Got a kid with at least five toes on one foot? Teach him or her to kick a football.

Heck, you don’t even need a whole foot. Tom Dempsey, who has held or shared the NFL record for the longest field goal for 37 years (63 yards) did it with half a foot.

That would help explain why kicking is probably the least glamorous vocation in all of football. That and single-bar facemasks.

Kids don’t exactly grow up dreaming of being the next Adam Vinatieri. Not too many dads set up a tee and a net in the backyard, hoping Junior starts mimicking the Gramaticas. And if they discover he does have a talent for booting the ball, they steer him towards a rounder ball.

So with that context, it isn’t hard to understand why the kicking game in Maine high school football borders on atrocious.

The frustrating thing is, most coaches devote as much of their limited practice time as they can to it. I don’t need to tell them that having a consistently good kicking game would at least cut their antacid purchases by one-third and might even give them one or two more wins a season. It’s just hard to find a good kicker, someone who can hit a field goal from, say, 30 yards, or kick it off and keep it airborne past midfield, or punt it 15 yards past the line of scrimmage before it slices out of bounds. I’ve seen drive after drive stall in the red zone when three points were there for the taking because coaches are more comfortable going for it on 4th-and-8 than they are in making a 25-yard field goal.

Already this year, I’ve seen shanked punts cause one team vital field position. I’ve seen multiple extra points missed, forcing several teams to go for two late in their games to make up the lost points.

I can’t blame the kids doing the kicking. I tip my hat to them, actually. It’s not like they can go back to class on Monday and have the cheerleaders gather round and say “You ladies see that 33-yard punt I booted from deep in our own end in the third quarter?” They pretty much have a thankless job.

Besides, it’s not just the kickers that need work. It’s the entire kicking game. I watched Leavitt play Lawrence a week ago Saturday. The Hornets gave up a blocked punt and a punt return for touchdowns in the first quarter. Game over. Mt. Blue had two costly breakdowns, one in kick coverage and one in punt blocking, in its loss to Lewiston.

I don’t mean to pick on these teams. They devote as much, if not more time, to the kicking game as any other team. Any and every other team is just as likely to shoot itself in the foot on kickoffs, punts, field goals, extra points, coverage or returns over the course of the season.

Maybe that’s why coaches aren’t scouring the foreign exchange student programs for Cyprian soccer players or taking the soccer team’s star midfielder out for pizza to try to entice him to switch fall sports. They must figure it all evens out in the end.

If it were me, though, I’d take the skinniest, slowest freshman at the first day of tryouts, give him a football and a tee, point to the goal-post at the other end of the field and say “Son, you want to make the team? Take this ball over there, put it on the tee and kick it between the two posts. Do that every day, and then report back to me in three years.”

My school would be a regular kicking factory. Division I schools from around the country would be scouting my kickers. You’ve heard of Penn State being “Linebacker U?” We’d be “Kicker HS.”

And we’d probably go 1-7 every year. But man, would that one win be sweet.