Evesham Township mayor is also an NFL kicking coach

From behind his desk, the mayor of Evesham Township points to an eight-foot cylinder leaning in a corner of his office.

"See that yellow pole?" asks Randy Brown.

It's the fiberglass upright of a football goalpost that was on the field when he missed a crucial kick 29 years ago.

He was kicker then for Cherokee High School. It lost the game and a regional championship when his last-minute kick went wide. Brown to this day blames overconfidence.

"Not a day goes by that I don't look at it," he said. "If not for that miss, I wouldn't be who I am."

Part-time mayor of one of South Jersey's largest townships is a big part of who he is.

But each Wednesday morning, Brown, 45, puts aside bond resolutions and road-drainage bids and drives 118 miles to Maryland, where he turns into the kicking coach for the NFL's Baltimore Ravens.

Since 2008 he has spent two days each week of game season at the Ravens' practice field, fine-tuning and drilling his three-man kicking squad.

During games he's with them on the sidelines, conferring and hollering and holding his breath as their punts and field goals fly (almost always) on target, helping send those birds, now 9-2, to the top of their division.

Theirs is a game-within-a-game: not the grunting, swirling confusion of a run or pass play, but a sequenced moment - snap, catch, place, kick - of 1.3 seconds.

"It's kind of like driving in golf," Brown said, leaning at his desk.

"But imagine that somebody 15 yards away throws a ball at you, somebody else catches it and puts on the tee, and then you swing at it - while 11 guys are trying to knock you down."

At 5-foot-9 and 160 pounds, the silver-haired Brown looks as fit as in the days he kicked for South Carolina's Catawba College, breaking 10 school records and making all-American.

He later coached kicking at Cherokee and at Holy Cross High School in Delran and ran dozens of kicking camps for Division I college teams - a novelty three decades ago - before his work with a kicker at West Virginia University landed him an invitation to join the Chicago Bears for two seasons, starting in 1998.

Stints at Clemson and the University of Tennessee followed before he worked the 2004 and 2005 seasons with the Eagles. There he coached star kicker David Akers during the season the team reached the Super Bowl and worked under special-teams coordinator John Harbaugh, who became a close friend.

In 2008 Brown was about to start with the San Francisco 49ers when Harbaugh, who had just become the Ravens' new head coach, called him.

"I was in the cereal aisle of the local Genuardi's when my cell rang," Brown recalled. "In a few hours I was going to be on a plane. And John said, 'I need you to come down.' I started that Monday."

He likens his role to those of a golfer's swing coach or caddie, developing his players' subtlest movements at practices until they are repeatably perfect, and in games keeping their minds clear at do-or-die moments.

"I can tell just by the sound when a kick is bad," Brown said.

That doesn't happen often.

Last Sunday his rookie placekicker, Justin Tucker, kicked a field goal that tied the San Diego Chargers with three seconds left on the clock, then kicked another to win in overtime.

"It was just another day in the life of an NFL player, coach, and team," Brown joked in a text message Monday. "But what a day it was."

A week earlier, Tucker, whose 92 percent average makes him one of the league's top kickers, made two field goals critical to the Ravens' win over archrival Pittsburgh. They play the 6-5 Steelers in a rematch Sunday. With a win they cinch the AFC North Division and a berth in the playoffs.

It's all in pursuit of winning the Super Bowl, and for that Brown - who declined to say what he earns from football - lives a split life for half of each year.

On Wednesday morning he made his standard two-hour trek to the Ravens' posh practice facility in Owings Mills, a Baltimore suburb.

He spent the morning reviewing game tapes and conferring with Harbaugh and special-teams coordinator Jerry Rosburg, and at 1:20 p.m. emerged with the rest of the team onto the indoor practice field.

As the offense and defense ran plays at one end, Brown put Tucker, punter Sam Koch, and their long snapper, Morgan Cox, through drills at the far end, timing Koch's punts with a stopwatch and subconsciously tipping his own right foot up each time Tucker booted a ball skyward.

"Every week he's constantly giving us ideas on what we can work on," Koch, the Ravens' punter since 2006, said on the sidelines. "He's one of the best guys to do that in the world."

Koch, 30, described himself as having been a "subpar punter" before Brown arrived. "He had me working on where I'm positioning the ball" in the drop, said Koch, who now holds the best punting average in Ravens history.

In games, Koch added, Brown "is the kind of guy who can slowly relax you" after a mistake "and bring you down and put you in a good state of mind. . . . He's a huge part of my recent successes."

Tucker, whose 56-yard field goal against the Eagles in September tied a Ravens franchise record, likewise credits Brown with changing his game after he arrived in summer.

"I was a completely different kicker" at the University of Texas, said Tucker, but Brown taught him to plant his left foot wider at the kick and stay over the ball on the follow-through. "Now I'm getting downfield farther."

Brown "never lets us overanalyze" a mistake in a game, Tucker added. "We'll make a quick adjustment if need be, but Randy's mostly about keeping us cool and calm, because that's the way he is."

Brown arrives home Thursday evenings, and is gone Saturday afternoons and Sundays when the Ravens play away.

His wife, Trisha, and two young daughters attend every home game, however, sometimes joined by Brown's son, Tyler, from a previous marriage, who is a junior at Rowan University.

On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays, Brown said he "hangs around the house" with Ryan, 6, and MacKenzie, 4, "playing and making them breakfast" before school, and attends most of their soccer games on Saturday mornings.

Somewhere in the midst of all this he earns a living as a real estate title-and-abstract salesman, a line of work he began with his late father in 1991. He sold the business after becoming mayor in order to avoid possible conflicts of interest, but still has clients.

Raising two small children at home with such a juggled schedule is wearying, said his wife, "but I knew when I married him he was not a 9-to-5 guy. He's nonstop. He's never going to retire because he doesn't know how to relax."

Speeches, ribbon-cuttings, and proclamations are a steady part of being mayor, whose $8,500 salary he gives to charity. Alternate Tuesday evenings also find him in the center chair of the municipal courtroom with a gavel in hand, running council meetings - and often doing most of the talking.

"I'm going to cut to the chase," he told council during a recent discussion of a proposal to rid Evesham (pop. 49,000) of its neglected or abandoned commercial properties.

"Can the town order eminent domain?" he asked the township's legal counsel - that is, condemn neglected sites.

When the attorney said yes, Brown broke into a smile. "It's hammer time," he exclaimed.

In the game of politics, his adversaries say, Brown can throw sharp elbows.

A longtime Republican, he switched parties in 2007 when the local GOP would not endorse his candidacy, and won as a Democrat. In 2010 he switched back to Republican, citing "philosophical differences" with Democrats, who seethed, calling him a "liar" and circulating drawings of him as a clown and a cigar-puffing stuffed shirt.

One unsuccessful Democratic candidate for council accused Brown of being rude and dismissive of those who disagree with him.

Among his proudest accomplishments, Brown says, are restoration of the town's Fourth of July parade, conversion of its notoriously clogged Marlton traffic circle to a smooth-flowing overpass, and sweeping improvements to the town's recreation facilities.

"I will take 100 percent credit for the Marlton Circle" overhaul, he said.

He said he spent two years pestering the state Department of Transportation and then-Gov. Jon Corzine into diverting $50 million in federal funds from a proposed bridge project in Bayonne. The overpass, at the intersections of Routes 70 and 73, was completed in March 2011.

In 2009, a citizens' group blocked the town from using a municipal open-space bond to put artificial turf at the high school's football field. Brown raised $600,000 in donations to do that job, then used the bond to create an artificial-turf field, with lights, at Memorial Field, the township park.

When he discovered the school's old goalposts would be replaced, he asked for the yellow upright from a quarter-century before.

"When you're 16 and miss an extra point in front of 10,000 people," he said, "it really gets to you."