In his quest to become a better football player this summer, Michigan punter Zoltan Mesko turned to books on baseball and golf. The recommended reading came courtesy of an off-season conversation Mesko had with new Michigan defensive coordinator Greg Robinson about the mental side of sports.

Robinson recommended two books, “Heads-up Baseball” - a book so old it has Manny Ramirez in a Cleveland Indians uniform on the cover - and “The Inner Game of Golf.” Mesko read the first in no time, and plans to finish the second during fall camp.

Practice begins today.

“After realizing my physical potential was kind of maxed out after four, five years of lifting, I was like, what can I improve on that’s going to improve me the most?” Mesko said. “He’s kind of helped guide me in the right direction to improve my mental game, basically. Getting the most out of every rep in practice, even. Kind of staying in the present, not let your mind wander around.”

Mesko’s interest in sports psychology is nothing new. As an underclassman, former Michigan coach Lloyd Carr gave him the book “Zen Golf,” a mental manual he still references. “Kicking is really more mental than physical,” Mesko said. “It has to do a lot with how you feel confidence wise and not to get down on yourself or not to get too high or too low and kind of keep your focus over the course of a game or a season.”

That wasn’t a problem last year, when Mesko earned first-team all-Big Ten honors and led the league in punting with a 43-yard average. He dropped a career-best 24 kicks inside the 20, and mastered some of the unconventional roll-out punting Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez asked him to do.

“He keeps wanting me to add more packages to our punt team to show off his athleticism,” Rodriguez said. “He’s a very, very talented young man and an outstanding individual, and we think he’s, if not the best, certainly one of the best in the country.”

Mesko, one of nine players named to the Ray Guy Award watch list last week, said he’s nowhere near the punter he thinks he can become.

He works regularly with a personal kicking coach, former Cowboys punter Filip Filipovich, and met up with Filipovich last month during Big Ten media days in Chicago.

During the season, Mesko said Filipovich, who he met through Facebook, travels to Ann Arbor to film some practice sessions, then sends pointers and technical corrections by e-mail.

The current area of focus: Quicker leg snap.

“In golf terms, it’s like club-head speed,” Mesko said. “It’s kind of different because the shaft is always straight on a golf club, but the leg has to whip at the right moment. I’m trying to whip it at that contact point.”

He's also trying to make it in the NFL, though Mesko said that's "not my ultimate calling" - being a coach or the CEO of a company is, he said - and not at the forefront of his mind right now.

"I'm motivated by what happened last year," Mesko said. "The negative side motivates me a lot more to prove people wrong. So I am 100 percent committed to turning this program back around on the upswing."