The parking lot at Minnetonka High School was a busy place on a recent sunny Sunday afternoon. Dads in pickup trucks and moms in SUVs carting kids to hockey tryouts while youth and adult basketball games were underway in the school’s gyms.

On the Einar Anderson Stadium field, about 50 or so commandeered the turf, most of them kicking and punting footballs, often for great distance.

It’s the 14^th year that Chris Husby, an assistant coach at Maple Grove High and Minnesota’s premier kicking guru, is holding his annual high school kicking summit. Officially known as the Phase 3 Kicking Skill Evaluation Camp, it’s become a must-do for most of the state’s top kicking prospects. It’s a chance for kickers to share tips and trade secrets, assess where they stand and catalog some measurables for scouts.

Perhaps the biggest draw, aside from actually kicking the ball, was getting the chance to watch their peers, most of whom were among the best high school kickers in Minnesota.

“He’s so good,” was a common whisper. “I love watching him,” was another.

While there were no beginner kickers taking part — a level of proficiency was a must — and there was ample kicking talent, a few kickers drew attention when approaching the ball.

Forest Lake junior Jayden Onuonga was one causing plenty of head pivots. He’s tall and slender, and the flight of the ball when it left his foot caused heads to shake. He didn’t rush his kicks or try to overpower the ball. It was smooth and true and traveled a long way.

“He’s probably the best,” said New Prague junior Thomas Geiger, himself also among the state’s elite. “Even when he doesn’t hit it perfectly, it still goes a long way.”

Onuonga’s route to kicking a football began with soccer, a common path. With a break between the end of the high school soccer season and the beginning of club soccer, he was looking for something to fill the dead space. A friend suggested kicking a football.

“I kinda just went out there for fun and I hit a 60-yarder,” Onuonga said. “After that, some of the guys started telling me I should take it seriously. I listened to them, and I’m very thankful for those guys.”

Until that point, Onuonga was unsure where his athletic future lay, with limited men’s collegiate soccer opportunities in Minnesota. Suddenly, a different path was available.

“Of course, playing [college soccer] is an avenue, but I believe I’d do better in football and it’s really where my heart’s at,” he said. Asked when his allegiance switched from soccer to football, Onuonga answered sensibly. “When … I realized I’m really good at what I do.”

The current environment for kickers is a far cry from the old days. Roughly 25 years ago, kicking in high school football was largely an afterthought. Coaches often simply sought out someone to kick off, get off a punt and perhaps make an occasional extra point. Field goals? An anomaly, at best.

Kicking has become a valid football pursuit at the high school level. It’s easy to find tutorials online. Camps and combines, such as the one Husby organizes, are more and more common. Collegiate opportunities are plentiful, but competition for them can be fierce.

“I would say that the talent in Minnesota is significantly better than 15 years ago, when I started training campers,” Husby said. “My very first camp, I had two kickers. And this camp, I had 36 total specialists being evaluated to see how college-ready they are.”

The distances kickers can achieve has grown as well. Onuonga’s 60-yarder on his first day is far from unusual. Most of the kickers on the Minnetonka field can cite similar distances achieved in practice.

As heralded as Onuonga was, he did not place first in the overall evaluations. That honor went to Ernest Goodwin, a former White Bear Lake kicker now kicking at Iowa Central junior college. His overall kicking total of 22 points, based on a number of kicking standards, led the group. He was also one of only two kickers to receive the designation of “DI FBS Ready” for both field goals and kickoffs. Geiger was the other.

Goodwin was the only collegiate player at the evaluation camp. He was there as an invitee of Husby.

“In my first game in high school, I made a 51-yard kick. That’s when I knew I wanted to do something with this,” said Goodwin, who went on to talk about how he ended up at Husby’s combine. “I got a DII offer from Minot [N.D.] State and I talked to a couple of DIIIs. But none of them were good scholarships. My end goal is to go to a DI school on scholarship. This should help for exposure.”

That’s the primary purpose for combines like Husby’s: to aid in matching student-athletes with available opportunities.

“The amount of [kicking] talent in Minnesota is incredible,” he said. “We probably have a dozen, if not more, specialists that could play at the Division I level. I feel Minnesota is one of the top kicking hubs in the Midwest because of the amount of talent that gets produced.

“It’s grown so much. I had two kickers at the first one in 2014,” Husby said, chuckling and surveying the field. “Now look at this.”

It wasn’t just placekicking on display. Some of the state’s top punters were also showing their skills. Owatonna’s Landon Sturges, another kicker with a soccer background, Rosemount’s Bennett Simmering, Shakopee’s Quinn O’Fallon and Minnetonka’s Tate Eisenbarth were all tagged as being DI FBS Ready.

“Punting came kind of naturally to me because I was a goalkeeper in soccer and you had all those long goal kicks,” Sturges said.

A year of weightlifting and refining his technique has Sturges eyeing a college punting job. Soccer is still a love, but kicking is an opportunity.

“I made a big jump over the summer. I ended up ranked No. 1 in the state, and before the season I was in the top 20 in the nation,” he said. “As the year went on and more data started coming in, the ranking started to slip. By the end of the year, I was sitting at about No. 55. Still pretty good.”

He’s received feelers from college recruiters but no solid offers. Like so many at the combine, Sturges is remaining hopeful.

“When I watch football, I just like to watch the special teams,” he admitted. “This is what I want to do.”