Maybe it’s because he spends his working hours bent over, head between his legs and looking behind him that Brian Jennings so fully appreciates where he has been and where he finds himself this week.

Jennings, you see, is the San Francisco 49ers long snapper and looking back on his life has given him perspective on just what it means to be in the Pro Bowl.

“I would say that it is evidence that miracles do happen,” Jennings said.

Not just that someone who once viewed long snapping with disdain could embrace and self-master the position, making a remarkable 12-year NFL career out of it. But that a mixed-up kid who once faced 33 felony charges and spent time in a juvenile facility and a year under court-mandated house arrest, could become an inspiration.

Indeed, for all the precision with which he can propel a football 15 yards in 41⁄2 rotations with bull’s-eye accuracy and six-tenths of a second speed under pressure for placekicks and punts, getting to the top of his profession has been anything but a snap for Jennings.

There was a time in high school, for example, “when I was just a 17-year-old punk, a juvenile delinquent,” Jennings said. A period when he seemed more apt to end up with the drug dealers and car trunk gun merchants that surrounded him in Mesa, Ariz., than a vital cog in the unit that set NFL single-season records for field goals (44) and net punting average (44.14 yards) in 2011.

Before he ever gripped a football with right hand on the laces, left hand as a guide and middle finger on its seam, Jennings first steadied his own life and found an outlet in football. At the time, his senior year of high school, Jennings recalls, “I didn’t know what a snapper was. I didn’t know what a linebacker did.”

But football gave him a way to channel his energies and a vehicle to move his life forward. Eventually he ended up as a tight end and the taste of accomplishment drove him to Arizona State as a walk-on.

For him, providence came in the form of a knee injury and, one day, picking up a football on the sideline and snapping it to a group of teammates. “I was just joking around with it and they said, ‘Hey, you’re pretty good at that,’ ” Jennings recalled. “And, I was offended. Then, a couple of weeks later I was playing catch with a roommate and he said the same thing. He asked me if I’d been a long snapper in high school. I told him, ‘No, absolutely not. I was a football player in high school.’

“But, the more I thought about it, I started to think, ‘Hey, this might help get me on the plane (and travel squad). This might get me on the field. This might even get me scholarship.’ ”

In time his dedication to the task — “I couldn’t sleep at night if I didn’t practice snapping that day” — and ability would open eyes and get him all three plus, as an unimagined bonus, a contract with the 49ers as a seventh-round draft pick.

So reliable has Jennings become that 49ers punter Andy Lee says, “I don’t think he’s ever snapped a punt (to me) that was uncatchable. I never have to worry about where it is going because I know where it will be.”

These days he shares lessons learned — in life and in snapping a football — through his online camp and website (jennings141.com), a way of looking forward as well as back.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.