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Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: What's up? It's Yoni again with the True Sports PT podcast. I wanted to give you an intro to my conversation with Nick Moore. This is the second conversation that we recorded. We're really going to dig into what he does for a living as a current long snapper for the Baltimore Ravens. What I want you to think about while you're listening to this conversation is the way that I'm able to get to the bottom of exactly what he does for a living. It's so unique, the demands and the needs physically for him to achieve his goals of delivering the perfect snap, and that's what I went through when I first met him and that's what I do when I first meet athletes of really any level. I wanna understand what it is that they need to accomplish, what they've tried thus far to get them to accomplish that goal, and what they think that I can provide before I just launch into my interventions.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: And you'll pick up on some of that during this conversation. We talk very specifically about how he delivers the perfect snap and then we talk about some of the ways in which our efforts at True Sports help him to do as such. So without further ado, we'd love for you to enjoy this conversation. Again, we're always open to your feedback. Please reach out. Please share the podcast. You can reach us on pod@truesportspt.com with an email, follow us on all of our social outlets at True Sports PT. We're pretty easy to find that way, and just share and give us a review. True Sports Physical Therapy podcast, thrilled to have Nick Moore join us. Nick Moore is the long snapper for the Baltimore Ravens, longtime friend for sure of the practice and super excited to hear the Nick Moore origin story. Tell us all about you. Introduce yourself to sports physical therapists across the world.
Nick Moore: So my name is Nick Moore, as Yoni said. I'm going into my third year with the Baltimore Ravens. I am 29, about to be 30, so getting up there in age. Graduated high school back in 2011. Got drafted to the Boston Red Sox in 30th round in 2011. Spent about four and a half years or so with them. And got cut in my fourth spring training right at the end. And by that time I was pretty much done with baseball. I was kind of burnt out. So I went a different route. Went back to college. Walked on at the University of Georgia. Walked on to football as a linebacker.
Nick Moore: And did that for about two weeks and moved to fullback. And played fullback for about two and a half years. And then 2017 I moved to part-time, basically fullback part-time long snapper. Played a couple games at long snapper in 2017. And then 2018, my senior year, I moved to full time long snapper. And played out the whole year my senior year. Played all 14 games. Did the Reese senior role in January of 2019 and then entered the draft in 2019 and eventually went on as under draft free agent to the New Orleans Saints.
Nick Moore: Got cut after the second preseason game in 2019, back when we had four games. So played two games there. Got cut. Dabbled around. Did some workouts and stuff like that after I got cut. And then three or four weeks into the regular season 2019, I was kind of like, "There's no way I'm going to get picked up at this point. Haven't played yet." So got a desk job. I worked as a financial accountant for this company outside of Atlanta. And then signed to the XFL in December of 2019. Played that all the way through until COVID happened in March of 2020 when everything kind of shut down. So the XFL suspended its season. And then two weeks after that, I signed to the Baltimore Ravens, March of 2020. And I've been here ever since.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: I guess let me just get a little bit more specific with what you do for a living with snapping.
Nick Moore: Okay.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: How many revolutions does the ball take?
Nick Moore: Three on field goal.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: On field goal.
Nick Moore: Punt, I don't keep track. I would say closer to eight or nine.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: Okay, and when that ball hits the holder's hands...
Nick Moore: Yeah. The idea is the laces are facing the uprights straight towards wherever the middle of the up or essentially straightforward. We would call that 12 o'clock. And the idea is for me to throw it and me to see the laces when he catches it.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: How do you control how many rotations it takes or for that to be synced up?
Nick Moore: That comes in with replication of just doing my form, my snap form, but finding the right distance, I need to be away from the holder's hands or the spot, we would call it, and how hard I need to throw it. So once I figure out, let's say... The biggest thing for me when I first got here, I struggled with that my first year. And one of the things Morgan and I worked on a lot was like, all right, let's get to a point where you're snapping the same every time. It doesn't matter if you're snapping 6 o'clock every time, which is the exact opposite of what we want, straight backwards. It doesn't matter if you're doing that every time, but let's get to where we can snap 10 balls in a row and they're all in the same spot. And then once we do that, we figured out that we've... I don't wanna say mastered, but we have generated a very similar form, replicated the form every single time over and over again. So that is the hardest thing as a snapper, I think, is getting that to where you're doing the same exact movements every single time you snap the ball. And it's like anything with human body. It's very, very hard to replicate.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: And it's pitching.
Nick Moore: It's just like pitching. It's the exact same thing, and hitting too, getting that motion down precisely right every single time is very, very difficult to do. And that's where your body being sore, you tweak... Your back's hurting your shoulder hurts, your neck is sore, all those stuff come into play. And it makes it even harder to replicate that ability to do that motion precisely every time. But once you get that down and you have a very, very good understanding of how your body works and what kind of snap you throw, then all you gotta figure out is how far the ball needs to travel to hit that three rotations.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: That's all?
Nick Moore: That's it.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: Okay, how do you how do you track velocity of the ball?
Nick Moore: Yeah, we do keep track of that. But at this stage in the game for anybody who's at this level, velocity is...
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: It's there.
Nick Moore: You have it. You have to have it in order to be here.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: It's a barrier to entry.
Nick Moore: Yeah, it's like pitching in the big leagues. You can't come out of the bullpen if you don't throw 100. It's just a thing that it's just a requirement. We don't even really talk about it. We keep track of hand speed and exit velocity for the ball. But it's not something I'm looking at like, "Oh, man." Unless it's significantly slower, and I will usually know that before I get the data that says, "Hey, you were a mile and a half slower." I'll be like, "Man, I felt sluggish today. My snap felt long."
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: You feel it.
Nick Moore: Yeah, you just know, and doing something over and over and over again, you just have a really good feel for, "Hey, I had a good day today or had a bad day," regardless of the result. A lot of people get result-oriented, especially in baseball. It's easy to get result-oriented and you're like, "Man, I'm doing good. I went three for three yesterday." When really your swing stinks and you just got a couple of good pitches and you got lucky, really.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: And so how would you describe yourself if you're not results-oriented?
Nick Moore: I'm focused on the process.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: You're process-oriented?
Nick Moore: Yeah, process guy. You have to be.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: You have to be.
Nick Moore: Because the results will come... At this stage of the game, yeah, the results are the only thing that matter. But there's no way you're gonna get the result you want every time... You run out there, Sunday Night Football against the Bengals. You're down 17 to 16. You got three seconds left on the clock. Coach let the clock dwindle down 35 seconds for you guys to make a field goal to win the game because he's like, "Yo, we're gonna make this kick." You're not making that if you're only worried about having good results. If you don't trust the process, there's no way. It's just there's too many outside factors that you can't replicate in practice. You can't replicate the fans. You can't replicate the noise in the stadium. You can't replicate six straight home losses. You can't replicate Sunday Night Football, 50 degree weather with a 10 mile an hour crosswind. You can't replicate any of that stuff in practice. And the defense lining up across from you and a couple million people watching you on TV.
Nick Moore: That stuff, if you're focused on just the result, you're gonna crumble in that situation. You just are. And I felt it from experience. I've done it in New Orleans. That's kind of how I was. I played. I did awesome in practice and I got to the game and I just crept down my leg a little bit. And you get into these moments in football. If we learn nothing from playoffs last year is that field goal is extremely important. I mean, 75% of the games in the NFL are coming down to a field goal. They're within a touchdown. And so you're going to go in, especially for us, dude, my first game winning field goal snap was the NFL record 66 yarder in Detroit last year. I couldn't even see straight. I didn't even know what was going on.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: So what did you do?
Nick Moore: We have this saying, we say babies and memories when we're going for a game winner, and that's kind of a reset for my mind. It takes...
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: Babies and memories?
Nick Moore: Yeah. So we do it in practice. So even in practice when we're like, "All right, this is a game winning field goal kick," and I will say it to myself and I'll... It's the same time every time. So I break the huddle. We get lined up. I look back at Justin. He starts taking his steps over. I turn around, reach for the ball. As soon as I grabbed the ball, I look at the right guard and I'm like, "Babies and memories." Just not even talking to him. I'm just saying it for me. And it just resets my mind. It clears every thought my mind could possibly have at that moment. It just clears it all. And the only thing I think about is just throw the ball. You can't think about where my feet need to be, what my hips need to feel like, where the ball is and all that stuff, because you do that and there's no way you're gonna be successful. At least you might do it one or two times, but you're not gonna consistently be successful over the long term of a career at my position, and I think I learned that in baseball.
Nick Moore: I was so like, "God, man, I went 1 for 4," or, I go 0 for 4 Ks, it's like everything was... 'Cause it's instant gratification in football or baseball. Sorry. You get the statistics right away. You strike out, boom, you know it. You're like, "I'm 0 for 1 today." And so then you're pressing. You're like, "I gotta get a hit." You strike out again. You're like, "Oh, I'm 0 for 2. I gotta put the ball in play at this point." And so that's what I struggled with a lot in baseball, was that mental side of the game that I think a lot of athletes, especially younger athletes, they don't deal with adversity a lot, especially these big time athletes, football and baseball. You never struggle in high school. You never really... If you're an elite level football player, you don't struggle in college either. Unless you have an injury, you're not struggling in college.
Nick Moore: So you get to the NFL, well, everybody's that same way. The guys that played for 20 years, like Tom Brady, are the guys that mentally are... That can handle it, that they're there and they're competitors and they're like, "Shoot, this guy's really, really good. I'm gonna figure out a way to be really, really good too." And I think that comes with work ethic.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: Work ethic and process.
Nick Moore: Yeah. You have to trust, for me. The times I feel like I don't trust myself, like I get the most anxious in the games, is when I know I didn't prepare exactly, and like, "Man, I didn't snap enough balls this week," or, "Man, I didn't do enough right before this game," or, "I didn't get my body work in this week." Those things start creeping in my mind. It's like, if I just get... That's why this routine is so meticulous. It's like, you do all this stuff and your brain doesn't even think. You just get to the game and you just do it. Your body just knows what to do and you just do it. And I think it comes with experience. Obviously it's easy to be like, "Yeah."
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: But ingraining and greasing the wheels of that movement pattern...
Nick Moore: All the time, every day.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: Every day so that you could do it without thinking about it when those bright lights come on.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: What's up guys. It's Yoni from True Sports Physical Therapy. We are always looking for awesome sports PTs. Our practice is super unique. We are in network with insurance, but we spend one-on-one time for 45 minutes every single session with our athletes. We are housed in state of the art facilities. High ceilings, big open turf spaces, racks, barbells, weights. It is a performance facility with the world's best sports physical therapists housed within them. And we want to add to our team and grow our team of awesome sports physical therapists. We offer awesome salaries, great benefits, more importantly, the ideal setup to provide the highest levels of care to the highest levels of athletes. We have awesome continuing education benefits. We have career ladders.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: We designed this practice to suit both the patient and the athletic patient, as well as the sports PT. So if you are interested in joining an awesome growing company, reach out. You can send us an email at pod@truesportspt.com. You can find us on all social outlets at True Sports PT. We would love to hear from ya. We wanna hear how we can make your career even better. Give me a couple more specifics of things that have to happen for a successful snap. We know that you gotta be solid through your midsection. We know that we want your shoulders, elbows to snap through.
Nick Moore: Yeah. And I think the biggest thing for me is keeping my hips down, especially on punt. A field goal as well, but punt more so because I have to transfer my weight to block. So essentially as soon as I snap the ball, I got about one millisecond to get my head, eyes and hands up to block whomever is across from me and usually a defensive end or defensive lineman.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: Which weighs 300 pounds.
Nick Moore: Yeah.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: So the reason why I just made you go through that sequence of what happens physically for you to get through a successful snap is because that's the conversation you and I had when I first met you.
Nick Moore: Yeah.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: To understand what your goals are, the movement patterns that you need and to learn from you because like you said, you're the expert and that's the lesson that I want to get across to the sports PTs that are listening to this who are going to come across that elite level athlete is you got to talk to that athlete. There's plenty of information you can get on your own of what they should... But you're not going to know Nick Moore until you talk to Nick Moore and you listen to him. And now, okay, now I can translate it into my world. I know this guy's got to get a little bit deeper in his hips. I know that that means hip flexion. I know that he has to control that hip flexion. I'm going to teach him how to use his hip flexor to control it and stabilize it closer to his core so that his core can stay solid, his hips can stay locked, you can dip more into hip flexion and now you can create that whip with your upper extremities to get what, three and a half rotations?
Nick Moore: Just three full solid.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: Just three full.
Nick Moore: Yeah, three.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: 'Cause otherwise it would be six.
Nick Moore: It's like three and... For me where I hold the ball, it's like three and a quarter.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: It's like three and a quarter.
Nick Moore: No, I think that that goes straight... And I think one of the best things about Mookie Betts to me, knowing him on such a personal level, was never once did he ever think he knew the most about anything. He never thought he was the smartest guy about anything. It didn't matter baseball or not. And we knew this guy was like... It took us about one year to be like, "Okay, this guy is legit." This guy hit 270 our first year together and the reason he hit 270 is 'cause he probably lined out to the center fielder before when he had WTP, Warning Track Power, before he had home run power, he was lining out to the center fielder all over the place. But I think one of the best things about him is the guy is so humble and he's so eager to learn stuff. It doesn't matter if... We had Rich Gedman, he was a Red Sox Hall of Famer, his son was on our team and Matt was a... He was a decent baseball player, but it wasn't anything special.
Nick Moore: But Matt was very, very smart and he knew a lot about hitting 'cause his dad was such a big time hitting... He was a hitting coach for us, his dad was. And so Matt... I remember Mook was hitting like 150 at this time, we were both hitting like 150, difference was I was striking out every time and he was hitting line drives. And he's like, you could tell he was so hard on himself all the time. And it was like May of 2013 and I think I was actually hitting like 155 or 160 and he was hitting like 140 or 135, something like that. And I remember we're sitting in the dugout and we're in Charleston, West Virginia, and Mook is talking hitting with Matt Gedman. And Matt's like, "Dude, you just keep hitting the ball, just keep swinging it. You gotta start swinging it earlier in the count, stop getting... " He was a big two strike hitter at the beginning. And he's like, "Dude, you just gotta keep swinging the bat, swing early, swing often and get up there." Never hit a home run in his career, first... In the very next, the bat hits a home run and I don't think he's ever had a slump since and that was 10 years ago.
Nick Moore: But I think the way he was able to talk to every person in the organization, no matter who you were, even when he was in the big leagues, since he's been in the big leagues, when I was with him, he always wanted to learn from these other people. He'd be like, "Hey Nick, you're really good at... " When I played first base at the end of my career, he's like, "Man, you're really good at picking the ball out of the dirt. Hey, what are some things you do or think about?"
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: As an outfielder, he's asking you this?
Nick Moore: Yeah, well, at that time he was still second, he was second base a little bit. And he's like, "Man, what are some of the pointers you have for when a ball's coming here and you're gonna have to backhand it? What's your thought process on it? What are you thinking? How do you get to the ball? Where do you put your glove," and stuff like that. And he was always... Even for me, dude, I was a career 211 hitter. I wasn't close... I mean, dude, there's no way I'd have made it to the big leagues. The whole organization could have not been there and I still wouldn't have made it.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: You always say you're the most humble guy.
[chuckle]
Nick Moore: Yeah, Mook is the one guy that I'm like, "Man... " He's so eager to learn. It's honestly fascinating because a guy of that talent, of that caliber player, that guy's a generational talent. He's one of the best players to ever play the game. And I think that's part of the reason why he's so good is he always, always, always listened to everybody. Whether he believed it or not, who knows? Whether he actually put it into practice, who knows? But when you tell somebody something, you're gonna pick up on a little bit, some of that stuff you're gonna take with you. So I think that's one of the reasons that he's so great is that he's able to do that. And that applies to all of us. Everyone.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: And that applies to all of us. And that's an awesome lesson, to listen, to be humble, to make it about the person in front of you and to see how do you gain that little bit of the knowledge from every single person that you interact with, whether it be pro athlete, whether it be high school athlete, whether it be anybody. I think that's a lesson really well made. I wannna thank you for your time and joining us on the True Sports pod.
Nick Moore: Of course. I love talking, man. I got a lot to say.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: Well, you're good at it. You need your own podcast. Have you thought about that?
Nick Moore: Oh, I was talking to Morgan about that and he shut me down. So we'll see.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: We'll see if he'll listen to the sportsman.
Nick Moore: If he hears this one and hears how eloquent of a speaker I am, which I'm definitely not, but no, I've dealt with a lot of experience a lot in my life and in sports I've dealt with a lot of adversity. So it's always fun to talk about. And the hope is that somebody listens and somebody can apply it to them and it helps somebody get to... Cause it wasn't easy to get here. I took a very, very long road. It's still not easy. Every day is hard.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: You really mind the details and it's awesome to see and it's been awesome to see your success. Really becoming one of, like you and Morgan Cox, the absolute best long snappers in the game. So it's just been great to see that. Thank you for your time. Along those lines we wanna get better at what we're offering on the podcast. So hit us up at pod@truesportspt.com. We wanna know about future guests that you wanna have on here. We wanna know any questions you will have. We have a ton of questions coming in just about how to be a better sports PT that we're gonna put together an ask me anything episode where I'll be just dealing with those questions. So you better be listening.
Nick Moore: No, I'm in there. I listen all the time.
Dr. Yoni Rosenblatt: You listen? Keep listening, share it, love it. Appreciate you.
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