For the Hawaii football team, one of the most challenging road blocks is Utah State’s special teams.

The Aggies, who play host to the Rainbow Warriors on Saturday, are tied for the national lead with four blocked punts.

“They do a great job,” said Mayur Chaudhari, who coaches the Warriors’ special teams. “They’ve blocked a bunch of punts and they’ve beaten some protections.”

The Warriors have not had a punt blocked in 113 consecutive games, the country’s second-longest current streak. Punter Stan Gaudion has not mishandled a snap in 47 attempts this season. Gaudion, who was raised in Australia, did not play American football until joining the Warriors in August 2016.

“I think every week I go in thinking that someone’s trying to block a punt,” Chaudhari said. “I don’t wait to see, ‘this week is not’ or ‘this week is.’ I try to make practice as hard as I can and I try to put the players under a lot of pressure. If it’s easier in a game (than practice), it’s better.”

In this week’s practices, the emphasis has been on charging toward Gaudion during punt drills.

“We’ve got guys like (middle linebacker) Jahlani Tavai threatening to beat me up every day,” Gaudion said, smiling.

But Gaudion said he feels secure behind the human shield of Penei Pavihi, Ryan Tuiasoa and Max Hendrie. Gaudion said long snapper Noah Borden “protects me like crazy when someone gets through. We just have great protection all around.”

The Warriors have four different plays to utilize Gaudion’s skills in punting off rollouts or blasts. Gaudion can kick high, directionally or into gaps with line drives.

“He’s got a lot of variety to his game,” Chaudhari said. “He’s learning how to and when to mesh his skill set with the other 10 guys on the field and communicating with them. He’s grown a lot.”

Against UNLV two weeks ago, Gaudion had to navigate 20-mph winds. When the wind was to his back, he held onto the football a bit longer to enable the coverage to race downfield. The Warriors repeated the tactic in the past week’s game against Fresno State. In those two games combined, two of Gaudion’s 12 punts were returned for a total of 12 yards. The Warriors netted 40.2 yards per punt.

“We haven’t lost any games from the punt position, which is good,” Gaudion said. “It would be better if we could starting impacting things more.”

Chaudhari said Gaudion needs to continue to be self-critical of his punting.

“He only gets 10 minutes a week (in practices) to work with all 11,” Chaudhari said. “He has to make the most out of it, and put himself in situations forcing him to have good punts. He needs to be critical so he can fix things.”

Gaudion, who is 6 feet 3 and 210 pounds, recently has joined teammates in post-practice, weight-training workouts.

“I prefer doing Pilates, stretching, anything a mother would do on a Sunday morning to get flexible,” Gaudion said with a chuckle. “I avoid doing the big weights that the strong guys like (wideout) Isaiah Bernard and Noah Borden do.”