Pond Road student crushes competition in NFL skills contest
Eleven-year-old Robbinsville resident Anthony Yanucil has had a busy autumn.
He plays Hamilton PAL football on Saturdays and Robbinsville travel soccer on Sundays—but in between countless hours of games and practices, the Pond Road sixth grader entered in the NFL’s Punt, Pass & Kick competition, a national football distance and accuracy skills contest sponsored by the NFL. According to the NFL, over 3 million kids ages 6 to 15 participate in the 53-year-old program each year.
He advanced, advanced and advanced again, until Yanucil was named the New York Jets’ 10/11-year-old division team champion at MetLife Stadium during a game on Oct. 26 against the Buffalo Bills.
“For him to get to the NFL round was awesome,” said Michael Yanucil, his father. “I thought he would just win the local event, and then we’d see where it went. He ended up winning the whole thing, every round up to this point.”
It started last year, when Yanucil placed second in his bracket in the first round of the contest as a 10-year old. Unfortunately, only the winners advanced, but his parents saw it as a good omen for the following year.
“There were probably 30 kids there, and he placed second at 10 years old,” said Michael Yanucil. “I’m like, ‘All right, next year, you might win it.’ We entered him this year, and he won it. He came back for the sectional round, and he won that. The next round was the team championship round.”
One winner from each of the five age brackets is placed with each NFL team, but before the champion was determined, PPK officials first had to pool together every sectional winner and determine the four highest scorers in each of the five divisions. In Yanucil’s case, his competition came from all over New Jersey, as well as Connecticut and New York.
So, imagine the family’s surprise when it received word that Yanucil would be competing against the three other top scorers aligned with the Jets at MetLife Stadium late October. Well, everyone except Yanucil.
“I thought I was going to keep advancing,” he said. “I wasn’t really nervous.”
The Yanucils, though, could barely watch when he took the field.
“Anthony has a lot of confidence in what he can do,” Michael Yanucil said. “Michael, our oldest, he went with us and he was like, ‘I can’t watch’ with his hands over his eyes. We were all more nervous than Anthony was.”
His confidence paid off, as he came in first out of the four competitors in his division, earning him the Jets’ 10/11-year-old team champion title. Now, his score pits him against the 31 other team winners, but it’s all up to fate. The top scores of each team champion will be pooled together, and of those 32 children, four from each age group will compete for the national title, held during an NFC playoff game at a later date in January.
Yanucil’s name was announced during halftime—the competition was held a few hours before the game started—and he and his fellow competitors had the opportunity to stand at the Jets’ tunnel entrance, where they were greeted when the team ran on the field. Yanucil, though, wished the squad was wearing a different shade of green in a stadium about an hour and a half down I-95 South.
“It was cool, but I’m an Eagles fan,” he said. “It would have been cool to see Nick Foles.”
The competition is football-based, but Yanucil said his soccer skills came in handy, as they do on the football field. Soccer, he said, helps his kicking in football, and it’s given him an advantage so far in the PPK contest. Kicking is Yanucil’s favorite skill of the three, due in part to the fact that his grandfather, Richard Griffis, who is currently an assistant coach of the Hightstown High School varsity girls’ soccer team, spent several years developing Yanucil’s skills with him, Lisa Yanucil, his mother, said.
Michael Yanucil added that soccer players are not uncommon in the competition, but not every athlete has an even set of skills.
“There are a lot of other kids who play soccer,” he said. “We’ve been talking to some of the parents. It’s three different skills, but two of them involve kicking. A lot of kids might be able to throw the ball far, but a lot of them who are even bigger than Anthony can’t kick it as long.”
Yanucil currently ranks second nationally in his age group, though only two other teams, the New England Patriots and Dallas Cowboys, have held their competitions in addition to the Jets. The team championship saw his longest throw at 104 feet, and his first-round kick clocked in at 105 feet. His punt has largely stayed the same in the high 80s.
The final team competition is held Dec. 21, so Yanucil still has a sizeable waiting period before either moving on to the national championship or being eliminated, but wherever he ends up, his family will be satisfied.
Another plus? There’s always next year—which is exactly what his family said around this time in 2013.
“At the Jets game, he’s in the tunnel with the cheerleaders, and he got to go out on the field in front of 60,000 fans,” Michael Yanucil said. “It was a great experience. Just for Anthony to make it this far is awesome.”
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