Stanford’s Jet Toner takes nothing for granted

It’s all a bit crazy when Jet Toner puts the last four years of his life into perspective.

“I kick a ball through metal pipes and because of it, I get to come here,” the 2016 Punahou alumnus said in a phone interview Monday.

Here is Stanford University and those metal pipes are goal posts on a football field.

Toner will graduate in the spring with a degree from one of the most prestigious schools in the country.

It’s a place where a professor hands him a textbook on the first day of class, and there is a good chance that professor is also the textbook’s author.

It’s a school where he has found himself in a class sitting next to five-time Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky.

It’s a football team that he has occasionally rolled out of the locker room with and bumped into NFL No. 1 overall draft pick Andrew Luck.

Yes, it’s all pretty crazy. And none of it would have been possible without the ability to kick a football.

“Not a chance,” Toner said through a long laugh about getting into Stanford without football. “I have to punch myself every once in a while and look around. It’s a blessing to be able to use football as a tool to get one of the best educations out there.”

Over the past decade, Punahou has become a kicker pipeline to Division I football.

Current senior Quinn Maretzki committed to Army on Monday, following in the footsteps of Tim Horn, who signed with Washington last year. Graduating before Toner at Punahou was Kaimi Fairbairn, who went to UCLA and has been kicking for the Houston Texans for the past four seasons.

It’s an incredible run of kickers, and Toner says the reason for it is pretty simple.

“I think the genesis of it all is coach (Eric) Hannum,” Toner said. “It’s pretty uncommon to have a kicking coach at a high school, and the way coach Hannum coaches, he gave me the best foundation I could have as a kid coming out of Hawaii going to a college like Stanford teaching me to be disciplined.”

Toner tried to be a sponge during his time at Punahou, soaking up everything Hannum had to say.

What stuck with him the most was that the position required more than just work on the football field.

“To a certain extent it has to be a lifestyle,” Toner said. “Everything has to be so detail oriented. With what we do on the field, just the slightest thing can lend itself to the result. You know you only get so many opportunities every game, so it’s so important to be exact every moment. That’s just something you can’t turn on come game time, you have to breathe and sleep it.”

It isn’t easy to stand out at a campus like Stanford, but Toner does have one thing going for him.

In just about any interview he does, the question always comes up. How did he get the first name Jet?”

“Everybody asks me about that,” Toner says again through that same laugh. “It’s actually just my initials. My full name is John Edward Toner and I’m fifth generation, so when I was born, the doctors just went with my initials.”

It is an instant conversation starter, and after all these years, Toner says he doesn’t get bothered by the question. There is one problem with the name, especially as a football player.

“Too may people think I can run fast,” he said.

CAREER STATISTICS

Year GP FGM-A Pct.Lng

2017 14 21-26 80.8 46

2018 11 14-15 93.3 46

2019 6 11-15 73.3 51

Total 31 46-56 82.14 51