Currently we are creating server farms to accurately mimic mouse brain.

It might be interesting watch for you.

I'd say the football-kicking is "just" an extension of us evolving into becoming expert tool users.

Any tool can, after a bit of practice, become an extension to our body, and be controlled with just as much precision (and lack of conscious thought) as any limb.

Brains are cool :)

Just running in extremely un-even terrain (like off-path in a forest) is enough to amaze me over how much our brains and bodies can manage.

I don't think you can point out any specific function as being responsible for it, its more a matter of the whole.

Btw, animals are pretty amazing at body control too, and if you help them practice, they can use tools too (and some do without help)

I don't think the brain does do this automatically. I think it is just because humans kick things around a lot and learn to judge the distance until it becomes second nature (muscle memory ?). For example everybody I went to high school with could do this but when it came to doing the high jump we were not allowed to do the flop and had to do the scissor jump, hardly anybody could time the run up correctly.
Nowadays I do Taekwondo and we have something called special technique where you have to run up and kick a target 2.5 meters in the air. Whenever somebody new tries it they can get the high kick but cannot time the run up so that the kick actually hits the target.

You only have to spend a while searching youtube to find videos of people failing and misjudging this run up and kicking air to see that it isn't something that just happens magically.

I have been told that it is supposedly 400 times that you need to repeat an action before it comes second nature.

Incidentally when I was at school we were taught to kick the ball with our least favourite foot and if we didn't we were made to play with no boot on our favourite foot so that if we kicked the ball we'd break our toes.

It's not only humans that are amazing like this. Watch a common house cat... it will happily jump 10 feet to land on a fence 1" wide, etc. I don't even know how you would write AI to do this...

I don't think the brain does do this automatically. I think it is just because humans kick things around a lot and learn to judge the distance until it becomes second nature (muscle memory ?).

It can only be attributed to muscle memory if you are performing the exact same task. If you change the distance to the ball, but can still kick it perfectly, then it isn't muscle memory. Likewise, many people can accurately throw an object at a target even if they've never attempted that throw before. Again, this isn't muscle memory.