The first time Jeremy Crawshaw reached out to Prokick Australia and expressed interest in training there, he was told he had to wait.
Not a week or a couple of months, either.
All the way through high school.
Most of the guys who end up at Prokick play Australian rules football, rugby, basketball or all of the above all through high school. Then they end up wanting to try their hand at American-style punting and start with Prokick after high school at 18 or 19 years old.
Crawshaw, the Broncos’ new rookie, knew from the jump he wanted to punt and reached out several years earlier.
“I was like, ‘Well, you’re 14, so you’re going to have to cool your jets,’” Nathan Chapman, Prokick Australia’s founder and head punting coach, told The Denver Post recently.
The young Crawshaw — Chapman and other coaches at Prokick call him “Jez” because, as Chapman says, “I’m not sure I’ve ever called anyone named Jeremy by his full name” — was able to visit Prokick a couple of times, but mostly started teaching himself with the help of YouTube videos.
When Crawshaw finally got to Prokick, he was a bit of an anomaly from the program’s typical pupil: not particularly big or strong, but advanced from a technique standpoint.
“He didn’t play a ton of (Aussie rules) football,” said Chapman, who goes by Chappy. “He dedicated a fair bit of time to just punting. He grew up playing a little bit, but probably not as much as everybody else.”
Mostly, Crawshaw needed the gym.
“He had really organic (talent), big, long legs, flexibility, two-step and could swing it high,” Chappy said. “I was like ‘(Frick), bro, place that ball out where you need it and you’re going to be in a really good spot. …
“But he came to us and he was like 150 pounds ringing wet. We had to get some weight on him and build up the strength so that leg speed and swing could be put to more use.”
It didn’t take long for Crawshaw to realize he had a chance to get a scholarship in the United States.
“I started to have a couple of punts with the other fellas and started to notice that I had a bit of a bigger leg than the others,” he said after a rookie minicamp practice earlier this month.
Funny enough, when Crawshaw started looking at options in the U.S., he wanted to go to the University of Colorado. This was well before Deion Sanders returned Boulder to a college football destination, of course. Crawshaw’s reasoning was far simpler.
“Denver looks beautiful,” he thought. “I’d love to go there.”
But Prokick, in part due to the nature of special teams positions, looks for places where there’s an early opening for playing time, along with a stylistic fit and typically a coach the program knows. Crawshaw’s talent rose to the SEC level, and the University of Florida became an easy match. Chappy referred to Crawshaw as “a big, high-spiral guy,” as opposed to some more rollout-style punters.
“The SEC is where he needed to go,” Chappy said.
A year there, and Crawshaw had already decided he could make the NFL.
“I was just trying to go to college first,” he said. “Once we got to college and got onto the big stage, the sights were set for the NFL.”
After two games during the 2020 COVID-19-impacted season, Crawshaw was SEC All-Freshman in 2021, second-team All-SEC in 2023 and then averaged 46 yards per punt (25 inside the 20-yard line) last fall for the Gators.
The Broncos sent special teams coordinator Darren Rizzi to see Crawshaw, and the punter said they hit it off, having lunch multiple times through the pre-draft process.
Denver selected Crawshaw in the sixth round, making him the only punter to hear his name called in this year’s draft.
He’s the latest in Prokick’s run of producing NFL talents. Other current punters who went through the program include Chicago’s Tory Taylor, San Francisco’s Mitch Wishnowsky, Seattle’s Michael Dixon and New Orleans’ Matthew Hayball. Chappy said Crawshaw’s talent stacks right up with that group, and he doesn’t just think there’s more in the tank. He thinks Crawshaw can be a lot better.
“I was training with ‘Jez’ in February and I still think there’s another 30% left in there,” Chappy said. “He’s in the pro environment to develop in, not the college environment where there’s 40 hours of ‘uni’ a week with college workouts and the strength guy just sometimes doing random (crap). …
“I reckon he can get another 20-30% out. He’s got a really exciting window ahead of him to develop.”
Crawshaw will pursue those kinds of lofty improvements while calling the Front Range home, just a few years later than he’d hoped.
“It’s a bit of a full circle moment where I am back and I’m here now where I wanted to be originally,” he said. “It’s awesome.”
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