drove coaches nuts). Your anecdote about a high-level kicker jogged my memory about a kid from my son's HS but a few years ahead who played soccer and kicked and was good enough to make it onto an ACC football roster. But looking him up, he didn't play much in his four seasons. Not bad, though.
Soccer here is a winter sport for HS. Football is fall, soccer/basketball/wrestling is winter, baseball/men's tennis/track is spring. But soccer clubs play in fall and spring. There's a winter break so kids can play for their HS. So, it would probably be hard to play competitive soccer in the fall along with HS football. I doubt it would be possible with all the tournaments.
I think the most tournaments we've done in a season was three. And if you figure FB is on Friday nights with club soccer games on Sat/Sun, it might be more doable than you think. But again, your child is 7? So you've got at least eight years before worrying about HS sports choices. He may not want to play soccer by that point.
Yeah I see, maybe he could do both then. I can already tell he's gonna be good at football because he can throw a spiral right to my chest. And he's quick and agile. But his mom prob won't let him play anyways due to injury risk. So I guess the ques will be, can he play both soccer and basketball in the winter. But then again, maybe it won't matter if he's at an "academy"; they don't let their kids play any HS sports. I think he'll join an academy at age 14 or 15.
I think the a good option for trying out multiple sports is one of those summer/winter camps where they go through all sorts of different sports for younger kids. There was one nearby my house last summer where they did futsal, basketball, volleyball during like a 2 week camp session or something like that. They had different groups from like really young like 5-7 yo's to like pre-teens.
Looks like this one may be gone now, but my kids did it over multiple summers and always wanted to do more than one session a summer. It always covered a lot of ground and a bunch of sports. I'd suspect other universities with kinesiology programs might offer these (the students usually made great counselors that our kids really looked up to), maybe local park districts, too. https://www.facebook.com/pages/cate...Illinois-at-Urbana-Champaign-148904829235277/