Even in high speed continuous mode, with fast moving sports there is going to be a lot of action between frames. Your options are either timing your captures or shooting in video mode and settling for the lower resolution video frames as still captures.
With high school football, the problem often becomes greater because poor field lighting may force lower than optimal shutter speed resulting in reduced capture rate in high speed mode. I use f2 and f2.8 glass for HS sports which allows me to maintain 1/1000 shutter speeds with reasonable ISO for 1DX series bodies even on poorly illuminated fields but using "slower" glass and/or a body less high ISO friendly can easily force a shutter speed slow enough that the camera cannot maintain its rated maximum capture rate.
I use 1DX III bodies for sports and they are set to 16 FPS in high speed capture but if I relied upon just shooting at high continuous rate, it would still be a low percentage of specific contact shots. Most of my captures at sports events are from quick shutter presses resulting in single frame captures at the right time. Once you gain experience with the sport and the specific shutter release lag of your camera body, timing becomes pretty easy.
But for kicking, the moment of contact with the ball often doesn't result in the best photo and typically more interesting is the "power pose" of the player with kicking leg back preparing to make contact or with the kicking leg follow through with the ball still in frame. My daughter was recruited from soccer to do kickoff, field goal, and point after for the football team during her sports shortened Covid junior year of high school. The first two photos were captures of foot to football contact using precise timing and I captured several of those during the season but I preferred images captured before and after contact which I think better present the power of the kicker.
Rodger
