Overview:
Mitch Wishnowsky punted in two Super Bowls for the San Francisco 49ers and was recently signed to return to the Buffalo Bills for next season
Australia’s Mitch Wishnowsky learned firsthand that American footballs take the craziest bounces.
The sport changed the direction of his own life in a most unpredictable way.
Wishnowsky took a 9,260-mile leap of faith when he quit his apprenticeship as a glazier in the Land Down Under to learn how to punt footballs for Santa Barbara City College.
A dozen years later, he’s still alive and kicking in the sport as a National Football League veteran.
It’s “a far-out dream,” he conceded before making his Super Bowl debut with the San Francisco 49ers in 2020.
“I still have to pinch myself sometimes,” he told Noozhawk.
And while he has yet to awake from that dream, having signed with the Buffalo Bills this spring for an eighth NFL season, SBCC is about to provide him with a moment for reflection.
Wishnowsky will be inducted into the Vaqueros’ Athletics Hall of Fame on Saturday at SBCC’s Campus Center. The event will begin with a noon reception and luncheon, with the induction ceremony following from 1 to 3 p.m.
Other athletes to be inducted are water polo’s Addison Seale, softball’s Kailey Lecher Snyder and swimmer Rachelle Visser.
Also to be enshrined are men’s tennis coach Jack Sanford and the 1996 state championship men’s soccer team that was coached by Tim Vom Steeg.
Feet of Strength
Wishnowsky was a man for all seasons when he came of age in Australia’s West Coast city of Perth.
“I actually played soccer for most of my life, and ran track and stuff like that,” he told me during our first interview in the fall of 2014.
He was good enough to play on Western Australia’s junior national soccer team. He even won a major state billiards tournament at age 12.
But Wishnowsky, who by age 18 had grown to 6-feet and 2-inches in height and 220 pounds in weight, soon found an advantage in contact sports.
“I played Australian Rules Football with friends and thought, ‘This more suits my body type,’” he said. “I thought I’d give it a go, and I found small success in that.”
But a series of shoulder injuries requiring reconstructive surgery halted his career with the Perth Demons of the Western Australian Football League.
Wishnowsky, who had dropped out of secondary school at age 16 to begin his apprenticeship as a glass installer, had to settle for playing a flag version of Australian Rules Football on the weekend.
“It was just me and some mates at a park,” he said.
But his booming kicks in those games soon drew notice.
He eventually received a phone call from John Smith, who runs an American football kicking school called Prokick Australia with partner Nathan Chapman.
“He was yelling at me, ‘Are you ready to do something worthwhile with your life?’” Wishnowsky recalled. “And I said, ‘Yeah.’
“He said ‘Quit your job, move to Melbourne, we’ll teach you how to punt and we’ll change your life.’
“And I was like, ‘All right … Sounds good.’”
He learned during his training that an American football was more pointed and less round than an Australian Rules football.
“It’s smaller, and it’s harder to find that good spot,” Wishnowsky said.
But he found it well enough to be directed toward the football team at SBCC.
Tim Gleeson, another Prokick graduate from Australia, had already punted for the Vaqueros and was bound for Rutgers University.
Wishnowsky discovered during his research on the internet that Santa Barbara wasn’t much different than Perth.
“Nice weather, lovely beaches, everybody is out getting coffee and talking to each other,” he said. “The culture is almost the exact same.
“Tim had found success there and spoke real highly of Santa Barbara, so I thought, ‘Why not follow Tim?’”
The Boomin’ Onion
He made a big first impression on SBCC coach Craig Moropoulos.
“The funny thing was the first time he punted, I did not see him punt … I heard him punt,” he said. “I mean, it was just like, ‘Boom! … Boom!
“I turned around and then I just watched him punt.”
Wishnowsky soon earned the nickname, “The Boomin’ Onion.”
Moropoulos became even more intrigued after clocking him at 4.57 seconds for the 40-yard dash.
“I saw right away that he had the size and the speed and the ability,” he said. “His potential was obviously there.
“I remember telling the team at the end of the practice, ‘Hey guys, this is somebody you’re going to be watching on Sundays.’”
He became even more certain of it after seeing how driven Wishnowsky got in practice.
“His work ethic turned out to be the best thing about him,” Moropoulos said, “and he was also one of the most humble people I’d ever come across.”
The placement of Wishnowsky’s punts, even more than the 39.8-yard average of their distance, earned him All-State and All-Western State Conference honors in 2014.
He dropped 30 of his 63 total punts inside the 20-yard line, 20 of which rolled inside the 10.
“He has an uncanny knack, probably from Australian Rules Football, of kicking the ball with backswing like a sand wedge, and it dies right near the goal line,” Moropoulos said. “He’s phenomenal.”
Wishnowsky would end practice at SBCC by sending a receiver on a pattern and then passing him the ball with a kick.
Australian Rules Football players pass the ball by kicking it, he explained.
“For the longer punts, when you want the long hang time and the bigger yardage, you need to get that spiral on the ball,” he said.
He knew little about the rules of American football before coming to SBCC.
“I’d never watched it,” Wishnowsky said. “I think the only education I had on it was I watched The Longest Yard — the movie — and that’s all I knew of it.”
A big teaching moment came while he was serving as the holder for SBCC placekicker Blake Levin during a close game at Hancock College.
“One of the opposition blocked the kick, picked it up and began running with it,” Wishnowsky recalled.
“I wasn’t sure what to do, but the crowd was cheering and so my thought was, ‘You should probably chase him.’”
He ran down the Hancock player and tackled him at the 30-yard line.
Wishnowsky forced the opposition to chase him on a few occasions when he improvised a fake punt.
“He went in to punt against L.A. Valley after we didn’t get the first down,” Moropoulos recalled. “I turned around to talk to some of the guys and then saw all of their eyes getting real big.
“I turned back around to see Mitch running down the far sideline to get a first down. I thought to myself, ‘Way to make the head coach look good.’”
The fake punt soon became more prominent in the Vaquero playbook.
“If I had to do it over again, I would have done much more with him,” Moropoulos said. “He just did some special things that only a guy with his God-given athletic ability and then his work ethic could do … Unbelievable work ethic.”
Road to the NFL
An NFL career was always Wishnowsky’s goal.
“That’s the dream,” he said when he was nearing the end of his freshman season at SBCC. “But serious thoughts about that are definitely down the track.
“I need to first get somewhere after Santa Barbara.”
That somewhere turned out to be Salt Lake City, kicking in the Pac-12 for the University of Utah.
He redshirted in 2015 and then won the Ray Guy Award as college football’s top punter of 2016 with an average of 47.7 yards per kick.
Wishnowsky averaged 45.7 yards during his three seasons with the Utes before the 49ers selected him in the fourth round of the 2019 NFL draft.
Only two other Vaqueros have ever been drafted, both selected by the Houston Oilers: offensive lineman Booker Brown in the sixth round in 1974 and running back Larry Moriarty in the fifth round in 1983.
The 49ers realized that their Aussie punter marched to the beat of a different drummer after offering each of their 2019 draft picks a gift of their choice.
“Most of them asked for Rolex watches, and things like that, but Mitch said he’d like a (muscle) massaging gun,” Moropoulos said. “They asked him, ‘You sure? You really sure?’
“He told them, ‘Yeah, I could use it for my quads.’ That really endeared him to the club right out of the gate.”
Wishnowsky made an even bigger impact — figuratively and physically — with his crushing tackle on Denver Broncos punt returner Devontae Jackson during the 49ers’ second preseason game.
“He didn’t look like a kicker on that one, he looked like an outside linebacker,” Moropoulos said. “All his teammates went crazy.
“He’s not a big talker, but they love him for the way he carries himself.”
Super Time
He became the first Vaquero to play in the Super Bowl by the end of that rookie season, punting for the 49ers in their 31-20 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium.
Wishnowsky made a second Super Bowl appearance in the 49ers-Chiefs rematch at Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium on Feb. 11, 2024. He punted five times in that game for a whopping 50.8-yard average in a 25-22, overtime loss.
But he hadn’t forgotten his Aussie roots. He left tickets for the game to Chapman, his former Prokick mentor.
“You just want to see him happy,” Chapman said. “He’s in a great spot … Got a great wife, kids, the dog.
“Things have built up over a number of years for him to be in this position.”
Wishnowsky married his SBCC sweetheart, former Vaquero volleyball player Maddie Leiphardt, and settled in Santa Barbara. They have two children: daughter Bowie, age 4, and son Winn, who turns 2 in July.
Although he’s been known to tackle punt returners, his grit was overshadowed by that of his wife during a difficult labor with Bowie on Oct. 30, 2021.
Her husband flew to Chicago the next day to help the 49ers beat the Bears, 33-32 … But coach Kyle Shanahan presented a game ball to Maddie, not Mitch.
“I heard she was very tough,” Shanahan said. “Checking in on them, (Mitch) said he couldn’t eat … He was throwing up, he was so nervous.
“So he didn’t get one … She got one.”
Wishnowsky has punted in 105 games during his seven-year NFL career, averaging 45.5 yards per kick. He’s placed 156 of his 348 punts inside the 20-yard line and has been blocked only twice.
Injuries ended his tenure with the 49ers, however. A knee issue forced him to miss all of training camp before the 2024 season. A back ailment sidelined him for the last eight games.
He stayed in shape after his release by working out at La Playa Stadium and several other Santa Barbara locations.
“As a punter, you can use any field, any sort of just patch of grass,” Wishnowsky said.
The Bills eventually picked him up early last season.
Wishnowsky, who turned 34 in March, showed last season that he still rates among the NFL’s best punters.
His 4.44-second hang time helped produce the fewest returns (11), the lowest return average (6.3 yards) and the fewest return yards (69) allowed among qualifying NFL punters last year.
And so his hang time now continues in that oddball game called American football.
